Can't Go Back to the U.S.S.R

"Barbara," my Grandmother groaned on the phone, "why on earth would you want to go there?" She had no idea that I'd been studying Russian for a year and a half already, or why (I loved languages, and my college was too young for other viable options). She did know that I'd been born into the anti-Communist heyday, raised conservatively Midwestern Protestant, and well sheltered by the parents with whom I lived, even during college. All I could have told her about my reasoning for the Soviet Union was that, when I tore the postcard off my professor's door, I thought if I was going to travel with a student group, I might as well go somewhere I'd be unlikely to go on my own when I was more worldly.

So I spent the summer of 1974, including my 21st birthday on the 4th of July, mostly in the summer camp run for students and staff of the Kiev MedInstitut, sharing a tiny cabin with two medical students and the Sputnik guide assigned to our group of 12 American college students and one grad-student "advisor." I learned to get drunk badly and to get drunk enjoyably. I did "phyzaryadki" at 7:30 every morning in a dewy meadow, under the direction of a former all-Union women's shot-put champion. I was shown by one of the camp's cooks how to wring the washwater out of my jeans as she did all the time for her four brothers. I walked a half mile to a Komsomol camp that could arrange, belatedly, to provide access to hot showers for what was considered an excessive frequency of twice a week. I laid on the riverbank and tried to explain Simon & Garfunkel songs to lab techs who'd learned the lyrics phonetically. And when a member of our group overheard a snatch of a Voice of America broadcast, I shared a panic over a denouement of the Watergate scandal that turned out to be only about a month premature. I tried to explain to our Soviet friends, who didn't even have a word for it, what "impeachment" meant, and I learned from them how they could see self-determination as protected by an authoritarian government, just as I saw it requiring a participatory democracy.

I found the range of experiences I brought home from that summer as impossible to explain to my family, supportive though they were, as to Grandmother. But they gave me a direction for my academic career that let me become the first graduate of my college to attend an Ivy League grad school. And even though that didn't turn out to be the ultimate direction of my life, my connection to the peoples of the Soviet Union persisted. In 1988, I took advantage of a shorter-term opportunity to go back, but traveled with a faith group and gained another set of new perspectives. Among them were the many changes going on in Russia, Ukraine, and Latvia, which along with the SSRs I didn't visit would soon be independent states. And all of those connections continue still, though less explicitly expressed. I've had a dear friend, since returned to Moscow, rail about Yeltsin's betrayal of her hopes for the transformation of her country, and I think I could understand her feelings a little better because of the changes in me that began in 1974. I have loads of reasons for wanting to go there now, And I know it's still the there I knew as a naive college student, at least in the ways that matter most, the hearts of the people.