I knew the broad outlines of its history. After a Russian-Turkish war in the late 1820s (there were many such wars during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as both nations struggled for control of the Black Sea coastline), Russia ran its flag, famous for its two-headed eagle, up the Sochi flagpole. It has remained there ever since, even though throughout much of this time Russia has had to battle local Muslim tribesmen for actual control of the city and the region. Not until 1874, for example, did the Russians feel comfortable enough to build an Orthodox church in Sochi. Normally that would have been at the top of their to-do list.
Soon after entering my train compartment, where I was hoping I would be able to type up my notes on my Tbilisi visit, I met my compartment mate, a friendly, talkative, middle-aged assistant economics planner for the Georgian republic. At first I thought that he would be the perfect companion: quiet, self-contained and cautious with a foreigner. I was wrong. Within minutes he was telling me his reason for traveling to Sochi (he was going there to pick up his wife and son, who had been there for the summer), his narrow, negative judgment of America, and his bright vision of communism. He was not a communist, but he talked like one, never more noticeably than in his description of America, which sounded like it had been lifted from a tired editorial in Pravda. Why, he started like a rocket off the launchpad, the “persecution” of Paul Robeson; the “murder” of “innocent Negroes”; the “hounding” of Jews; the “growing impoverishment of the working class”; the “forced imposition” of private cars and homes on workers, who, unable to pay the high fees, become “enslaved” to their “bosses,” whom he compared to the “ancient warlords” of China; the “inability” of young Americans to get a proper education; the “need” of the American government to start “wars of aggression” to save their “failing economies” from total collapse; and, finally, the “fact,” as he put it, that Americans soldiers were “unleashed” on the public to “rape women in the streets and chew gum.”
By the time he completed his nutty assault on America, I was ready to scream, punch him in the face, denounce Soviet communism, and move to a new compartment, if one was available, but—not wanting to create a diplomatic scene—I stuffed my temper into a duffel bag and softly suggested that since we were approaching the midnight hour, it might make sense for us to go to sleep. My companion wouldn’t hear of it. He ordered two glasses of tea and cookies and resumed his assault on the United States.
When he paused for a moment to sip on his tea, I leaped in. “Look,” I said, “we are not going to agree on anything. Listening to you, I think I am listening to a very bad Pravda editorial. Enough. Let’s take a nap.”
He responded, “No need for such sharp words. We are just talking.”
What I found interesting was the tone of his voice—level, unemotional, sounding like a parent patiently explaining something to a child who was not very bright. Finally, unable any longer to contain my anger, I erupted. I used Khrushchev’s own denunciations of Stalin and the Soviet system to make my point.
My companion seemed to wilt for an instant. “True,” he admitted, “we have made mistakes. But”—his eyes lit up—“now we are correcting them.” This open admission of mistakes was now the official fallback position. He continued, “Communism is the wave of the future. It will triumph everywhere, even in the United States.”
I told him that he was misreading history. “Communism will never come to the United States,” I said. My companion laughed at me; he seemed completely sincere, and there was no rancor or bitterness in his manner. He believed that what he said was true. He had seen the future, and it belonged to him. The zigs and zags of today were only bumps on the road to communism tomorrow.
The hours dragged on. I fell asleep twice during his rhetorical flirtation with history. At 4:30 a.m. I appealed to his better nature. “Let us get a few hours of sleep, please.” He agreed, reluctantly.
I awoke close to 8:00 a.m., and my Georgian commissar was already up and ready for combat.
“No,” I pleaded with him, “Let’s talk about Sochi. What should I be sure to see when I get there?”
My companion was disappointed. “Don’t you want to continue our talk?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I would rather talk about Sochi, baseball, or literature, but not politics. There is no common ground in our thinking. There is just a big gap, and every time you spout the communist line straight out of yesterday’s Pravda, this gap only grows wider and wider.”
My companion literally scratched his head. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “You defend a system that is dying. You justify racial terrorism, and you deny that communism will conquer the world.”
I begged him. “Please, let us just sit quietly, not argue about politics, and watch the scenery.”
To my surprise he agreed, and for the next few hours, until we reached the Sochi railroad station at 10:30 a.m., we looked out the window in silence as the train descended from the mountains to a rail line along the shore of the Black Sea, deep blue under the rising sun. To my right the Caucasus seemed to leap from the landscape to the sky, disturbed, it seemed, only by an occasional cloud. Along the way we passed fishing villages, and I could see people lounging on the beach, others swimming in the sea.
The closer we got to Sochi, the more sanatoriums I saw. This was the place for sanatoriums. Every ministry, every industry or enterprise, had a right to build a sanatorium for its workers, and they all built them along the Black Sea coastline. Every worker therefore had a theoretical right to go to a sanatorium for his or her vacation, assuming of course that there was room, which was not always the case. The Red Army sanatorium was among the largest, built into the mountainside and looking out over the sea. It took no genius to understand why Stalin would choose to spend so much of his time here and why Khrushchev and Bulganin (the “two fat fools”) would vacation here too. Why not? It was lovely.
No Intourist guide was at the station to meet me, which I found refreshing. I took a cab to the Primorskaya Hotel, set on a high hill overlooking the crowded beach. It was the hotel for foreign diplomats. The ride there took thirty minutes. Sochi was small and charming. Semitropical trees grew everywhere. The stores were crowded, the restaurants were filled, the streets were clean. The women, in Soviet-style bikinis, were buxom and bronzed—all in all, quite a sight.
After checking in, I walked down to the beach to take a swim, and there stumbled upon my first disappointment. The beach, though breathtakingly beautiful, was covered with a rug of rocks and pebbles, and though Russians had no problem walking on the beach, I had a huge problem, which made it difficult for me to get to the water. But I did anyway and loved my first swim in the Black Sea.
At dinner, shared with a number of visiting Americans, I met two Soviet students, a lovely young woman from Kuibyshev and a young man from Rostov. Both were finishing a two-week vacation before returning to school. She was in engineering, he in economics. I asked her whether there were many women in the engineering field. Her friend jumped into the conversation. “Of course,” he said. “Women in this country do the same work as men, and get paid the same.”
At first, the woman nodded in agreement, but then after a moment of reflection, flatly contradicted her friend. “Actually,” she said, “only 15 percent of the students at my oil institute are women, and most of them, when they finish, get desk jobs and rarely go out into the field.” The economist decided there was no point in getting into an embarrassing argument with his friend—he knew she was right—so he raised a toast to “peace and friendship,” his way of changing the subject. I thought his suggestion was diplomatic, and his timing perfect, and we happily joined him.