24 June 1980

End of the semester abroad in Poland

We spend the morning in Venice, just showing Cathy the highlights. I have some rubles left and manage to change them, at a very unfavorable rate, at a money changer in Piazza San Marco.

After lunch we get back into Giallina one last time for the home stretch to Rome. Mum, dad and my brother Fabio are waiting at our apartment in Via dei Mille, and a genuine Italian home-made dinner prepared by our family chef Anna concludes our trip.

It is over.

But I know it is not really over. I know I will return to Poland in the future, for personal and professional reasons. Borzena is scheduled to come and visit this Summer. Marian and Ewa surely will be in touch and we'll try to make some money together trading goods between Italy and Poland.

It's been the most instructive period of my life. I went to Poland because I was interested in the "real" socialism. Never a socialist myself, as a political scientist in the making I wanted to understand the thinking beyond the wall. I thought better knowledge could foster mutual understanding, and peace.

The problem is, no one in Poland seemed to care about socialism. Those who did speak about it hardly ever said anything positive. It was different in the USSR, where some of those we met did seem to believe in their official ideology.

We'll see, for now it's time to take in a good night sleep in my own bed!

23 June 1980

Driving back through Yugoslavia and on to Italy

Left Balaton lake at 10.00am. It would have been nice to spend more time here, after four intense months, and relax a bit, take in the cool atmosphere and sip Hungarian wine, by far the best that is coming from the brotherhood of socialist countries. (Georgians might disagree, and I must admit I don't know Georgian wine much.) Much better than the Crimean "champagne" we had in the USSR.

The road is just OK and we proceed slowly toward Yugoslavia. No problem with this border. Two socialist countries, in theory ideological siblings. In practice, Yugoslavia has long been pursuing its own version of socialism, quite open to the West and relatively more relaxed at home.

Surprisingly, the roads in Yugoslavia are worse than in Hungary or Poland. At least the ones we drive on today. Once we reach Nova Gorica, the Yugoslav half of Gorizia, I pull into a service station to fill up Giallina. Gasoline is much cheaper here that in Italy. The man at the pump speaks Italian and says he only agrees to sell us fuel because he sees Giallina has a Roman plate. He refuses to sell to Italians from Trieste and Gorizia, who just cross the border to take advantage of subsidized fuel. Border inhabitants of both Italy and Yugoslavia can go shopping in each other's country fairly easily, and while Yugoslavs go to Italy to buy what they can't find at home, Italians hop beyond the border to buy cheap subsidized staples, fuel first of all.

We reach Mestre at about 9:00pm and get a couple of rooms at the "Garibaldi" hotel. Then out for pizza. Nice to be back in Italy, I enjoy hearing Italian and soaking the warm air, though everything now seems soooo expensive! A pizza here is more expensive than a gourmet fine dining experience in Warsaw!

22 June 1980

Driving south, policemen and lake Balaton

We wake up at 8 after a good night's sleep and head out to visit the house where Cathy's father lived before emigrating to the United States. It's a modest house but in fairly good shape. Who knows what it looked like when he was here?

For dinner Cathy's family serves us some hearty boszcz, lots of proteins and vitamins to take us through the day. After lunch we bid farewell and head south, toward the border. No problem with Polish customs, all our stuff gets through no questions asked.

We are back in Czechoslovakia and this time we manage to get through without getting lost or running into Soviet military bases. Can't help but notice the innumerable monuments to Soviet military equipment that dot the road. Kind of eerie, anyway better than the other military we met when we transited the country northbound.






We reach Budapest in the late afternoon and start looking for a hotel, but prices are way too high for our budget, so we decide to drive on.

As we progress along the main highway we stop occasionally to look for a place to sleep. Some camping grounds are cheap enough but fully booked. We decide to drive on, maybe all the way to Italy! At this point two policemen stop us and start looking for trouble. They check our passports, Giallina's papers, our tires, everything is fine. Or almost fine: they find that the light of Giallina's rear plate is broken. They say we must pay a fine of 200 forints (about 10 official US dollars, there is almost no black market for currency here, the black rate is abut 30, only fifty percent higher). We could pay but their attitude is irritating and we decide to dispute the fine. What follows is an endless discussion, they are clearly trying to take advantage of us foreigners to pocket some cash. But we finally manage to tire them out and drive on.

It's pretty late when we reach lake Balaton and find a nice little hotel for 5 dollars per room! We are not sure exactly where we are, but the area is pleasant and well maintained. Balaton is the main resort region of Hungary and a destination for many tourists from the socialist brother countries. Our fleeting impression of Hungary is that the standard of living is higher than Poland.

21 June 1980

Drive to Przemisl

We are ready to leave Warsaw at 9:30am. Last pictures together with our Polish classmates and friends. All of them came to say goodbye: Stefan, Romek, Borzena, Ella, Bonga, Elzbieta, Alina, Leszek, Tadek. This is it, our last departure from Warsaw, not for a drive around the country or the USSR, but to go home.

Romek and Stefan

Borzena Romek Ann Stefan Andrew and Marco

Alina Bonga Marco Ann Elzbieta Cathy
Leszek

Elzbieta Alina Bonga

Elzbieta Andrew Alina Tadek Bonga
Cathy Wadim Ann

Andrew and Romek


It's been an immensely interesting and fun to spend these four months in Poland. I know I will be back, though I don't know when. Borzena will come visit me in Italy soon.

Just before leaving the capital, we fill our tank with our last black market gasoline from Jan's station. The drive to Przemisl is smooth and easy. Funny I should think of it this way. A few months ago I would have described Polish roads in less positive terms, but I guess we are used to it by now.

Once there, we meet Cathy's auntie, her father's sister. She's been waiting for us. She can only offer one room to us in her small apartment, but it will do. We'll squeeze in, Andrew and I in one bed and the girls in the other. There is no hot water and no sewage in the building, a strange smell whiffs out of the toilet, but we don't mind the small hardship.

This family is clearly not rich, but very hospitable nonetheless. Dinner is based on kanapki. After  which, three ladies and one man, in their thirties, not sure who they are, friends we guess, arrive and offer to take us for a tour of the town. Nothing much, but it gives us a good idea of a different Poland than that we have seen so far in Warsaw and other major cities.

20 June 1980

Last day in Warsaw, for now

Andrew and I go to the girls' dorm after breakfast, but they are not there. They were supposed to return yesterday from their tour of Finland and northern Poland. We are slightly worried, not that anything serious is likely to have happened (though you never know) but we had planned to start our trip back to Italy tomorrow...

Then Marek, Borzena's brother, calls to say everything is fine: Ann and Cathy are in Warsaw, they arrived in Gdansk with the night ferry from Helsinki at 9 o'clock, and managed to hop on a plane on to Warsaw. They just did not have a chance to call. We are relieved!

The afternoon is spent looking after our luggage and especially the last paperwork. We need a Polish exit visa, a transit visa to get us through Czechoslovakia and an entry visa into Hungary. By 5:30 in the afternoon our passports are decorated with a new collection of colorful stamps and we can relax. The most difficult was the Polish exit visa: after several months here we need to prove our course is over, our stipend is properly accounted for, our onward visa are in order. A friendly lady at the office somehow likes us a lot and puts our papers on top of the pile, just to be nice. She does not ask for money, just smiles.

We then go and say good bye to Marian and Ewa. I decide to buy a silver and marble clock they wan to sell, will present it to my parents. Because there are no official receipts, I am, strictly speaking, not allowed to export it. Silver is one of those precious metals that, if you can find it on the black market, is very cheap here, so the authorities want to prevent its contraband.

We also have various items that are not backed up by official sale receipts, like our monster 2kg Soviet caviar can, next to the pocket-size half-kilo can of Soviet caviar.


Final dinner at Borzena's home. The final intake of hearty home made Polish food. The kind that is often impossible to find in the shops but that her family, can manage to squeeze out of the black market. Or "free market" as, more appropriately, it is called here. She, always a melancholy type, weeps a bit, her mother more. In fact we all do a little bit, though the guys try to hide it.


19 June 1980

Getting ready to leave Poland

In the morning we go to meet the Rector of our university. We have a plan: organize a two-pronged student seminar meeting between Georgetown U. and SGPiS, one event each in Washington, DC and Warsaw. It should do much to improve understanding and it surely will be lots of fun. He agrees but, as expected, has little money to contribute except hospitality expenses in Warsaw. We'll have to take care of that from the US side. We'll try.

This highly intellectual endeavor is followed by a more mundane one: buying Russian caviar in the market of "Praga" a neighborhood of Warsaw that is famous for a farmers'smarket. Or fishermen's market. Or Soviet traders' market. Here you can find Russians who have the right connections to buy caviar (or gold, diamonds, furs...) at subsidized prices in the USSR and then sell it at enormous profit in Poland. Sometimes to Poles, in the best case to Westerners who pay convertible cash.

We buy half a kilo of premium Beluga caviar to eat ourselves and a huge can of 2 kg which we plan to resell once we reach Italy. We'll see.

Romek presents me with a beautiful fur hat. It's not the season to wear it now but it will come in handy in Washington next Winter.

One last currency exchange. I buy some Czechoslovak Koruna from Marian. Keep some and sell some to Pat for Hungarian Forint. We'll be driving through both countries and need a bit of each. Our professionalism in currency black market deals has reached enviable levels of sophistication.

In the evening we start packing crystals, caviar and the rest of our belongings. It will be a challenge to fit everything in Giallina's trunk. Also, there where three of us on the way from Italy, now we have Cathy. But somehow we do it. We stuff even the back seat of the car with tightly wrapped merchandise.

If they stop us at the Czechoslovak border and ask about all the crystal, we'll say we bought it with our student stipend. We are entitled to spend up to half of it on domestic goods and export them duty-free. Hardly believable but it's the law. We are going to be safe.

18 June 1980

Crystal and corals

Easy day of rest, laundry, catching up with our classmates at the dorm.

In the evening I go and meet Marian and Ewa at their place. News of our shipment to Italy is not good: my crystal vase broke. The big atlas and my old Tsarist rubles made it OK through customs and the rough handling of LOT Polish Airlines. There was no choice, Alitalia is not flying to Warsaw. Even Alitalia is usually better that flag carriers from Comecon countries. I long for a time when flag carriers won't exist any more. Why should governments have anything to do with flying people and cargo?

Marian and Ewa are very kind, they got me a new crystal vase! And one for Andrew. He also has a gift of corals for mom and another set of corals which he kindly asks me to smuggle out of the country. I am not sure why corals are such a good deal in Poland. But they are.

17 June 1980

Back to Warsaw

Our ferry docks at Gdansk harbor in the early afternoon. It's been quiet sailing, quite different from that of a few days ago from Finland to Sweden. Lots of Poles on the ship: Sweden is one of the few Western countries that grants visa-free access to Polish tourists and they take advantage of it. For tourism, for business, for trading, at the edge of legality, all the goods they can buy in Sweden and that are out of reach in Poland. Sweden is surely capitalizing on its neutral role in the Cold War.

Smooth ride to Warsaw and evening with Romek, Stefan and the rest of the crowd. We tell our stories from the USSR over kanapki and vodka.

16 June 1980

Flags, blonds, and ferry

We leave Oxelösund and the Ericsons after a hearty breakfast at 11 o'clock. In town I manage to buy a Swedish flag. I collect, and hang around my apartment in Rome, flags from the countries I visit. I always wanted a Swedish flag because of the special significance of this country in my life, but did not manage to do so until now. When I was dating Karin Ericson I asked her about buying a flag and she recommended I write to the king. So I did write to the King of Sweden to the effect that I was going to get married with a Swedish lady and we wanted a flag from him as a kind of blessing. I did not really lie, we were a real couple (as sixteen-year-olds can be) and in theory we could have been married at some point in time. The secretary of the king wrote that he had no flags to give away; however, she sent me a wedding picture of the king and the queen.


Flag properly folded in my suitcase, we drive to Stockholm and meet Lena, Karin's sister. She is as stunningly beautiful as she was three years ago. We have a ice cream while strolling together in the pretty downtown area, and after saying good bye we hit the road again, direction Nynäshamn, a small port town where we board a ferry headed for Gdansk.

Once again we leave the world of opulence to return to real socialism. We also leave the world of stunning blondes.

15 June 1980

Car washing, catching up and night fishing

Rather unexciting morning at the Ericsons'. We need to wash Giallina from all the black tar that stuck to it during our drive to Novgorod, when we rolled over a highway while it was being built!

Rest of the day... rest. The previous weeks have been intense and we don't mind putting our feet up for a few hours. It's a warm and sunny day in Sweden, we wear T-shirts and it feels just perfect. Long chats with the Ericsons, we've got a few years to catch up on. They ask a lot of questions about the United States and Georgetown. I ask about Karin, who's got a good job, is living with a nice guy and come to visit once in a while. We also get in touch with Lena, her sister, and plan to meet when we go to Stockholm to catch our ferry back to Poland.

In the evening again we go out with the small boat, this time trying to catch salmon with a net. It is illegal, strictly speaking, to fish with a net, but normally law-abiding Swedes do it anyway for their own personal consumption. We do get some fish but, alas, no salmon.

Washing giallina

14 June 1980

Swedish friends, salmon and Soviet submarines

After a long night spent listening to the moans of drunken Scandinavians, we arrive in Stockholm at 9 o'clock in the morning. The plan is to visit the Ericsons, the parents of my high-school girlfriend Karin. I have lost touch with her, but they never forget to write to me for my birthday, and we have kept in touch over the last few years.

We drive to the Ericsons' apartment in Hasselby, near Stockholm, but there is no one there. It is a green neighborhood, lots of flowers. Quite a change from the last time I was here, in the depth of winter, with sub-zero temperatures and all the flora either frozen stiff or covered in snow. Given the difficulty of communication, I had not been able to advise of our arrival, though I had told them months ago we could come by in the Summer. And anyway they had always said I was welcome any time, and I know they meant it.

We then drive to Oxelösund, where they have their Summer house. No one to be seen. Unusual. We wait a bit and have a light lunch. After a while Bo and Ulla-Britt Ericson arrive. Ulla-Britt is a bit surprised but smiling, Bo is enthusiastic as usual. Maybe my mother-in-law-that-never-was is a bit disappointed that her daughter and my did not solidify our relationship? Who knows?



Looking for salmon, or Soviet subs
We are fed abundantly with smoked fish from the Baltic, and then four of us set out on the Ericsons' small outboard-powered wooden boat to go fishing in the archipelago. These cobalt blue waters always bring to mind the USSR to me as a young student of defense affairs. It is here that the Swedish navy has repeatedly spotted unidentified submarines - widely assumed to be Soviet - trying to make their way and sound the defenses of the nearby naval base at Karlskrona. The USSR always denied its subs crossed into Swedish waters, but who believes them? I keep looking at the quiet waters to see if a periscope emerges.

No luck today... we see neither fish nor subs.

(P.S. In 1981, scarcely a year after my visit, a Soviet submarine ran aground for all to see a few kilometers from here!)

13 June 1980

Finnish border and ferry to Sweden

Wake up at 7am, quick breakfast and sadly we must leave Leningrad. We drive slowly and take in the landscape. Brief stop at Vyborg (Viipuri), a town now in Russia that's been contested for centuried between Russia, Finland and Sweden. Everything goes smoothly until the Finnish border.

At the border station we must wait a good half hour before the Soviet guards even so much as look at us. Then another half hour inside the border station itself. The first thing to do is change the 7 rubles I have left into dollars. The exportation of rubles is not allowed. Not that we wanted to take any out of the country anyway. It's a non convertible currency and can not be spent anywhere else.

We are slightly concerned about the two bottles of Soviet champagne we got, strictly speaking illegally, from our waiters friends. Even more concerned with the Soviet Army belts we got from igor in Moscow that Andrew and I are wearing, but no one seems to care. This time they hardly even look at our luggage. They completely ignore the car.

We reach Helsinki easily and quickly. What a relief, the roads are clean and smooth, service station convenience shops are lined with shelves stocking everything one can possibly need while traveling by car. We are back to normalcy.

At Helsinki Andrew and need ferry tickets to Stockholm, the plan is to visit my friends, the Ericson family. Ann and Cathy head back to Poland.  The Silja line, the best one, is fully booked. We get a place for us and the car on a Viking line. Viking is cheaper but the ferry does not really exist as a means of transportation between Finland and Sweden. It is a floating pub where kids from both countries can buy and consume cheap alcohol without restrictions. On board, everyone, from 12 to 82 years-old, is completely drunk. We are not going to have a very social experience, rather an anthropological one: Scandinavians trying to find any possible way to beat the system and get drunk.

12 June 1980

Leningrad churches, gasoline and romantic white nights

Touring under the rain around Leningrad city.

At the Saints Peter and Paul cathedral all we can see is a few tombs from Tsars.

Then to Saint Isaac church. We read on a poster that "the people requested that the state take it over from the Church in order to better preserve it and remedy the neglect that it had been abandoned to and because of which many artistic masterpieces were being ruined by time".

Some pictures show damage from WWII but at a closer look they are infantile photographic alterations to magnify the state's role in the restoration and its respect for religion. It is true that Stalin and the Orthodox Church did collaborate during WW II to defeat Germany, but that did not last. On a wall there is a quote from Lenin: "The Church is an enemy of the people, not historically, but by definition".

We climb the stairway to the dome but from the top it is not allowed to take photos of the city landscape. Military secret. There is a large bin with hundreds of film rolls, the film pulled out allegedly from tourists who violated the ban on photos.

We then move on to the Hermitage Museum. Here it is allowed to photograph. Many Italian exhibits. The best exhibit of the Soviet department seems to be a large low-relief map of the USSR which allegedly " stunned visitor from all over when it toured the world in a roving Soviet exhibition.

We then move on to buy some fuel. We have official and perfectly legal coupons, but the lady at the service station does not want them. We guess it is too much paperwork for her. So we pay the local price in rubles, only 6 rubles for 30 liters!! Basically free gasoline!

Evening dinner at the Austeria restaurant, where we eat a lot of caviar and other delicacies to spend all the rubles we have left. At the end the waitress proposes that we pay in dollars, exchange rate 1 to 1. Not so interesting for us. We counterpropose to pay in rubles but give her 8 dollars on the side for two bottles of Soviet champagne. She accepts without hesitation and runs to get the two bottles for us.

Back at the hotel we spend some time chatting in the terrace of our room, it is mid-June, one of the brightest nights of the year, and Leningrad is famous for its "white nights". Very romantic.

11 June 1980

Petrodvorets palace, moose and watch

Morning at the Petrodvorets palace. The imperial-looking, majestic palace of the Tsars, reasonably well maintained, rubs sorely against all the current regimes stands for. But here it is, witness to history.

It is very hot! Even too hot, incredible as it may sound. it is an incredible complex of imperial palaces built by the Tsars, now a museum.

In the central fountain of the palace a moose is swimming around having fun! After repeated efforts, the guards manage to pull it out of the water, but he goes right back in. In the end they must turn off the fountains and lower some row boats in the fountain to get him out for good.

Andrew and I throw our American football around a bit. There is a larger than life statue of Lenin in a pensive, intellectual mood, sitting on a pedestal, and I sit next to him trying, with only limited success, to imitate his pose.




Soviet moose swimming



Trying to imitate Lenin's pose











In the evening, we have booked tickets for the opera, "la Traviata", but when we get to the theater there is no opera. The program has been changed and we are offered a mediocre ballet accompanied by recorded music. Disappointing.

I manage to buy a Soviet watch from the local "Raketa" factory. Pretty though not so reliable reputation. We'll see.

All is well that ends well however, and we splurge for another caviar and champagne dinner at the Moskva restaurant.

10 June 1980

Sightseeing and dining in Leningrad

Wake up around ten o'clock and off to town for some strolling and shopping along Nevsky Prospekt, the main high street in Leningrad. There is almost literally nothing to buy. Big shops and lots of salespeople but inevitably empty shelves. We have a look at the prices for staples, like meat, butter, bread. Everything is cheap, but nothing is there for anyone to buy.

Except for the Beriozka stores of course, but prices there range from uninviting to prohibitive, at least for us.

We go for lunch to the Sodko restaurant where we had booked a table. Just before we go through the door though, a couple of middle-ages men approach Andrew (for some reason black market dealers prefer him to me) to ask if he's got "anything" to sell. He does not. We really should bring along more stuff to sell next time.

Fixed menu for 22 rubles (about 25.000 Italian lire, or 30 USD at the official rate, about six times cheaper at the black market rate). No choice for the manu but we can't complain: excellent tender smoked salmon, caviar and Soviet champagne. There is also a show of Russian folk music and dances, at the end of which a waiter comes to our table, and only to our table, to ask whether we liked the performance. We did, really.

We end the day with a leisurely drive through the city. It is so much more pleasant than Moscow. It's still mostly Soviet apartment blocks, but here and there the occasional pre-Soviet building makes for an interesting dive in the past.