There was a tingle, a faint sense of danger, which was crazy, of course. I traveled as a tourist with a tourist visa and I had a return ticket, but for me, this had the enticing whiff of the forbidden. I was an American, after all, as Leslie and Jo never failed to point out, joking about how I must be shaking in my capitalist boots. I had grown up with the Soviet Union as the Other, the Evil Empire, the place from which the missiles that would kill us all would be launched. I remembered the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was a kid when my father, terrified, had said he planned to move some money to a bank in some remote rural part of New York State.
Ambivalent, too. I'd also grown up among people in Greenwich Village who, when they were young, idealized the USSR and had been in the Communist Party; many had seen the USSR only through the rosy tint of those ideological glasses. In every way I was astonished to be here, especially that first night.
That first trip to Moscow changed all our lives, one way and another, mine and Leslie's and especially Jo's. That first night late, after we checked into the National Hotel, we sat in the main restaurant of the hotel. From another room came the sounds of a private party, laughter, balalaika music, ice on glasses.
Through the lace curtains in the window, we watched the snow coming down on Menezh Square. The snow mixed with the patterns of the lace. Red Square was just visible, so were the Kremlin walls and the gold onions on St. Basil's, all magical in the snow. Somehow I had envisioned the Kremlin as a grim fortress, not a place where behind brick walls were exquisite yellow stucco walls and ranks of gold domes.
At midnight, we went out and walked, freezing, over to Red Square. It was enormous, vast, eternal, with enough space for whole armies to parade - it was the most satisfying public square I'd ever seen, bigger than you expected and much more beautiful. In front of Lenin's tomb, in front of the massive red granite box where he lay, the guards were on duty, goose-stepping through the night, and, in the distance, pinkish puffs of frozen smoke rose from a power plant near the river.
"Suddenly, in one of the Helsinki parks I see a young man singing, his cowboy hat on the ground. When he finishes, I go up to him and introduce myself. He says that he is Dean Reed. To me that meant nothing."
In Moscow, the day after I arrived, Nikolai Pastoukhov told me how he first met Dean in Helsinki in 1965.
Although the Countess had said she sent Dean to Moscow because she was afraid of his going "Left Left Left," Pastoukhov said it was because he, Pastoukhov, encountered Dean in a Helsinki park during a World Peace Conference in 1965. Everyone had a version, everyone wanted to somehow own Dean Reed.
I had followed Dean to Moscow and now to the offices of the agricultural newspaper Pravda Selskaya Shizn which translates roughly as Pravda Country Life, where Nikolai Pastoukhov was the editor. Pastoukhov - he sometimes thought of himself in the third person - had been bored out of his skull at the conference. The conference was dull. The women looked like dogs. The Chinese were contentious and intractable. The speeches were incessant. Which was why Pastoukhov escaped for a smoke.
Strolling in the park, smoking, he ogled the pretty girls in their miniskirts. Right up to their asses, he thought, and tried not to get too excited about this vision of Western pulchritude. Still, it was part of his job, observing life around him; he was a journalist.
Suddenly, Pastoukhov's attention was diverted by the sound of music. A little group had gathered and at its center was a handsome young man with a fine head of thick hair, playing the guitar, his hat on the ground. He was working for money to get a ticket back to Argentina, he said. But he was not an Argentine. He was an American. His name, he said, was Dean Reed.
Stamping out his smoke, Pastoukhov looked the American over. God, he thought, the American had the little group in the park eating out of his hand.
In those days in the mid-1960s, Soviet officials were on the lookout for acceptable entertainers to pacify the Soviet kids and prevent their wholesale defection to the decadent music of the West. (Damn Bittles! Pastoukhov thought, as he often did, for Beatlemania had swept the Soviet Union.) Here was this handsome American with a real cowboy hat, plucking his guitar, singing peace songs. Pastoukhov had a little talk with the young man who, to his wonderment, espoused peace and love and the socialist cause. This was the jackpot! Bingo, he thought, or the Soviet equivalent.
"Come with me, Dean Reed," he said.
That evening at the hall where the peace conference was in progress, Pastoukhov pushed Dean on to the platform and introduced him to the delegates in the packed room.
"Here is new blood come to us with the peace movement from America," Pastoukhov said.
Dean Reed began to play. Pastoukhov stood in the wings and watched, holding his breath. When Dean played the World Peace Congress in Helsinki, things were a mess: the Master of Ceremonies, a doddering old Finn, was hysterical; Bertrand Russell had failed to show; Bertrand Russell's secretary, who was there, took up the Chinese line, which was that you could not talk World Peace until there was World Revolution.
"Bullshit," the Soviets cried.
"Bullshit," thought Pastoukhov, bored to death with this idiotic babble and desiring only a cigarette.
"Stop him! Stop him!" some people yelled at Bertrand Russell's man.
"Let him speak," others shouted.
Pastoukhov said, "There was almost a fistfight starting. And he jumps on to the podium with his guitar and starts singing for us. OK. And I am thinking it would be so good for him to come to us in Moscow.
Maybe Dean looked out into the sea of angry faces, maybe he listened to the contentious voices and escalating fury, and thought: I can make a difference; I can make the difference between war and peace; I can make people touch each other. He was twenty-seven.
He picked up his guitar and sang "Marianna." He sang cowboy songs and he sang something that to Pastoukhov, at least, sounded a lot like rock and roll.
From the podium Dean greeted the delegates - the Westerners in jeans, the chubby Chinese in Mao jackets, the dewlapped Soviets, their chests webbed with war medals, the East Germans in gray leather shoes, and he made them sing. He told them to hold hands. He told them they had to hold hands, even if the girl sitting next to them was lousy looking - this was how Pastoukhov reported it - they had to hold hands and sing.
When that wasn't enough to liven things up, Dean leapt off the stage, climbing over the delegates' legs, striding down the aisles. He made them hold hands! The delegates started smiling. They laughed and sang along with the crazy American. Dean roamed the hall some more, then he bounded back on to the stage, picked up his guitar, and, with everyone holding hands, Soviets, Chinese, Africans in their fancy robes and little caps, they all sang "We Shall Overcome."
In the wings, Nikolai Pastoukhov grinned his delirious grin; he knew a good thing when he saw it.
"Come with me, Dean Reed," he said. And by nightfall, Dean Reed was on the train from Helsinki to Leningrad.
With Pastoukhov, he traveled in a private compartment that belonged to the Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union. Deputy Tikhonov was a celebrated poet and he greeted Dean as a fellow artist. Through the June night, Tikhonov read his poems aloud and Dean played his guitar - you could just hear him singing the "Midnight Special." Pete Seeger had toured the Soviet Union to great acclaim a few years earlier and his American folk music was held in high esteem.
I liked to imagine that they sat in an opulent old-fashioned railway carriage with red plush seats and antimacassars, and a gleaming samovar. Toasts were made. Outside the cornfields sped by forests of white birches. Pastoukhov remembered it like a scene from a Russian novel, from Tolstoy perhaps.