Next Year, Tahiti!

It started at Kennedy Airport, where tourists were wedged into an Aeroflot plane more tightly than ever frat boys in a Volkswagen. Aloft, already in the USSR as it were, we beseeched the homely stewardesses (they look homelier going over than coming back, when you’ve seen the rest of Russia’s women) to give us vodka, that secular opiate of the people, whereby the proletariat is able to endure its own triumph. No wonder they are a race of drunkards. By the time we stopped over in Scotland I was homesick.

We got to Moscow on what was Monday evening there, though I supposed morning in New York. Metabolism confused, we walked across the runway through snow flurries and sneaping winds and joined our first queue inside the airport, to get our visas checked. “Next year, Tahiti,” promised Bill Buckley. Yeah. The place was full of soldiers, of whom we were to see thousands in Moscow and Leningrad. Another long wait for our luggage. Then our tour guide. Surprise: a petite redhead she was, one Lira by name, at once Russian-looking and, paradoxically enough, fetching.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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William F. Buckley Jr.

It started at Kennedy Airport, where tourists were wedged into an Aeroflot plane more tightly than ever frat boys in a Volkswagen. Aloft, already in the USSR as it were, we beseeched the homely stewardesses (they look homelier going over than coming back, when you’ve seen the rest of Russia’s women) to give us vodka, that secular opiate of the people, whereby the proletariat is able to endure its own triumph. No wonder they are a race of drunkards. By the time we stopped over in Scotland I was homesick.

We got to Moscow on what was Monday evening there, though I supposed morning in New York. Metabolism confused, we walked across the runway through snow flurries and sneaping winds and joined our first queue inside the airport, to get our visas checked. “Next year, Tahiti,” promised Bill Buckley. Yeah. The place was full of soldiers, of whom we were to see thousands in Moscow and Leningrad. Another long wait for our luggage. Then our tour guide. Surprise: a petite redhead she was, one Lira by name, at once Russian-looking and, paradoxically enough, fetching.