It was my second visit to the USSR (first time was just to Leningrad) so I didn't have much by which to measure things, but here's what I felt afterwards.

- The standard of living, which was by no means equivalent to the west, was nevertheless probably the best the local people had ever experienced. It was clear that private agriculture, albeit on a small scale, was still flourishing, the people looked pretty healthy (smoking like chimneys notwithstanding), there were plenty of braziers selling delicious kebabs that people were buying and gobbling, and the chaikhanas and tea houses were busy with old men gossiping and playing chess. Kids were smiling. Now I don't know if that's because of, or in spite of, a semi-socialist economy, but the whole thing was fairly uplifting.

We were taken to a textile factory in Dushanbe to see the happy workers (well, they didn't look too gloomy, anyway) at their sewing machines, and noted that all the signs exhorting higher production were in Russian, not Tajik, and a superficial glance suggested that the managers' offices were all occupied by blonde people. (This was the case throughout Uzbekistan too; they did feel like Russian colonies to some degree.)



But overall, I was not particularly struck that there was oppression going on, but I imagine a devout Muslim would have disagreed. We were free to come and go from our hotels in the evening, and we did. However my Russian was pretty limited and of course I spoke no Uzbek or Tajik, so communications were mainly by sign language and smiles. But I didn't feel any more restricted than I did in Leningrad or Moscow, which wasn't very much in either case. Of course one had "minders" during the group tours, and "key ladies" on the hotel floors, who I assumed were monitoring our coming and going.

Travel infrastructure was pretty miserable outside of Tashkent. We stayed in Urgench because while Khiva was being restored the whole city was emptied by the Soviets so those pesky residents wouldn't get in the way of the hero workers. The power went out while we were there (it was August, by the way) and when we went to the airport to go back to Tashkent, we got bumped off the Yak-40 by a bunch of local soviet bigwigs, so we had to return to the hotel overnight. The power was still out hence the water was too (electric pumps?) so all there was to drink (no booze, remember) was warm apricot juice. in 40+C heat. Thanks, comrades.

The coolest thing (for flying fans) was the seriously cool TU-114 eggbeater (with its counter-rotating props) that took us from Leningrad to Tashkent overnight. The in-flight meal was memorable - a (real) PVC bag containing a hard cooked egg, a piece of slate roofing tile black bread with a little tub of red goo, and a whole cucumber. Comrades, the harvest goal for cucumbers has been exceeded! Hail the hero farmers!



Then they tried to kill us on a hideously underpowered IL-62 on TAS-SVO. Because of density altitude (high elevation, 40C) the pilot decided to do power tests on the engines while we sat on the apron. He turned off the air conditioning in the cabin (to preserve power?) while he did this, and by the time we rolled the inside of the plane was, oh, say, a million degrees. Some old Uzbek gent in the full outfit jumped out of his seat and started howling and running around; he was gang-tackled by the (sturdy) FAs who strapped him into his seat using belt extenders. When we finally took off, the driver used 101% of the paved runway. The Indian man (from Mumbai) next to me said he was afraid of fainting.

Once we were wheels up and clear (just) of the trees, the skipper turned back on the a/c (or maybe opened a window) and the temperature fell right now - so fast that the perspiration in the cabin's air didn't have time to get cleared, so it condensed on anything metal in the cabin and.... rained on us. Nice.