YOU COULDN'T HAVE BEEN ON THAT PLANE! (Part I)

Back Story My parents were not happy with the Soviet Union in the 1930s.  My memory is that they viewed the Soviet people as being slobs.  Then came WW-II and the Soviets suddenly became our friends.  Following WW-II, the Soviet Union became our enemy; the Cold War  ensued.  A big event in my life was the Berlin Blockade* where I thought there would be a nuclear war within five years, by accident if not by design.  Countries began to fall to Communism like China and Cuba or half countries like North Korea after what was called at the time, a "police action."  I observed that somehow, all the Communistic countries became dictatorships and not benevolent ones at that.  I had barely recovered from the Berlin Blockade fright when the Soviets launched Sputnik** that showed they had the intercontinental missile with the possibility that they could atom bomb us.  And so it went: the Cuban Missile Crisis*** and Viet Nam.  Then came another surprise.  In the early 1970s began a period when the Soviets became our friends again, or sort of friends, called detente (or a lessening of tensions) under president Nixon.  So in 1976, I received an invitation from the Soviet Academy of Sciences to present the annual Vernadsky Lecture (Vernadsky was one of three founders of the field of geochemistry)* to commemorate his birth, the first Western scientist to do so.  Though I was an anti-Communist, they were now sort of our friends so I accepted.

The Trip  In early March I began my trip to Moscow fraught with personal complications I will not go into.  I had to get to London.  I worked for the Federal government and there was a hard freeze on travel at the time, but I was given an exception because I was the first Western scientist to be given such an invitation.  My brother, however, never believed this and was sure I worked for the CIA, which was not true.  In London, I picked up an Aeroflot plane to Moscow.  I almost missed the flight because I got off the shuttle at the wrong stop and had to run after the shuttle with my suitcase to get back on.  Yes, this trip was full of stress.  The plane seemed to be a converted bomber and the flight was very jerky.  It seemed like you could feel the pilot shifting gears.  When we deplaned we had to go through a check point where there was a stern faced young man who checked your name against a manifest.  When he got to me he checked and checked and checked and then said, "You could not have been on that plane!"  Naturally, I was taken aback by this and, since I am sort of a smart ass, I wanted to say, "How do you think I got here, parachuted in?"  But for once I kept my humor in check and just said,"How else could I have gotten here?"  After some consideration, he let me through.  My baggage was checked, and I was sure they would confiscate a copy of "Doctor Zivago" I brought for my scientific interpreter, but they didn't.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vernadsky
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_1
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_missile_crisis.