Leningrad and points east

In Leningrad we were housed at the Hotel Leningrad, a Finnish-built slab of a thing overlooking the cruiser Aurora (famous from its mutiny and role in the 1917 revolution.) My wife and I had spent a few nights at the hotel the previous summer, when we had driven a rental car into Leningrad from Helsinki (that’s another story) so I was familiar with the drill – “key ladies” next to the elevators on every floor, a sign carved into the stone siding next to the exterior main restaurant entrance announcing, in Russian, that “the restaurant is full,” to discourage the proletariat… oh wait.



(A note on the photos in this TR. These have been scanned off old transparencies, and many images have faded or have suffered damage due to degradation of the film over the years. I'm sorry they're not of digital quality, but hopefully they'll convey the scenes adequately anyway.)

We met our fellow tour group members (all travel by foreigners in the USSR was under the control of Intourist, the state tourism authority.) We were around a dozen in total, from various countries including the US (us) the UK, India, Canada and maybe some other English-speaking countries, for the ease of translation by our guide/host/minder, a lovely young woman named Larisa. (Same as Julie Christie’s character in Dr. Zhivago, but no Julie Christie she.)

The two days in Leningrad were spent doing typical tourist stuff – the Hermitage, Petrodvorets via hydrofoil, Petropavlovsk Island and fortress, etc. My friend and I managed to elude one muster and took off on our own, in order to visit the highly weird Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, the Finland Station (where Lenin arrived to take charge of the Bolsheviks) and some other places, including kvass and beer in a park or two. Na zdorovye.











Then it was off to Uzbekistan, via an incredible flying time machine, a Tu-114. This was (and I think remains) the fastest turboprop plane ever built, and IMO one of the most beautiful. It was based on a Soviet bomber and featured four huge turboprop engines with counter-rotating props – we called it an “eggbeater” – that permitted long range and high speeds, albeit with ear-shattering noise, as the prop tips were traveling at supersonic speeds.




It was an overnight flight, with a scheduled stop in Kuybyshev (now Samara) on the Volga. This was my first introduction to non-Leningrad Russia, and what an eye-opener it was. Our ground time at KUF was a couple of hours, so we were allowed off the plane and into the airport, or I should say, the chaos. People shouting, babies crying, a babel of languages… There was no TP in the toilet stalls, only baskets of chopped up pages from Pravda (its highest and best use IMO.) Yikes. We pivoted and went back to the plane, where we observed a scrum at the foot of the stairs that looked like an evacuation scene from some movie (this was a year before the fall of Saigon.) Men in turbans waving their arms, mothers with babies crying… ...?? Some exceedingly sturdy Aeroflot lady saw our boarding passes and made a hole through the mob so we could get up the stairs, and eventually the dam burst and all the other seats were presently occupied by said gaggle.

Making a noise like the end of the world, the plane took off and then it was time for our in-flight meal as we continued the journey toward dawn. We were each handed an actual PVC bag with the following contents:

- A piece of black bread that would have served nicely as a roofing tile.

- A paper tub of some sort of pink goo that (I guess) we were supposed to put on the bread.

- A hard-cooked egg.

- A whole unpeeled cucumber.

The FAs brought around warm fruit juice, possibly as a concession to the heavily Muslim passenger load headed home to Central Asia.

Enjoy your feast, comrades!

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