Remembering A Trip 30 Years Ago To Russia

  • Sunday, March 31, 2013
  • John Shearer

Have you ever done an activity that was a little adventurous or out of the ordinary, and it turned out to be a positive experience?

Thirty years ago this spring as a college senior, I was able to experience such an activity when I took a trip to what was then the Soviet Union, now Russia, when the Cold War was still showing no signs of cooling or ending.

It ended up being a fun and neat time and made me feel as though I had enriched my life greatly. And because I had so much fun writing about my experiences in a journal that a friend had given me to take, I decided then that I definitely wanted to get into some kind of vocation that involved writing.

At the time I took the trip over roughly 10 days in late March 1983, I was nearing the end my fifth year of schooling at the University of Georgia. Yes, colleges in those days also had four-year undergraduate programs. But, to put the situation in Soviet Union historical terminology, I was on the five-year plan.

After a college experience that had started excitedly by walking on the Bulldog football team and getting to live in the athletic dorm, I had moved on to boring apartment living and then back into a dorm to enjoy more social interaction.

The dorm in which I was living was Myers Hall, a small coed dorm that had a strong sense of community amid the larger university. As a result, I loved the experience – especially after going to all-boys Baylor School – and hung around the lobby a lot socializing when I probably should have been studying more.

During one of those times while being a “lobby lizard,” I struck up a conversation with a Portuguese language professor named Joe Snow, who lived in a faculty apartment inside the dorm.

He liked to travel and told me that Dr. Harold Schefski, a Russian language professor at Georgia, was organizing a trip over spring break that year and was looking for more people to go on it. That interested me, who was majoring in geography. I also knew my late mother, Velma Shearer, had a spirit of adventure and liked to travel, so I told her about it.

And suddenly, within a few days, we were both planning to go to the Soviet Union.

After some time-consuming preparation, which included having to get both passports and special credentials to get into the Soviet Union, we found ourselves getting ready to head to New York before hooking up with our group at JFK International airport.

The trip was being held over spring break between winter and spring quarters, and also at a time when very few college students spent any time studying abroad.

After experiencing quite a culture shock spending a night in New York – a city I would later visit often and grow to love – we took an all-night plane trip to Helsinki, Finland, before later flying in to Moscow.

We then went through a thorough check-in line at Moscow’s airport, and I remember how the woman security attendant checked all the items to make sure we were not bringing unauthorized materials.

After that harrowing experience – which made me proud to be an American – we were soon hooked up with a tour guide. A middle-aged man, he guided us around everywhere we went in Moscow and later in St. Petersburg, which was called Leningrad at the time.

He seemed to have a nice and easy-going manner and appeared detached from all the stories I heard about communism at the time. But he could have been the personal butler of Soviet premier Yuri Andropov for all I knew and was telling him daily about our Southern accents.

I thoroughly enjoyed visiting such places as Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral, where church services were then not allowed, as well as going to an opera in one of the main government buildings inside the Kremlin. We also stood in line in roughly 30-something-degree weather for 30-45 minutes to walk past the embalmed body of early Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin behind a glass case.

I have never forgotten how serious the guards looked standing around his grave with powerful rifles.

But other scenes seemed a little humorous. One waiter in a restaurant came up to me and said “blue jeans,” meaning he likely wanted to buy any blue jeans I had at a time when such clothing items were considered hard-to-get luxuries.

One of the fellow Georgia travelers wore a cowboy hat and boots, and jokingly said every item he was wearing was negotiable. He was evidently looking at the trip as a money-making operation.

I also remember seeing a black government car zoom by when we were in expansive Red Square. I thought maybe some crisis was taking place, but the person or persons could have just been late for lunch reservations for all I knew.

When we flew to St. Petersburg after a few days in Moscow, I quickly realized it looked more like what I imagined a Western European city to look. We toured the ornate Winter Palace, and I remember being mesmerized by its architectural beauty.

We also went to a circus in a much simpler building, and I quickly picked up that Russians evidently do circuses as well as they do ballet and other fine arts like piano playing.

I did see one reminder of home during my trip to the Soviet Union – a Pepsi-Cola bottle, which had a label written in the Russian language. I remember taking a few bottles back home as souvenirs and gifts.

While I greatly enjoyed the experience in the Soviet Union, I remember getting chills up my spine when we arrived back in Helsinki, and the tour guide said, “Welcome back to the Western World.”

And when we arrived back in New York and passed through customs, we were delirious to be back home. However, being one of the last in our group to go through the line, I heard some of our travel mates ahead of me cheering even more than expected.

When I arrived where they were, tour organizer Dr. Schefski told me some unexpected news – our school, Georgia, had defeated North Carolina (and Baylor School graduate Jimmy Braddock) earlier that day to qualify for its first and only trip to the NCAA basketball Final Four.

I could not believe it. We had been cut off from most news and I had no idea my beloved Bulldogs under coach Hugh Durham were advancing through the tournament.

They would later lose in the semifinals to Jim Valvano’s North Carolina State, who would make its own improbable run with an upset victory over Houston in a game that is remembered greatly by college basketball fans.

The trip to Russia stands out for me personally in similarly memorable fashion. I was glad I went, and I remember copying some of my comments from my trip journal to help me try to get newspaper jobs a few months later.

I am not sure if it helped, but I was able to get hired by editor Lee Anderson at the then Chattanooga News-Free Press about a year later.

I have enjoyed doing observational writing since then, but I have unfortunately not really traveled to other countries.

But my dream is to go somewhere neat like rural Yorkshire, England, and get to walk around the countryside.

It will be much different from my trip to Russia that occurred three decades ago this month, but hopefully just as enriching.

Jcshearer2@comcast.net

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