I met John Murphy in Helsinki, Finland, in 1986. He was on the same tour group as Mark and I were on. That night, 20 or so of us had gathered in a restaurant to get to know one another. The next day we would be leaving for Leningrad.
I remember walking back to the hotel with John, Mark and Susan Tennison, and how John's deep laugh echoed against the surrounding buildings as we talked about the experience we were about to undertake, a first-time visit for all of us, except Susan, to the Soviet Union.What would it be like, we wondered.
As director of the Center for US/USSR Initiatives, Susan had taken several groups before us. She recalled how leery everyone had been on the first visit. They had taken a whole supply of magic slates to write messages to each other in hotel rooms so they wouldn't be heard by hidden KGB microphones. In fact, they would challenge each other to find hidden mikes, which always seemed to elude discovery.
On one occasion, though, someone announced to the others that he had found a bug in his room.
Cautiously, everyone gathered to see. As they all jammed in, he pulled back one side of a large carpet in the center of the room, where a small bolt with wires going into one end was countersunk into the hardwood floor.
Being in a daring mood, they decided to disassemble it. Carefully, one of them unscrewed the bolt to reveal the microphone. Suddenly, it disappeared and they heard a tremendous crash. They had just unscrewed the chandelier in the room below.
Whether the story is apocryphal or not, it does point out the kind of paranoia that affected our attitudes toward the Soviet Union for many years.
A week after we left Helsinki, I remember walking with John and Mark down the long central avenue in Kiev and sitting on a park bench under a cluster of black trees that in March still gave no hint of spring. We watched the faces of the passing crowd, absorbing their reality. I remember John saying he felt Mikhail Gorbachev had maybe six to eight years to pull off his reforms, which at the time were embryonic, or he would be removed in a bloody coup. He was almost right.
I remember an evening in the coastal city of Sochi on the Black Sea where the air was warmer than Kiev and where we visited Gena and Luda and their two little boys. They didn't have an apartment of their own and lived with Luda's parents, who were skeptical about our visit at first, afraid to be seen with Americans.
By the end of the evening, though, I remember standing with them at the end of a lane under the blossoms of a cherry tree in the moonlight, and Luda's father talking on and on, not wanting us to go.
I remember Georgi, the ham operator, who took us to his radio shack in the hills high above Sochi, where we listened through the static until suddenly we were speaking to a ham in New Jersey. After talking to America for a few minutes, Georgi signed off by saying, "I wish you all the flowers you can handle."
I remember Max in Leningrad, the wheeler-dealer who helped us get good deals on our fur hats and spent all day at the art academy arranging a meeting with the rector because he had a connection and then hailing down a bus that took us careening from one end of the city to his apartment on the other end, where his wife was cooking dinner for us. I remember looking out the back window of the trolley as we left Max and his daughter Sasha, and waving constantly to each other until they were lost from view.
This past week, as the people of "Russia" have found a sense of self, the faces keep coming back. When they do, a feeling of indescribable emotion wells up, and I know that whether I ever see any of those people again, something has happened for them that is new and wonderful, wonderful beyond anything we here can understand.
I called John recently in Sacramento. I don't know why. I hadn't talked to him for a long time.
It was good to hear his blustery voice. I just sat and listened to him talk for a good half-hour . . . and savored every moment. It was a celebration of sorts, a way of privately marveling over what has happened for our friends in Russia beyond the wildest possible notions we could have imagined at the time we were there.