by Jeffrey Meyers

After teaching in Japan for a year, my wife and I took the long way home through Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Russia, Poland, Germany and England.  We had a taste of Russia before we got there.  When we first entered our room in the Janpath Hotel in New Delhi, we found it still occupied by a Russian spy who was frantically packing his electronic equipment for a late departure.  Our Aeroflot flight to Moscow, with no air conditioning, was delayed for several hours in the broiling Delhi airport.  As we sat inside the overheated plane, the Russian women took off their dresses, stripped down to their underwear and chatted away.

My American passport was stamped with “On Official Business for the U.S. Force.”  I had a temporary rank of colonel to get me on crowded air force planes and fly to my distant classes in Japan.  In Russia this official status made me seem more important than I actually was.  It naturally alerted the Soviet authorities at Sheremetyevo  airport, where all the Russians became strangely silent.  I looked even more suspicious on our first day when we were invited to lunch at the British Embassy.

We had to pay in advance for the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, with palm-court and musical-trio, and the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad.  Our first hotel room had gigantic pieces of uncomfortable furniture that took up most of the limited space.  Every floor had an attendant babushka who spied on the guests but could not supply the missing sink plug.  Wads of wet toilet paper momentarily filled the drain.  Returning from the Embassy to our room, we realized that the local spies had replaced the original low-hanging chandelier and installed a listening device.  All our talk had to be hush-hush and—imitating espionage  novels—we ran the water at full force for intimate tête-à-têtes.

Our first trip to Russia, with no knowledge of the language, led to inevitable confusion.  We tried to enter the handsome Admiralty building in Leningrad, which had a tall golden spire and looked like a museum, until a guard raised his gun and warned us that it was military headquarters.  We saw a War and Peace film and, knowing the novel, could follow the story.  But I didn’t know why the last half was missing—where was the battle of Borodino and all the other stuff?—until I got home and realized we’d only seen the first part of a very long film.

We stood on a long line to buy tickets for a concert of classical music. When we got to the window the grill was suddenly slammed down.  We took a short walk, and on the second try an hour later asked about the program.  The ticket-seller, unhelpful as always, replied “Vant Konzert?  Or no vant Konzert?”  “OK, I vant”—my Russian was improving.  The “concert” turned out to be a childish variety show with lots of jokes in Russian that we didn’t understand.  Despite the local hilarity, it didn’t seem at all amusing.

On a boat cruise along the Moscow River, everyone seemed frightened of foreigners and no one spoke to us or even to each other.  When a group of Italian tourists boarded the boat, animated and responsive to the towering St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin, we spoke to them in Italian and broke the solemn silence.

Sixty years ago the two big cities had very few cars and almost no shops, apart from the palatial GUM department store that sold unappealing goods for foreign currency.  I couldn’t even buy new shoelaces when my old ones broke. The streets were mostly empty, though several pedestrians were eager to buy our scarce, highly prized blue jeans and were willing to have us return to the hotel in our undies.  A sinister event occurred in Leningrad when I unwisely walked ahead of my wife on a huge empty boulevard.  Two young men on bikes saw her apparently alone, rode up from behind and threatened to attack her.  She was terrified and screamed, I ran back to help her and, not wanting to get into a fight with a tough hombre, they quickly pedaled away.

Our compulsory and always obstructive guide had all the charm of Ivan the Terrible.  She refused to show us Lubyanka Square, site of Stalin’s notorious prison, where many thousands of victims had been executed.  She also refused to take us to Tolstoy’s country house at Yasnaya Polyana, 125 miles south of Moscow, though we were dead keen to see it and it was within the distance allowed on our tourist itinerary.  Instead she suggested, and we firmly declined, a visit to her favorite chemical factory.

Our food coupons could be used only in our hotels.  An elderly American couple, who’d suffered stomach problems in Samarkand, gave us their left-over coupons, which allowed us to feast luxuriously on caviar and drink champagne.  But the dining room was the scene of our greatest struggles and defeats.  We first had to fight our way past the uniformed doorman, who always tried to block the entrance to the nearly empty restaurant, and the service was strictly non serviam.  We had to wait a very long time for menus and even longer for food while the waiters stood offensively idle and ignored our famished pleas.  Signs announced that tipping was strictly forbidden.  But we realized that only tips beforehand would bring the robotic servers, bowing with open palms, from complete paralysis to a modicum of movement.

Intolerably frustrated by the delays that confined us to the restaurant for three hours each meal, when there was so many things we wanted to see and do, I finally could bear it no longer.  I stood on my chair and cathartically screamed, “I WANT FOOD AND I WANT IT NOW!”  One waiter, aroused by the shocking disturbance that could draw ten years minimum in Siberia, suddenly sprang to life and whispered in English: “OK, OK, Meester courageous bold.  But don’t yell.”  I later warned colleagues in Boston, planning to visit Russia, about these formidable obstacles.  As they pushed their way past the same monumental doorman, my friend yelled, “Jeffrey told us all about you.”

Sixty years ago, Soviet Russia under Leonid Brezhnev was an interesting but frustrating and unpleasant experience.  Few people spoke to us; those who did created obstacles and thwarted our plans.  But it was still much better than visiting Russia today.  With luxury shops and heavy traffic, it is now more oppressive and dangerous than ever.

After Japan, Southeast Asia and the torments of Russia, Warsaw, handsomely reconstructed after the massive destruction in World War II, seemed like Europe.  The streets were full and people sat in cafés reading the New York Herald Tribune.  Sweet-looking nuns approached us in full habit, whispering piously and offering to exchange black-market zlotys for precious dollars.  I tried to extend our three-day visa for three more days so we could visit Krakow and Auschwitz.  This was possible, of course, but it would take three days to get the visa by which time it would have expired.

At the synagogue in the old part of town the elderly caretaker told us that when the Germans and Russians invaded Poland in September 1939 the east and west borders were open for two weeks.  He spent four months walking 3,000 miles to Kazakhstan, worked in the cotton fields throughout the war and then took several more months to walk back in 1945.  When he arrived in Warsaw, all his family and friends had been murdered and he could no longer make up a quorum of ten Jews required for prayers.  He shocked me by saying that postwar Poles still hated the Jews as much as the Nazis.

Jeffrey Meyers’ books James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath appeared in 2024.  He will publish 44 Ways of Looking at Hemingway (also with LSU Press) in the fall of 2025.