Ten years ago next month, Bill Buckley was kind and generous enough to take a group of us from national review to the Soviet Union for a week—because, he said, as we write about it so much, we ought to have experienced it. We were an interesting and mixed group, which included spouses, such as Mrs. Buckley and my own husband; Helen Puwalski, NR’s crusty telephone operator; the advertising manager; editorial people; researchers and outside writers. Our group was part of a larger group run by the official Soviet tourist agency, Intourist, without whom no trip to that country is possible, to the best of my knowledge. Here follow a few memories of the trip, which, as everybody present agreed, was simply wonderful and like no other.
Arriving in Muscovite dusk, with a very light snow falling, we were hit between the eyes by the incredible colors and shapes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, in the vast and empty Red Square. It was right around the corner from our hotel, which was 4,500 rooms big, with four entrances; my husband once missed the correct one for our wing, and was lost for several hours until finally rescued by an Englishspeaking employee. The hotel had all the amenities of a good Holiday Inn, but the entrances were not equipped with the usual revolving doors, which, said one of our party, obviously had not been invented in Russia yet; indeed, in all the time we were there, we never saw one. Another astonishment was the subways—how far underground they were, the magnificent, art-gallery-like stations, and the frequency of the trains, pointed out to us by our female guide and interpreter, who never left us. I think we all were kind of sorry for the poor woman, responsible for showing the best side of the Soviet Union to a group of independent and irreverent Americans, and from a conservative magazine yet.
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