It was early 1984, still years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the official end of America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union, and Yuri Andropov was dying.
With the leader of the Russian superpower hidden from public view, the United States warned Americans abroad that regime change would be an especially bad time to visit America’s rival. But Mark and Constance Kraby had spent nine months arranging their two-car trip through Eastern Europe with three fellow ex-patriots who, like them, had made fast cash cleaning houses and U.S. military hotels in Munich, Germany.
The five Americans felt young enough to be immortal, and just poor enough to insist on their money’s worth from a long-planned hotel-and-camping vacation throughout the U.S.S.R. With their two rickety Volkswagen Beetles loaded with bourbon, whiskey, American blue jeans, German chocolate and chewing gum — the types of trading goods that would make border crossings a bit easier — the travelers set out to road trip through Communist Europe, with key stops in Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad, passing through the Vienna woods of Austria, into Hungary and then Romania along the way.
That their cars displayed American military plates never fazed them, but it sure drew attention.
“We had already sent money ahead for hotels,” said Constance Kraby on Wednesday, recalling with laughter tinged with amazement her three-week border-crossing adventure. “And we were young: ‘What could hurt us? We’re Americans.’”
A passion for travel
The Krabys, who moved into a condominium in St. Paul’s Lowertown neighborhood in 2001, still have strong feelings about the art, people and poverty they encountered in their travels nearly 40 years ago, and they see a direct line of connection to the events unfolding between Russia and Ukraine today.
The couple, who years later would literally step across the Berlin Wall separating East and West Germany as it crumbled before them, still debate some of the details. To keep the memories fresh, Mark Kraby, a former middle school science teacher who still drives trucks some mornings, spent part of his pandemic downtime compiling photos and remembrances from their adventure into a 90-page printed travelogue, which he’s distributed to friends and family. The five travelers each kept journals, which proved helpful after 39 years.
As the 1970s became the 1980s, Mark — already a Vietnam-era Marine Corps veteran — had made his way through the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an apple picker and warehouse janitor, eventually making more money than most of his friends after college by working as a precision machinist. But he wasn’t satisfied.
He told Constance, the young lady he’d begun dating after encountering her at a Christmas party, “I’d rather be poor living in Europe cleaning rooms in hotels than here and going to lakes up north.”
The couple flew to Europe twice. The second time, they stayed 13 years, eventually graduating from chamber maid status to working in U.S. military-related administrative offices in Munich, organizing everything from dead checks to patents for the U.S. Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which oversaw goods and recreation for the military. “Usually, it was jobs meant for the families of the military, but they never had enough people,” said Constance, who now pulls a German pension.
Their European adventures were many and varied. Their wedding, for instance, was officiated by the mayor of a small tourist town in Denmark.
The trip eastward
But the trip eastward, behind Russia’s so-called “Iron Curtain,” with a strict travel itinerary pre-approved by the Russian government, would be unlike anything they had encountered. Even the bumper sticker on the Krabys’ orange 14-year-old Volkswagen — “Escape to Wisconsin” — left them worried the message could be construed as an invitation to defect. They decided to chance it.
At the Hungarian/Romanian border, Mark recalled a trade — “definitely under pressure” — that relieved him of his Jim Beam bourbon and left him with a border guard’s cheap Schnapps. The guards asked the five travelers where they were headed. When the group replied “Russia,” the guards laughed heartily: “Everyone is trying to get out of Russia, and you’re going there on vacation? Igor, listen to this …”
At the First of May campgrounds in Oradea, Romania, someone noticed they had sweets — “Chocolate!” came a cry through the crowd — and villagers surged around their car, which by itself appeared to be a novelty in a town where most transportation appeared to be by trucks, buses and cattle-drawn carts with axles held in place by long, curved tree branches.
“One guy said, ‘There hasn’t been chocolate here in three years. We can’t buy clothes. We can’t buy milk,’” said Mark, recalling Romania as the poorest country he had ever visited. “We were wealthy beyond description to these people, and one thing that made us wealthy was just being there.”
Constance would get the same impression over and over again as they drove eastward.
“Russians argued with us all the time,” she said. “They thought we were from a diplomat family, that average people cannot travel.”
Anonymity, constant surveillance
Later, at the border entering Russia, authorities inspected their canned goods one by one, stopping with fascination at their deodorant, which the guards unwound until the stick fell to the ground. They confiscated their tourist guidebook to Romania — a U.S. Army base library book, no less — and Mark’s buck knife, promising he would get it back upon his return, knowing full well he had no plan to exit the country at the same barbed-wire checkpoint.
Like characters in George Orwell’s signature book “1984,” they found themselves traveling through a world cloaked in anonymity and under constant surveillance, where many locals averted their eyes and avoided small talk. To Mark, it was prison-like. But like many of their friends in America, Russia’s younger generation had their doubts about their government’s official take on the outside world and were hungry to learn more.
“The shock was getting there and seeing how poor Russia was as we drove from the south,” said Constance, who considered herself a bit of a free spirit at the time, almost a hippie. “They were curious. Just like I had suspicions about my government and its propaganda, the high school students and the college students had that, too.”
The five friends made their way to campgrounds by the beach in Odesa, now a Ukrainian city, where they polished off five bottles of vodka between them. Armed guards chased them off the beach, bringing Constance to tears. Could it be possible the children of this populous seaport were not allowed open access to the beach at night? Mark recalled not wanting to debate the particulars with heavily-armed men after sundown.
“They had machine guns,” he said. “They were sober and we were definitely not.”
Back at the campground, Russians told them that even simple relocations, like moving from one village to another for work, required evidence of housing, a job and government permission. And the housing had to be of an appropriate size for one’s family.
“This was the hardest part,” Mark recalled being told.
‘Something out of the 19th century’
Intourist, the state-sanctioned guide agency to Russia, published maps at the time with no designated highway numbers and no road names leading off from major highways.
On paper, Russia, the largest country in the world by land mass, was mostly a series of thoroughfares pointing to Moscow, “like a map you might get at Disneyland to find your way around,” Mark wrote in his travelogue.
On the ground, navigating residential areas was little easier.
“There were no street signs at the corner,” Mark recalled. “To find out what street you’re on, you’d have to drive down the street and look at the house plaques.”
Heading north between Kiev and Oryol, the small caravan decided to tempt fate and stray off the main road. They made it two miles before being confronted by authorities demanding they sign papers acknowledging they had deviated from their previously agreed-upon itinerary.
“The cops handed us a pen and said, ‘Sign!’ I said, ‘No!’” said Mark, who insisted, in all honestly, that despite two semesters of Russian literature in college, he could not read Russian. “Finally, they let us go.”
The five friends stopped at a weed-strewn roadside restaurant with no signage, then filled up on gas across the street. The area was poor by any definition.
“It was like something out of the 19th century,” Mark recalled. “Thatch roofs, dirt roads, old picket fences made out of tree branches. … And this was a superpower? Technologically, and in terms of wealth, they were way behind.”
Suddenly, the police were back with two women, both of them visibly embarrassed, who translated the papers they had previously refused to sign. They signed.
Dinner with spies
The trip continued northward. In Oryol, or Orel, a city in western Russia known for its literary history, two Brits begged to sit at their dinner table.
“We’ve been followed by KGB (expletives) for days,” Mark recalled them saying. The Brits recounted how the Russian secret service agents would sometimes sit directly alongside them at restaurants and offer to buy them vodka, which the Brits said they had at one point poured out onto the carpet in open disgust.
It wouldn’t be their first or last time under a microscope.
“We’d go into a city and there would be people in these huge watch towers on the phone looking at us,” Constance recalled with a laugh. “We used to joke — you never have to worry about being lost in Russia, because someone’s always looking out for you.”
At their apartment, the Brits — Mike and Chris — pointed to microphones hidden in their ceiling light, the bathroom, the headboard of their bed. If they removed them, their water or electricity would mysteriously be shut off. Better to put up with them and pass private notes between themselves in writing, they explained.
Mike and Chris — both embassy workers — cautioned the group to be wary of overtly-friendly Russian travelers who happened to be heading in the same direction. Finding out what they meant wouldn’t take long. In Moscow, the Krabys’ three friends kept running into the same pair of upbeat young ladies, night after night. Finally, one among their group confronted the ladies outright. The two girls began to cry.
“They said they’d be kicked out of school and lose their jobs if they didn’t play along with the KGB,” Mark recalled. The group had outed their first pair of Russian spies.
Throughout Russia, Mark marveled at the elaborately decorated bus stops, many fashioned with murals made from mosaic tile. Located at the end of seemingly endless escalators that burrowed deep into the ground, each station in Moscow’s underground subway also was unique, some featuring classical motifs or backlit stain glass. Mark would learn that the underground stations doubled as bomb shelters.
There were 10-cent ice creams that were twice as large as anything he had seen in the U.S. and at least as delicious, and department stores that seemed to throw haphazard piles of product on top of product as if it was all destined to be thrown away. The state-run retail chain known as Beriozka was clean and well-organized, in contrast, but the cost was out of reach for most Russians.
The haves and have-nots under the Communist system were plain to see.
“Like here, our capitalism isn’t pure capitalism, and their Communism wasn’t pure Communism,” Constance recalled.
In Red Square, the Kremlin — the presidential palace spanning five castle-like structures and four cathedrals — captured Mark’s amazement. He was less impressed with Gorky Park — officially known as Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure — “a sad excuse for an amusement park” where a small roller coaster circled high weeds with a “clink, clink, clink” noise that did nothing to bolster confidence.
An extended departure
The five friends repeatedly attempted to extend their itinerary in Russia another day, but were informed they had been denied due to “violations.” Among the stated concerns, in Romania they had camped in an off-limits area across from a factory, an incident that had somehow followed them across borders.
“The Russians knew about that,” Mark recalled. “Finally, they did let us extend our departure.”
In Leningrad, they visited the sprawling royal Winter Palace and Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world, among other historic sites.
Clearing the Russian border took three hours — Mark recalled guards inspecting between his friends’ toes for evidence of goodness knows what — and then they were off toward Finland, where a Finnjet — then the fastest car ferry in the world — carried them back home toward Germany.
Their time in Europe continued past the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, until it was time to come home in the early 1990s to look after relatives.
“We intended to stay six months, and we ended up staying 13 years,” recalled Constance, looking back at her European adventure with a kind of awe. Was she ever really the young woman who traveled across Hungary, Austria, Romania, the Ukraine and Russia, slipping border guards alcohol to ease their concerns about the five Americans traveling Eastern Europe in two rickety Volkswagens?
Indeed she was.
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