Aeroflot: a Memoir
In the early 1980s, while employed by the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations, I had to travel to Lvov, then still part of the USSR’s Ukraine. We traveled, not on diplomatic passports, but rather on something known as an official passport, which gave us no protection but allowed us to travel a bit more freely than tourists. Some special requirements still prevailed. For example, once at our work station we were accompanied most of the time by an Intourist guide, generally a chatty younger person assigned frankly to spy on us when we were out of the reach of our colleagues in the procurator’s office or the sight and sound of the ubiquitous dzhernias. These ladies sat in the hotel corridors all day and night and listened in on the happenings in our rooms through the radios located there and spied on and recorded our comings and goings.
Another rule was that wherever we traveled in the USSR, our trips had to begin and end in Moscow. I always assumed that was so that our belongings could be more thoroughly searched by the professionals in the then-KGVD. In any event, this trip began there.
We were housed in the Ukraina Hotel, a monstrous edifice of juggernaut appearance constructed under Stalin. It matched another famous building in Moscow, the university, built in the same monstrous and unappealing fashion. It doesn’t appear to be taking guests at the moment, but its website gives an overly flattering view of the place. Our trials and tribulations there are a story for another time, but as you can see, to approach the lobby one had to climb many steps. The porters then took no tips. They were paid whether they worked or not. As a result they spent their time chatting with each other in the cavernous, if rather threadbare, smoky lobby.
I mention the steps because our work required that we travel with a great deal of equipment. We were there to take depositions under oath of witnesses to Holocaust atrocities for use in U.S. courtrooms, the government of the USSR having refused to allow its citizens to travel to the U.S. to testify. In those days video and audio equipment was large and cumbersome.
And then we had our own needs. It was folly to expect medical or dental treatment there because it was so awful. Foreign service people told tales of disposable syringes being swished about in warm soapy water and used countless times even if dull and bent on countless patients. Dental work was even worse, as the stainless steel teeth of rather uniform appearance on Soviet citizens evinced. Ordinary toiletries were really unobtainable either at the hotels or in any place to which we had access. As the leader of the delegation, therefore, I had to pack health items — bandages, oil of cloves for toothaches, aspirin, antiseptic, and tampons — which members of the team might need. If anyone really became ill, he was to be flown out as quickly as possible to Finland for treatment.
What an incredible combination of factual errors and superior attiude (perhaps the two go well together). One might conclude that this group of people were VIP traveling to Cannes Festival, rather than just a bunch of government lawyers going on an essentially a human rights mission.
Great article, would like to read more….kind of like a glimpse of the future for America!
Welcome to our not to distant future. All Hail ObamaAir.
I stayed in the Ukraina too. Late eighties. It had recently undergone a horrifying renovation and everything reeked of lead paint. Ditto on Aeroflot. Several flights including one from Tblisi to Moscow with domestic animals in the aisles. Thought I was going to die for sure. But worse was a flight from Mexico City to Moscow via Havana. Sardines for sixteen hours. The worst collection of body odors imaginable with no functioning toilet. I was ready to lose it. If someone had shot the plane down, I would have said “Thank God!”
I was in high school in Vienna in 1979 (father was a diplomat) and our history class organized a trip to Moscow and Leningrad. They did give us a piece of rubbery chicken on the plane. The wings were flapping up and down like a bird. We landed at that airport they built for the Olympics, which was deserted, then were bused into Moscow in complete darkness along some winding back road-maybe it was actually the main road, who knows, it was pitch black outside everywhere. Not a single light to be seen along the route anywhere until we came to the outer ring road. I remember those radios in the rooms, attached to the wall like a thermostat. You could not turn the radio off at all, only down to a murmur (martial Soviet anthems mostly). We joked that they were probably bugging us with them. I guess they were.
In Leningrad, the tap water in the hotel room seemed to come straight out of the Neva, brown and murky. At night our phone would ring and a woman on the other end would keep repeating “Hello? Hello? How are you tonight?” in a lewd, seductive voice for a minute or so, then hang up. This happened a couple times a night.
It was all very bizarre.
The phone calls were to ask if you were lonely, and longed for some company. Your loss, dude!
yeah right.. then they would film everything and you would be under their blackmailing forever. Those are still regular practices in Cuba. They offer you some girls for your relaxing, they will catch you on video. If you are a diplomat or will become a political leader, industry leader, etc; they will use those records against you in the future.
I stayed in the same hotel, in 1998. By that time you could buy toiletries and a few other things such as Diet Coke in cans at a little convenience store on one side of the hotel building. It wasn’t accessible from inside the hotel, though; you had to trudge down the steps and through the snow. The Post Office was on the other side of the building, at an equal distance from the steps. No one in the Post Office spoke any English, but I found out from someone (maybe our guide?) the few words needed to request stamps for postcards to the U.S. I remember the room doors and locks in the hotel were incredibly thick and heavy, as though a planner in the Soviet era had rewarded the manufacturers based on weight.
Every time we flew on a Russian plane, the plane would follow this scary pattern: Just after takeoff or just before landing, the plane would zoom upward steeply or take a deep and sudden dive, respectively. Someone said that was how Russian planes were manufactured to operate.
The Russians drank at every opportunity. On a plane flight from Prague to Moscow the fellow next to me spent the whole flight drinking beer – the flight was at 8:30 a.m. This was a professional trip, yet during various lunches we were served an astounding amount of alcohol.
Among the folks we met with professionally, there seemed to be two types: the severe type that you could easily visualize as having been a party apparatchik 20 years previous; and the eager, ambitious type, eager to take advantage of the new freedoms and make up for lost time.
Much of the hospitality we experienced was beautiful. At a technical school, bereft of decent equipment and run on a shoestring, we were served tea in delicate, porcelain cups and saucers.
Roger: “If someone had shot the plane down, I would have said “Thank God!” Exactly! You could get through those trips only by putting yourself in some sort of hypnotic trance. I didn’t experience but others in OSI once had to take an extensive trip by rail from Moscow as no flights were available. Believe it or not we fliers were the lucky ones.
Cindy–Funny you should mention the locks. The first night at the Ukraina, I went into my bathroom and without thinking about it locked the door. It would’t unlock. Shouting for help was useless–there was no one to hear me. Lucky I had my heels with me and used them hammer-like to get out of there.
Nailclippers. On an airplane. How 9/10/01.
Which is worse? People sitting stolidly waiting for hours and hours, or people being herded cow-like through small gates, and then being disrobed and poked and prodded … for hours and hours?
I would submit that our system of air travel is *worse* in 21st Century LAX than it was in 1980-something USSR.
Ah, the Ukrainia! I remember it well from US-Soviet scientific exchanges in the good old 70′s and 80′s. But you leave out the many benefits of being the guests of a totalitarian regime. There was no danger of over-sleeping, even after those all-nigth vodka parties. Just when you were on the verge of being late a wrong-number phone call would arrive, or a maid would “mistakenly” open your door to clean the room. And the helpful travel agencies! I recall exchanging interminable toasts after a meal in the countryside near Kharkov, noting that we were already late for a flight to Tblisi. But, of course, when we arrived two hours late, the plane was waiting for us, full of surly Ukranians and Georgians who actually seemed somewhat put out that we had trusted their patience to wait for us. Unlike Ms. Feldman, I never had trouble getting to Lvov, but I was once privileged to spend six hours in the “VIP lounge” at the airport waiting to get out again.
But what I always remember most about domestic flights on Aeroflot were the landings. I have no idea who those pilots were evading, but they always seemed to be taking evasive action – flying until they were above the airport, then corkscrewing in almost vertically to “splash” on the runway. They made carnival rides redundant. Ah, memories!
Clarice, I spent considerable time in Moscow in 95-96, always flying in on one the international carriers except for once, when a American acquaintance in Moscow urged me to try Aeroflot and its new 767s w American trained crews. By that time, I was no longer on a corporate expense account and the fare was over a third cheaper for business class from Chicago, as well as being non-stop. Fabulous, the best food of Lufthansa, SAS, Air France and United. The smoke in tourist class was so thick I could not see the end of the plane.
One of my partners, took an Aeroflot to Vilnius, Lithuania, and, even in post-Soviet union, his description as almost like your description in the depth of Cold War.
I loved it that the Ukraina elevators took forever to get you anywhere; that the only place open to eat when we got there was a small cafe staffed by surly people who insisted on closing a good half hour before the posted time so they could “take inventory”. Only determined Air India staff pounding on the door got us in for fried eggs after the long journey so we didn’t perish from hunger. And the fact that the parquet floors where cleaned with buckets of water so they were warped and roll aboard suitcases could barely traverse them.
I also recall you had to pay in cash but you couldn’t bring rubles in and the change counter was closed early. And it took ages to check out because you had to go to several counters with slow moving clerks to do so.
It’s an interesting witness of a proxy past that looks like very far now.
I went to St Petersburg in the seventies as a fench cruise ship crew member. Usely we had lots of American customers, but not for that northern seas trip, they were all Europeans and French. We had 3 days for stopping over the fabulous city. All our customers were busy with excursions, museums, opera… Moscow… so we had some spare time to escape out of our ship in the afternoons and nights. Curiously as a ship crew we had a special treatment, less control than for the customers. A russian guard was standing at the the feet of the ship scale and was supposed to examine our passports, but only distractly look at them, and just for our first wanderings, then he learnt to know us. We had no intourist hostess to accompany us. So we could travel wherever we want , on buses, train… uh we were the working class of France, so, we were privilegied” to belong to that class.
Crossing the main park of St Petersburg, we were approached by Tzigoiners who were looking for coins.
When I was walking in the streets with my westerny clothes on, women and girls were glancing at me, not frontally. I could realise it when, a few meters further, I turned over, that were the times when they had nothing to buy in the “goums”.
I managed to talk to ancient people in german (I suppose a WW1 or WW2 souvenir for them), who were not reluctant to respond. We exchanged cigarettes: our tobacco was really a gift vs their miserable stuff.
Funny thing I also noticed in buses, people did not buy their ticket to the driver at the entrance, but passed their coin through the passengers hands until a box nearby the driver. None would have thought about keeping the money for himself. and they were starring at us, expecting us to do the same, it took us a while to understand why, I guess (don’t remember)that someone explained us that this was the money to maintain the buses in good state, so we had the moral duty to contribuate too. I thought then if it was in France, the bus company would have some worries, cuz most likely someone would have kept the money.
Anyways, beautiful place, nice people
My wife and I flew several times on Aeroflot in 1969. When we got to the
airport at Novosibirsk, the planes were covered with snow. When it was time
for our flight, a truck drove up with a jet engine mounted on it and
the driver backed the truck up to a plane, started the jet and blew the
snow off the plane. The crew pushed a gangplank up to the plane, the pilot
started it up and taxied to the boarding area. We got on and flew to
Moscow.
On a flight from Adler, near Sochi, my wife tried to hook the seat belt
and both ends came off in her hands. “What’ll I do?” she gasped. “Put it
in your purse as a souvenir,” I replied. She was afraid to do that and
put it under her seat. On the same flight, as passengers were boarding,
two guys snuck on and hid in the coat closet. Someone ratted on them
and the attendent with her gold teeth flashing, opened the doors in
a dramatic show and kicked them off.
We flew to Leningrad, where I promptly got three traffic tickets in my
rented Volga car.
In 1974 two college friends and I took a ten day tour of the Soviet Union. The adventure started with a pre-dawn crossing into East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie where we were thoroughly inspected. Eventually we boarded an Aeroflot airliner for our flight to Moscow. The plane was reasonably comfortable but the flight was miserable. There was one stewardess (she was at least six foot six and could barely move through the aisle) who passed out hard candies. When the plane leveled out at about 5,000 feet we understood the purpose of the candy – it served as their cabin pressurization system. We also were pretty sure the low altitude allowed the pilot to easily follow the highway thus eliminating the need for expensive radar equipment. We were young and had stomachs of iron but three hours of bumping around at that altitude almost did us in. I still have the airsickness bag (unused) in my collection of memorabilia from that trip. We also stayed at the Hotel Ukraine…..but that’s the beginning of another story.
Hey, hey, socialized medicine! We’ll be getting this with healthcare reform. (Just ask the Brits how their National Health Service is working out.) Thanks a lot all you dolts who voted Democrat in ’08.
“people told tales of disposable syringes being swished about in warm soapy water and used countless times”
Appling some kind of common sense before spreading the rumors helps in being better person. It happened, yes, but only as an exception. I live in Henderson, Nevada. We had the same case here in a few clinics. There was no soapy water in this case. The clinics produced many new hepatitis patients. Look it up on the internet. This is not a rumor. Oh, I forgot, it happened well before the ObamaCare. The clinics were private.
Sending your dry-cleaning from Moscow to Finland? I have not heard funnier joke for a long time. I am not sure whom you asked for the directions to the nearest dry cleaners.
“It apparently was not easy for citizens to get permission to travel then.”
This is true but only for travelling outside the county. Inside the USSR, permission needed to travel only to military related places. Any sane person would not want to go there anyway.
There are many other children of Western propaganda. Two favorites: (1) there are grizzly bears walking streets of Moscow, (2) there are no toilet bowls in Russia and no running water either.