August 1975. Four young women sit on a bed in a budget hotel in Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg). Three of the women appear to be intent on listening to someone in the room, off-camera. But one is staring straight at me, mugging, as I snap a Kodachrome.
This is Jamie, the embodiment of all my preconceived notions of a California girl from San Francisco. Words like, “open, sunny, laid back, friendly” flood into my mind. I imagine her growing up in a hippie commune in Haight-Ashbury.
Kicks Under a Table
Jamie’s openness could slide into naivety, as I later experienced at a social gathering with some Soviet students in a students union in Leningrad.
We sat around a table doing something good travelers never do: we compared life back home with the country of our hosts. We were young.
Eventually, mercifully, the conversation subsided, giving Jamie the chance to steer things in a more cooperative direction.
She announced that a Russian had stopped her in the street, and they’d had a long conversation. I became nervous when she talked about the Russian scribbling something down on a piece of paper and handing it to her.
“Would you help me to translate it?” she asked her Russian hosts.
I gently kicked her. Goodness knows what illegal request, along with contact information, was written on that piece of paper. We were sitting with handpicked Soviets who would be filing a report after meeting with us.
She reached into her pack. “It’s in here somewhere.”
I kicked a little more urgently. She looked up, but dismissed my action as accidental.
She rummaged, then made sounds indicating she had found the note. I kicked with some force.
She stopped, looked up, read my face, appeared mortified, then went into a long act trying to find the paper, but never finding it.
“It must be here… where is it?… It’s here somewhere… .”
Eventually, she said she couldn’t find it. I could breath again.
A Walk Down an Aisle with Jamie
Jamie asked if she could sit beside me on the flight from Leningrad to London. Being a firm friend of Dorothy, I’d had no romantic moments with Jamie. But I did like her, so I demurred.
At Leningrad’s Pulkovo Airport passports and papers were checked several times, including at the gate and at the entrance to the plane. I found it exciting to board an Aeroflot jet that would take us out of the USSR and back to the capitalist world.
I walked down the aisle with Jamie, past a bassinet clipped onto the luggage rack.
At this point I need to do a little explaining. In a modern jet, carry-on bags are stored in overhead bins with lids, and bassinets are clipped to bulkheads two or three feet off the ground. Back in those days, luggage was placed on an overhead rack where they could “shift during flight” and cause injuries.
This 1950’s BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation, forerunner to BA, British Airways) photograph pretty much sums up what I saw on board that Aereoflot plane.
But the baby in the bassinet in that Tupolev jet was not as responsive as the baby in the photograph. I did a double-take: it was blue. It was alarmingly blue, and motionless. It seemed barely alive.
Jamie took the window seat two rows behind the bassinet. I sat down beside her.
Once in-flight, we were subjected to prolonged, severe turbulence. Aeroflot pilots were ex-military, unschooled in the concept of altering course to avoid unstable air.
Terrified, Jamie grabbed onto me, and did not let go. She probably got one or two limp, reassuring pats back from me. It was a miracle we weren’t coshed by bottles of duty free vodka, rattling around overhead, or perhaps a flying bassinet.
We made a stop in Stockholm, Sweden, where we were asked to get off the plane and wait in the gate area. Any unrequited feelings on Jamie’s part were quickly overwhelmed by a Björn Borg sighting. The women in the group were ecstatic.
Borg was at the height of his success in 1975. He was a rock star of the tennis world. And, yes, he was hot.
Back on board we were treated to the best meal I have ever had in Coach. It was a full meal, starting with caviar, served on china plates, with a cloth napkin and heavy steel cutlery. To me, an impecunious student, this was pure luxury.
A large press contingent was waiting at the gate at London’s Heathrow. I felt like Eva Peron. walking off a jet, waving at the little people, flashbulbs popping. But the press were not waiting for me, and I wasn’t waving.
Later I learned we had witnessed an important moment of détente.
The Baby on the Plane
Détente defined an era of the Cold War. The relationship between the USSR and the USA began to thaw in 1969 under President Richard Nixon. There was some easing of military tensions, and many symbolic events.
One such event was the docking of Soyuz and Apollo modules with each other while in orbit in July 1975. Earlier in my 1975 trip, I visited Moscow’s Museum of Economic Achievements where I took this photograph of an adapter that made it possible for the spacecraft to lock on to each other, and for cosmonauts and astronauts to shake hands in space.
The blue baby on the plane was one more beneficiary of détente. Her name is Irina Chudnovskaya. She was born in Leningrad with a serious heart defect from which she would die without western medicine. Upon arrival at London’s Heathrow, the baby and her mother were taken to Brompton Hospital in London where a British surgeon operated on Irina. As you can see from this article in London’s Daily Mirror, the outcome was good.