Story World Research in Sochi
Dateline: August 1978
This is the great Russian resort.
Many German female tourists lie on the beach. They are tanned a rich bronze.
I spent a lot of time reading Nabakov’s “Lolita” and enjoyed it.
The dark bread tasted good with caviar. You washed it down with kefir or mineral water. Even tea…
I thought about the journey so far. It had had its moments of hallucinatory charm.
This was the place where Khrushchev was vacationing when he was told in 1964 that he was no longer the boss. He had been ousted and accused of hare-brained schemes.
He was the man who had denounced Stalin in a secret speech at a historic meeting of the Soviet Party Congress.
He was the man who had recklessly confronted Kennedy with nuclear missiles in Cuba and had given the green light for the construction of the Berlin Wall.
He was a bully, but not a mass murderer like Stalin.
Khrushchev was also a supporter of Trofim Lysenko, a biologist quack who had crazy ideas about growing wheat in Siberia. But he also broke with Mao Zedong, shattering the communist monolith that was so useful for many of America’s secret elites.
A crude ancestor of Gorbachev?
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He was also the man who allowed the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s forbidden books. But who crushed the Hungarian revolution with no mercy.
A paradox of bitter proportions.
Here was a man who had whined pathetically when he was not allowed to see Disneyland during one of his visits to America.
Hum…
Here was a man who had taken off his shoe at the UN and banged it on a desk to the horror of many delegates. But it was all in good fun…
A dangerous buffoon at a critical time of transition.
The tropical Black Sea beckoned to me with its vast and simple virtues.
I wondered what my next career move would be after coming home from this very strange trip.
My Russian was also slowly improving, the longer I traveled in this country of bizarre and extreme contrasts.
Lenin was everywhere, of course. He took on Caucasian features on the endless billboards as he waved at you in Europe, but curiously became more Asiatic looking the further you ventured into Central Asia. History was a circus indeed.
I just kept reading Lolita…
