Last week’s news from Ukraine made me think about a trip I made to Russia in 1991. In April of that year, Jim Bish (another Social Studies teacher from Woodbridge High School) and I traveled with a group of 12 students to Russia – which was still the Soviet Union at that time, but just barely. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, turmoil had been growing within the Soviet Union as President Gorbachev tried to navigate German reunification and the growing demands for independence from Soviet republics in the Baltic and Caucasus regions. In addition, Gorbachev’s power was being challenged from within by Boris Yeltsin, who would rise to power after Gorbachev was weakened by an unsuccessful coup attempt in August of 1991. By the end of 1991, both the Soviet Union and Gorbachev would be gone, and Boris Yeltsin would be President of the newly independent Russian state.
We knew a lot about this when we started planning this trip in the fall of 1990, but we clearly weren’t aware of everything that was going on. I was teaching a course in Comparative Government at the time; the Soviet Union was one of the countries the curriculum covered, so that led to my decision to propose this trip. In hindsight, it’s astonishing that we decided to make this trip and even more astonishing that the parents of a dozen of our students decided to let their children make the trip.
I don’t remember the name of the organization that sponsored the trip, but one of the English teachers in the school had used the company to take students to England several times over the course of a few years, and she recommended it to us. As I recall, the cost to the students was about $2,000. For every six students who paid to go, one teacher could go for free. We actually had only 11 students, so only 1 teacher could go for free while the cost to the second teacher was minimal. At the beginning stages of planning for this trip, a different teacher planned to go with me, but she had to cancel. Jim agreed to step up to make the trip, and he also agreed to assume the cost (a couple hundred dollars) because we didn’t have 12 students. Interestingly, at the request of the travel company we agreed to add one student to our group, because he was planning to go by himself. He was from New Jersey, and he met him at the airport in New York as we flew to Moscow. Our plane trip was Dulles – JFK – Helsinki – Moscow.
We spent five days in Moscow and five days in Leningrad, with a train ride in between the two cities. As I recall, the train trip took about eight hours.
We were accompanied by two guides throughout the trip. Sean was a Russian-speaking Brit. He was good-looking and charming, and the girls swooned over him. Sean worked for the western travel company that organized the trip. Our other guide, Alex, was a Ukrainian from Odessa, where his father served in the Russian Navy; Alex worked for the Soviet travel agency “Sputnik.” He was not as cute or charming as Sean, but he was pleasant and informative. I think his job was actually more to keep an eye on us for the government than to guide us, but he blended the two roles well.
I have some photos from this trip, but unfortunately I don’t have as many photos as I had hoped. My camera was stolen the second day we were in Leningrad, so I lost not only the camera but the almost-complete roll of film (remember those?) that was in the camera.
I want to talk first about a couple of the students who went on this trip with us
First, Melissa. It is not an exaggeration to say that Melissa’s life was changed by this trip. She was reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment on the train to Leningrad – it was assigned for her AP English class – whenSean sat down beside her and began to talk about the novel with her. When we got to Leningrad, he offered to take her to the scene of the crime – to follow the directions in the book to go to the apartment where Raskolnikov murdered the old woman. While the rest of our group had a few free hours to explore the area around the Hermitage Museum, Sean whisked Melissa away. When we saw them again at dinner, Melissa had stars in her eyes and she couldn’t stop talking about their adventure. I think Sean had done this before – they followed the clues in the book, walked up the stairs in the apartment building, knocked on the door, and were invited in for tea while the current inhabitant in the apartment talked about her life in Leningrad.
Melissa had already committed to attend William and Mary, where she soon changed her major to Russian studies. The last I heard of her, she was working for the CIA on the Russia desk.
Next, Andy: This is not as inspiring a story, but it is interesting. Before our group made this trip, we had several meetings with the parents of the kids that were going with us, and one of the subjects that came up was alcohol. Russia didn’t have any laws regulating drinking by teenagers, and we knew that alcohol would be offered to them. This was before the creation of anti-alcohol groups like MADD and SADD, and the parents of our students were fairly realistic about their (and our) ability to control what the kids drank unless we never let them out of our sight. The parents all agreed that it was okay with them if the kids had a drink with dinner if they were with Jim and me. Strange decision, but that’s what it was. I wasn’t planning to drink while I was with my students, that’s for sure.
We soon discovered that alcohol was freely available in the lobby shops of the two hotels we stayed in. Coupled with the fact that we were not always housed on the same floor as our students’ rooms, we were unable to control who went to the shop and bought vodka and so forth. Andy proceeded to get plastered every night, and he was hungover every morning. The second day that he pleaded to stay on the bus rather than come with us on our planned tours, I had a serious talk with him. I think that was the first time he realized that just because he COULD drink, it didn’t mean he HAD TO drink. He stopped over-indulging and had a better trip after that.
One other thing about Andy. We had learned about traders who approached foreign tourists on the street, offering to trade anything for American goods. We had been warned not to deal with them – but Andy had a plan to deal with them anyway. Through some research, he had concluded that American-made condoms were the most desirable goods to trade on the street, so he filled half of his suitcase with these items. Over the course of the trip, he was able to trade his condoms for an entire Red Army uniform. The only time he got into trouble was when one of the traders mistook what Andy was offering in exchange for part of the uniform; Andy came running to get Sean to explain to the trader that Andy was offering condoms, not sex.
I have one more story I want to tell – this one is about our guide Alex. Jim and I were sitting with Alex one afternoon, just chatting about our lives. Alex told us about living in Odessa, where his family lived in a two-room apartment with a bathroom that they shared with another apartment on the same floor. When Jim and I described our houses, Alex was shocked. He couldn’t get over how big our houses were. He couldn’t get over the fact that my house had four bathrooms for the three of us that still lived there (our daughter was in college). Why do three people need four bathrooms, he asked. Our answer – that it was sometimes inconvenient to have to walk up or down a flight of stairs to use the bathroom – didn’t convince him.
Here are a few pictures I took on our trip:
I am very glad I was able to take this trip. Growing up during the Cold War, I never imagined I would be able to travel to Russia as an ordinary tourist. I watched hopefully along with everyone else when it appeared that the “Evil Empire” was dissolving and being replaced by something that looked like democracy in the 1990s. I watched with less hope as Vladimir Putin assumed authoritarian power in Russia and reversed its progress toward democracy.
I watched with horror last week as Putin attacked Ukraine. I wonder about Alex – our guide from Odessa. He was in his 20s when we traveled with him; he would be in his 50s now. What has his life been like?
Good read! I've wanted to go because of my Russian grandmother but I refuse to give an additional penny to Putin. Or spend time in prison for doing something I should not.
Excellent article, Karen. If you decide to travel again, let me know. I think you'd be a great companion on a world adventure. Your knowledge of history would be wonderful to lean upon.