Breathing Foreign Air

Yesterday I did my forging
And I made two sheets of tin.
Now my factory is saying
I can go where few have been.
Washed the soot off in the shower,
Gobbled up unheated ide,
Then I listened for an hour,
Dos and don’ts when I’m outside.

Я вчера закончил ковку,
и два плана залудил
И в загранкомандировку
от завода угодил.
Копоть, сажу смыл под душем,
съел холодного язя
И инструкцию прослушал,
что там можно, что нельзя.

So begins a tongue-in-cheek song by Vladimir Vysotsky about a Soviet factory worker who is being sent on a trip abroad. Although the song’s storyline may seem a bit farfetched, the basic idea of workers being given overseas trips was nothing out of the ordinary. If anyone was going to be allowed to come out from behind the Iron Curtain, members of the working class were clearly the best candidates. Whether the purpose of the trip was work or play, they always had an easier time getting permission for foreign travel. Decadent members of the intelligentsia dreaming of Paris or London could only sigh in envy.

However, those fortunate enough to be given a chance to see the world had to go through a series of demeaning ordeals to prove their worthiness. They had to get recommendations from the labor union and party organization at their place of employment, and the party organization had a say in the matter whether or not the person in question was a party member. People who had a good relationship with their workplace’s party officials were lucky; those who did not paid the price.

Even if all the powers that be at work gave the go-ahead, you still had to get past the party committee in your residential district, which would grill you on all sorts of nonsense. Let’s say you’re in the running for a vacation in fraternal Bulgaria (which was barely even considered a foreign country, as attested to by the popular rhyme «курица не птица, Болгария не заграница» [a chicken isn’t a bird and Bulgaria is not a foreign country]). Before you can bask in the Bulgarian sunshine, you have to know the names of the first secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party’s Central Committee, the chairman of its Council of Ministers, and other local officials. Even if you manage to rattle off the names of all these comrades, you are still confronted with insinuating interrogations such as this:

“And have you been to Lake Baikal?”

“No.”

“To Sakhalin?”

“No.”

“So why are you planning to go abroad when you haven’t even seen your own country?”

Even if you jumped through all these hoops, anything like real freedom of movement was still out of reach. First of all, Soviet vacationers traveled in groups – with extremely rare exceptions individual tourism was simply out of the question. And you were certainly not allowed to go anywhere on your own. My uncle, who spent time on a meteorological research vessel, told me that whenever they docked in some distant land they were only allowed off the ship in threes, and these troikas always followed the same formula: there would be one seaman, one researcher, and one member of the technical staff. This was supposed to make it harder for three friends to plot an escape. Everyone wound up going ashore with two unfamiliar companions, each of whom had an incentive to prevent him from attempting to defect, as they would be held accountable.

Second, every group included an “Ivan Ivanovich” – a KGB agent. In fact, it was commonly understood that there were actually two: one obvious and one not so obvious. The obvious one didn’t hide the fact that he was filing reports about the travelers, but what was the second one doing? Nobody knew. But this less obvious agent still had to prove his worth. If he had nothing to report, maybe that was a sign that he wasn’t paying close attention or had missed something? One woman who traveled with her husband to Bulgaria told me she happened to learn that their “Ivan Ivanovich” was so desperate to come up with something to report, he submitted the following: “Yesterday they got so drunk they started making out with their own wives.”

Most couples did not get to go abroad together. There always had to be a hostage kept back home – a husband, wife, or child – to guarantee that their family member would return. It seemed perfectly natural to Soviet audiences that in the 1968 classic film, The Diamond Arm, the protagonist, Semyon Gorbunkov, goes off on a cruise without his wife and two children. The idea that a whole family could be let out of the country for a vacation together was simply unthinkable.

As a result, those who really did want to escape to the free world had to go to incredible lengths. I will never forget Rudolf Nureyev’s great “leap to freedom” in the Paris airport in 1961, when he was on tour with the Kirov ballet, or the tragic story of Lyudmila Vlasova, wife of the dancer Alexander Godunov, who defected while both were performing with the Bolshoi in New York. After Godunov’s defection the KGB tried to whisk Vlasova back to Russia, causing a diplomatic incident that kept her plane on the tarmac for three days before it was ultimately allowed to leave with her on board. There were also the “refuseniks” – Jews who struggled for years to be allowed to leave for Israel to join their relatives – sometimes real, sometimes fictitious.

And suddenly it all changed, although not exactly overnight. By 1988-1989 it became a little easier to travel abroad. People were not allowed to keep their international passports (they were issued on departure and taken away upon return, as if there was anything you could do with them back home). Still, there was a steady if meager stream of tourists going abroad.

I remember my first trip abroad. It was in 1990, and our school had become involved in an exchange with a school in Rome. For the entire 10 days of the trip I kept a detailed diary, and once I returned I read my entries to anyone who would listen. There was no shortage of listeners. People would make special trips to hear the reports of anyone who had been to someplace more exotic than Bulgaria, such as France, Italy, and America.

Soon, you no longer needed a visa to leave the country, and you were even allowed to keep your international passport. The hotels of Turkey were suddenly filled with people speaking Russian and “челноки” began traveling to Turkey, Poland, and China to bring back consumer goods in their huge, checkered, made-in-China plastic bags for the starved Soviet, and then post-Soviet, consumer.

Traveling the world, people would step into grocery stores and break into tears (tears of joy at seeing such bounty, but also tears of sorrow over the empty shelves awaiting them back home – I remember shedding a tear myself in Rome). Dazed Soviet tourists just walked around the amazing world from which they had been cut off for so long, looking at the buildings, the people. Museums that had been abstractions became a reality: the Louvre, the Prado, the British Museum.

Nowadays, it’s nothing for a certain sort of Russian to casually mention “I’ve got to be in Paris tomorrow,” or “I just returned from New York.” You’d have to be freshly returned from the Amazonian jungles to make an impression – and there are plenty of people walking around Moscow who could.

But another sort of Russian, the vast majority, still does not have an international passport and gets all their knowledge about the outside world via Russian television, which informs them how horrible life is in the West. And there are now thousands of people who work for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other national-security sensitive bodies who have recently had their passports taken away. Other Russians are beginning to wonder when their own passports will be revoked, or when they simply won’t be able to get a new one. What will we do then? Live on the memories of our first trips abroad?

I remember our train ride to Italy. For everyone in our group this was the first time out of the Soviet Union. When we crossed into Italy near Trieste, everyone cried “Hurray” and remarked that the air there was completely different – the air of freedom. Perestroika! Freedom!

Let us hope that in this day and age the Russian air does not become as stifling as it was in Soviet times.