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Moscow then

I’m heading for Moscow tonight. It is 40 years since I first visited there to sell the idea of an International Register of Potentially Toxic Chemicals to the Soviets on behalf of the then new-born United Nations Environment Programme. My companion was a well-known radiation biologist of the time, Alexander Hollaender, who had retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. My job was to arrange the logistics, take notes, and explain the details of the project. Alex got the doors opened and got the Soviets to say yes.

Moscow was a gray and forbidding place. Leonid Brezhnev was in charge. There were few cars on its wide avenues. The Rossiya hotel had the amenities of a Motel 6 with 10,000 rooms. It was later torn down. Except at a then well-known Georgian restaurant near the center, menus were short, service was surly and the food abysmal. A matronly prostitute attacked Alex one night in a hotel lobby–we thought it might be an attempt to compromise us and shooed her away angrily.

The visit nevertheless had its high points. Our hosts arranged tickets to the Bolshoi opera. I managed to get tickets for two more nights during the same week as a visit to the Moscow sewage works. The music was extraordinary by any standards. My card-flashing handler was surprised when his comrade citizens tried to buy blue jeans from me. I bought a lot of phonograph records, which had superb performances by pianist Emil Gilels and other Soviet classical music stars. But you could only play them once before the crackling started, due to poor manufacturing techniques. I stopped playing them and still have them stored away, now for eventual digitalization.

Alex and I called on the head of the genetics institute at the Academy of Sciences. I don’t remember his name, but high on the wall above him was a full-length portrait of Nikolai Vavilov, antagonist of the Stalinist para-geneticist Trofim Lysenko. Vavilov was arrested and died in prison in 1943. His presence on the wall was a stark reminder of what Stalin had wrought.

The Soviets came around to supporting the UN project we were selling.

I was less successful more than 20 years later in 1995, when as a State Department official I returned to Moscow to sell the Russians on supporting the Bosnian Federation. As luck would have it, Washington had done something (I don’t remember what) that annoyed the Russians, so the deputy foreign minister I called on took the occasion to ream me out for half hour before listening inattentively to my pitch on the Federation. I suppose by now I could get the declassified reporting cable I wrote, but I’m not sure I want to relive that experience, which caused Undersecretary Tarnoff at State to chortle when I returned to the fold. The best I can say about that visit is that the prostitutes in the Radisson piano bar were visually a cut above their Soviet forebears. I suppose that was progress.

Everyone I’ve mentioned this impending trip to assures me I won’t recognize Moscow, where the grand boulevards are now packed with cars, the hotels are luxurious, the restaurants are first rate and the skyline is far more modern. I suppose the prostitutes are downright classy.

I look forward to a visit to Red Square and the GUM department store, where 40 years ago I could get good ice cream, so long as I wanted vanilla. Lenin is gone, and I’m sure the store is much improved, but will the ice cream be better? I suppose I’ll feel a bit of nostalgia for Soviet Moscow. Things were simpler, and clearer, then.