Saturday April 18 - Departure from Washington

Saturday, April 18. Depart from Washington. I have prepared packets of information for each partner that I am to visit and consulted with appropriate LC recommending officers and staff, so I feel reasonably well prepared for my trip. On the other hand, many of the countries that I am to visit are undergoing some turmoil, which makes me slightly apprehensive.

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Looking back, I may have felt "reasonably well prepared for my trip" in sort of technical sense, but I am not so sure about otherwise. I had not been to Russia since the depths of the Soviet Brezhnev era in 1981, ten years before - quite literally, a different country. It is possible I felt well prepared in a combination of "how hard can it be?" and because of outright ignorance. Well, sometimes God protects fools, since things went overall very well.

At the time travel in the former Soviet Union (FSU,or NIS for "newly independent states" of the FSU) was remarkably easy to organize from Washington through specialized travel agencies that continued to offer services that had existed to support travel in the Soviet era to more obscure parts of the USSR. Looking back, it is hard to imagine, but I had a booklet of vouchers for the hotels and most of the air and other travel. I would appear in Tbilisi, say, with a blue bit of paper stating that I had prepaid for two hotel rooms (one for me, one for the Moscow Office director) for several nights and it worked. What I would have done if it had not worked, I have no idea.