On the Road
Under Stalin, travel for foreigners in the Soviet Union was difficult. Increased restrictions on U.S. officials in September 1948 and then in January 1952 limited the open cities to Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, Tbilisi, and Stalingrad. Most of the territory of the U.S.S.R. was closed.
Exceptions, however, were made in a few instances. In the early years after the war, the U.S. service attaché Colonel John H. McMillan was permitted to visit Ufa, and Ambassador Alan Kirk traveled to Lake Baikal on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Naval attaché Leslie C. Stevens managed to visit Novosibirsk, whose inhabitants, he remarked later, were extremely friendly. Every time he found himself lost, someone appeared in an instant to offer assistance.
All travel requests had to be cleared days in advance by the Soviet Ministry of the Armed Forces, and most requests, except for those to open cities, were denied.
The authorities were particularly anxious about train travel, since this gave foreigners the best opportunity to observe life outside the major cities, something that was, of course, to be discouraged. Whenever possible, the Soviet government preferred that foreigners fly.
Despite the restrictions and hassles, the U.S. government kept pushing its diplomats and service attachés to travel. On 9 January 1953, Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote to CIA Director, and former U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Walter Bedell Smith: “Even though the freedom of movement of our representatives in the Soviet Union is limited, such travel as they are allowed to undertake is extremely valuable, both for intelligence purposes and for a general appraisal of the situation in that country.”
Getting out of Moscow and into the vast unknown territory of the Soviet Union was considered vital to furthering America’s knowledge of its Cold War adversary.
Martin had been in the Soviet Union only a month when he and a colleague were sent to Odessa in March 1952. They traveled by train via Kiev but weren’t allowed to stop and see the city since it was closed. He wrote Jan from Odessa on the 18th. His letter was dripping with frustration and anger.
Nothing was proving to be as he had expected. He recounted the story of how a man, “slightly drunk,” tried to join them at their table in the hotel restaurant. A scandal ensued, as he was dragged away by the waiters, and the man’s friend. Martin and his colleague couldn’t understand why. They informed the headwaiter that they were happy to have the man join them but were told that the man was “bothering them” and that, besides, it was “forbidden” for the man to talk to them. Martin tried to meet the man later, in another location, but he told Martin that feared he’d be arrested.
Martin wrote that this incident sickened him and showed the ugly reality of “this whole god damned, rotten, lying slave system.” They had seen only one person with a happy face, and he had turned out to be a Pole. Their every move was followed, and no attempt was even made to keep the surveillance a secret. If Martin took any photographs on this trip, none remained in his archive.
In early May, Martin and Jan were reunited in Leningrad. They checked into the Hotel Astoria and spent a few days sightseeing. In those days Americans always stayed at the Astoria. The bathrooms may have had what one attaché called “Ivan the Terrible plumbing”—the taps emitted brown water—and rather ridiculous furnishings, but the food was excellent and the young women at the front desk were always polite and patient and spoke some English.
They flew back to Moscow instead of taking the train. The plane’s seatbelts, they were surprised to find, were tucked in underneath the seats. Since Soviet air travelers never used them, the belts had been gotten out of everyone’s way. Jan and Martin were charmed by Leningrad and returned for a second visit the following summer. They also took a trip to Stalingrad around the same time, although no photographs of this journey have survived.
After Stalin’s death, there was a relaxation in travel policies. Starting in June 1953 and continuing on over the next few months, more cities and regions were opened to foreigners, including Kiev, Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Baku, the Crimea, most of Central Asia, and the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok.
The Manhoffs were among the first to take advantage of the new regulations. In early May, they applied for, and were shocked to receive, permission to travel by the Trans-Siberian Railway to Abakan in the Republic of Khakasia. No Americans had ever traveled to such a remote area, and the story was big news, even making The New York Times and other newspapers across America. Traveling with Martin and Jan were Assistant Military Attaché Lieutenant Colonel Fred Yaeger and Assistant Naval Attaché Lieutenant John Dugger.
They left Moscow on the evening of 13 May and were away for two weeks. The train consisted of ten cars plus a diner; they were in the last car, an old pre-revolutionary wagon-lit, its wood interior polished, Jan wrote in a letter to her parents, to a glossy sheen.
There were two persons to a cabin, with a washroom in between, and a WC at both ends of the car, which were kept spotlessly clean and stocked with “slippery toilet tissue, soap, and a long linen towel.” Radio Moscow played loudly throughout the car the entire trip. When no one was looking, they would turn off the volume, but then the two conductors would come by and turn it back on.
To the Americans’ surprise, the train moved along at a slow leisurely shuffle; top speed about thirty miles an hour. At some of the stops they were permitted to exit the train but had to remain on the platform; most of the time, however, they were required to stay in their car.
“One very seldom hears in this country what you can do. It is always what you are not allowed to do. […] It is ‘neelsya’ to almost everything,” a frustrated Jan wrote in a letter home.
Several Russians shared the car with them. The smell of their popirosy cigarettes made Jan nauseous, and she found their habit of starting each morning with a glass of vodka rather peculiar.
But they all got along, and Martin and his two colleagues enjoyed drinking cognac with the Russians, one a high-ranking military officer, in the evenings. They took all their meals in the dining car and found the food to be delicious.
On the afternoon of the 17th they arrived in Achinsk. Here they got off, stored their luggage, and went to explore the town until the next train departed for Abakan, eleven hours later.
Every head in Achinsk turned to stare at the four Americans as they walked. They found a restaurant and sat down to a decent meal of borshch, cold hamburger, potatoes with sour cream and onions, and tea.
A tall young man in a military uniform and black boots entertained the diners on the accordion. He played so well, several of the guests, including the Americans, bought him some beer. When the restaurant manager noticed this, he sprang into action to put a stop to the fraternization: he informed everyone the restaurant was closed and shooed them all out into the street. The musician struck up a march as the diners filed out.
The next leg took them through the so-called Valley of the Kings with its ancient Bronze Age burial mounds. The landscape reminded Martin and Jan of the eastern half of Washington State.
An enterprising elderly couple, “looking for business,” in Jan’s words, helped them transfer their luggage from the Abakan station to their hotel. Here they were politely received and shown to their rooms, which were neat and clean. The one drawback was the WC: a filthy hole in the ground located in a shack out back. Jan was appalled at the stench of the outhouse. The Americans were also shocked at the look of the people out here far from Moscow. The poverty was glaring. Jan wrote:
The mass of humanity which we saw at each stopping on the trip, and in Achinsk where we actually got off the train, and here in Abakan again, is staggering. People are bundled in rags, carrying bundles wrapped in rags, carrying bundles their own size wrapped in rags, it is difficult telling where bundle and human meet. They present a picture of the difficulty of existing, meeting everyday problems of acquiring food, clothing, and other immediate necessities. There is no extra of anything. Living for the majority of the people we saw on this whole trip is their greatest problem.
The Americans stayed in Abakan for four days. There is not a single photograph in Martin’s archive of Abakan. Either he didn’t feel it was safe to take pictures, or whatever he did photograph, these images ended up back in the Pentagon.
In July, Martin and Jan traveled to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. In Murmansk, they stayed at the Hotel Artika, and Martin took a panoramic series of photographs along Leningrad Street outside their lodgings. They had not been back a week in August and Martin was eager to get leave Moscow again. “Marty has been pretty busy with all this travel,” Jan wrote to her parents on 10 August, “and no sooner gets one jaunt taken care of, starts reaching for the map. We are most anxious to go South. All the folks who have seen Tbilisi feel they’ve really been on a holiday. They say it’s very different than any part of the Soviet Union we’ve seen. Maybe we too will get to have a look.”
Instead of the Caucasus, Martin and three of his colleagues rode the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way to Khabarovsk later that month. It was this trip that was described a year later in Trud as an outrageous example of American espionage. Martin took a fair number of photographs from the train as they traveled east, mostly rather forgettable images of the landscape. The four men chose to fly back to Moscow instead of repeating the long journey in the opposite direction.
American reporter Harrison Salisbury visited Khabarovsk a year later, in June 1954. He found the experience unnerving.
He was constantly followed by two plain-clothes police who made certain he noticed them. Another two always stood watch in front of his hotel entrance.
On his own and acutely aware of just how far he was from Moscow, and the American embassy, he feared getting arrested and having no one to help. To avoid provoking the police, he never once brought out his camera in public and left without taking a single photograph. On his return to Moscow, he first flew to Yakutsk.
He arrived there to find someone had broken into his suitcase and gone through all his things. Even the lining of the suitcase had been cut open and the underside searched. He met with the chief editor of the local newspaper and told him he would like to take some pictures of the Lena River.
The man told Salisbury to keep his camera in his bag, put the American reporter in his car, and then drove ten miles out of town before letting him get out and photograph the river. Salisbury was amazed by the level of fear.
By early autumn 1953, Martin and Jan were itching to hit the road again. Jan wrote her parents on 1 October to say the weather had been beautiful of late “and it kills us not to be off on a good trip.”
Late that month the couple, joined by Lieutenant Colonel Howard Felchlin, who had traveled with Martin to Khabarovsk, boarded a plane for Zaporozhe, by way of Kharkov, where they spent four days. The main draws in Zaporozhe were the steel mills and enormous Dnepr hydroelectric station constructed in the early 1930s with the help of several American engineers, most notably Hugh Cooper. In Zaporozhe they were surprised to encounter another American.
Mrs. Perle Mesta was the widow of George Mesta, an American industrialist and manufacturer of heavy machinery. In 1953, only eleven private U.S. citizens visited the Soviet Union, and Mrs. Mesta was one of them, invited by Ambassador Bohlen. She had come to Zaporozhe to take a look at the Mesta Machines that had been running the city’s steel mill since the 1930s and was given a royal reception by the local authorities.
When the Manhoffs and Felchlin showed up to tour the factory, however, they were turned away. An angry Jan remarked, “I guess we weren’t VIP enough to make the grade.” Still, they enjoyed driving around and taking in the beautiful autumn colors and the neat little houses.
They flew to Simferopol on a “hard” plane with no seats, just collapsible wooden benches running along both sides of the fuselage. The landscape on the ride from the airport to their hotel reminded Jan of Italy. The band in the local restaurant that night did its best to make the Americans feel at home, playing old time standards like the “Beer Barrel Polka” and “Indian Love Call.”
The next day they drove to Yalta, stopping to see the palace at Bakhchisirai, which they were not permitted to photograph, although they did get to see the famous fountain. Before arriving in Yalta, they visited the sanatorium in the former Livadia palace and were shown in to President Roosevelt’s rooms by some of the guests. They noted how everyone they met there had been exceedingly friendly, welcoming, and kind.
The three travelers checked in to the Hotel Iuzhnaia at 10 Bulvarnaia Street, the former Hotel Bristol, the town’s oldest hotel. They fell in love with Yalta. In Jan’s words, “we felt like we were in another world.” Again, there was the impression they had left Russia for Italy. They gorged on fresh fruit and vegetables from the local market and were stunned to find there were no restrictions on photography. They couldn’t get enough of the charming city and its scenic beauty.
After a few days they drove back to Simferopol and flew out in a light snowfall on another “hard” plane for Kherson. They stayed at the Hotel 1 May, formerly the Hotel Evropeiskaya, the finest establishment before the revolution.
The Manhoffs’ enormous corner room, with a view on to Svayto-Uspensky Cathedral, came with a massive old German grand piano. Jan felt there was still enough space left over for dance party of at least fifteen people. Jan was convinced they were the first Western tourists in ages.
Children followed them through the streets and every time they went in to take a look at one of the stores a large crowd formed around them. Before they left Jan made a pen and ink sketch of their view from the hotel.
Back in Moscow in early November, Jan wrote to her parents of their trip: “Everywhere, as always, everyone was nice to us, treated us like guests to their own house, and I think they might have done that if their government would allow it. They were very curious about us in the Ukraine, and always came up to us in the markets and asked where we were from.” She enclosed a hand-drawn map of their trip.
Martin and Jan made two more trips the following May. One, to Baku and Tbilisi, of which there are no photographs, and then a quick getaway to Kiev at the very end of the month. By then, they had already packed up all their belongings.
A day after returning to Moscow from the Ukrainian capital, they left for the station and boarded the train that would take them to Helsinki. Their Soviet adventure had ended.
