Behind the Iron Curtain
Two years after we were married, Mal arranged to take four months off from Price Waterhouse to travel to Europe before we became encumbered with raising a family. We arranged for the purchase of a new Volkswagen Beetle for delivery in Hamburg, and in the following four months traveled 18,000 miles. We traveled on a shoestring budget, using a popular travel guide of the day-“Europe on $5 a Day.” Early in our trip we visited the Soviet Union which, for the first time since World War II, had opened its borders to automobile tourists.
We were in the Soviet Union for three weeks, and drove about 4,000 miles. It was a critical time in the Cold War, and this trip offered us a unique experience. For four years the United States had been flying the U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union at very high altitudes to monitor Soviet military buildup, using high definition cameras. The Russians knew we were making these flights, but their missiles could not get high enough to shoot down the U-2. That is, until Sunday May 1, 1960. On that day they were able to damage a U-2 piloted by Frances Gary Powers, disabling the aircraft and forcing Powers to parachute down. He was captured, and relations between President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Krushchev deteriorated quickly.
It was against this backdrop that we left our hotel in Warsaw on June 17 for the 120-mile drive to the border crossing into the Soviet Union at Brest. Tensions were so high between the two countries that rumors were circulating in Warsaw that the Soviet border was closed to Americans. In fact it was not closed. We were welcomed, and had an exciting and pioneering trip. I have included twenty pages of impressions (and pictures) written at the time in Chapter Thirteen.
It has been forty plus years since we took this trip, and the pioneering nature of it can easily be overlooked in the current post-Cold War era. 1960 was the height of the Cold War, surpassed in tension between the two superpowers only by the Cuban Missile Crisis noted elsewhere in this book.
While it is hard to document, there were certainly less than fifty, and more likely less than twenty-five, foreign autos in the U.S.S.R. that summer. We saw only one other foreign automobile in our three weeks, and four thousand miles of driving in the Soviet Union. If there had been other cars, we would have seen them since foreign drivers were required to travel only on selected routes-and we traveled on most of these roads. Foreign cars were very conspicuous and we could not have missed seeing another car. There was almost no traffic on the roads.
We had no problems and our experience was both educational and exciting. However, after May 1st and the U-2 incident, we certainly were uneasy and could not know whether or not we were making a big mistake in traveling to Russia. While I had become a U.S. citizen, my new U.S. passport showed that I was born in Germany. It had only been six years since I left Berlin, and the memories of the Soviet system were quite fresh in my mind. Still, our sense of adventure prevailed.
We identified our biggest risk up front as a mechanical breakdown while behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviet tourist literature warned automobile tourists ahead of time that parts for foreign automobiles were not available, and while Russian mechanics would be glad to provide repair labor, they had no parts. Not said, but obvious, was that it would be impossible to have replacement parts shipped into Russia given the political situation. Our Volkswagen was brand new which decreased this risk, but even new cars can break down. Mal believes in being prepared, and so we went to the main Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg and told them where we were going. They then prepared a list of parts that we should carry with us so that we would be 95% sure of having whatever parts could fail while in Russia. We then carried these parts with us not only in Russia (where they were not needed) but also on most of the balance of our European trip. We did use one of the parts in a rural part of Greece later in the summer.
There is still another indication of the uniqueness of this trip. Traveling with us while in Russia was Mal's college friend, and best man at our wedding, Bob Adler. Bob was single, living in Cleveland. I do not know how the CIA became aware of our trip, but Bob was discreetly contacted before we left, and asked for an itinerary. They knew the three of us were going, but not the details of where within Russia. The CIA made no requests of us, but when we returned, they wanted to see all of the pictures we had taken.
These were troubling times, yet in retrospect, we were adventurers who took advantage of our opportunities, and became wiser as a result.