Fellow Travelers by James Cook Page A

Soviet embassy and picked up our Soviet visas.
    To Manny’s delight, the visas were waiting for us, just as they were supposed to be, and this proved, Manny said, that the Russians had finally accepted his status as a friend of the Soviet Union. The year before, they had kept him waiting nearly a month. He’d had a letter of introduction from the Soviet trade mission in New York and a letter from Pop to Lenin himself, but nobody had paid any attention, so in the end he was forced to give up on Berlin, take a boat for Riga, and make his way to Moscow through the back door.
    This time they knew who he was, who we were, and what we were prepared to do for the socialist cause. Within hours we had boarded the long blue-and-yellow train that would carry us across Poland, through Byelorussia, and on into the ancient city of the Mocovites itself. What we were doing was completely against the law. U.S. citizens were prohibited from going to Russia, but nobody seemed to care.
    It took us three days to get to Moscow. At Scolpce on the Polish border you had to change trains. All the other railroads in Europe were four-feet, eight-inches wide, but the Russians wanted greater stability and carrying capacity and so built their railroads to a six-foot gauge. You achieved a lot more efficiency apparently, but you lost what you’d gained because you had to change equipment and transfer traffic to get from one system to another, and that cost time and money. Even worse, you added one more protective barrier between Russia and the rest of the world, shutting out influences that might otherwise contaminate the inward, self-absorbed purity of the Russian soul.
    The train was crowded and ill-equipped, there were no dining cars, and you brought you own food and drink or scrounged it from fellow passengers. At night there were not even any lights to guide you to the primitive toilet facilities. The railroads had been taken over by the government after the revolution, and anybody who wanted to could travel free of charge anywhere in the country, and everyone did. All Russia seemed to be on the move. Half the country was still engaged in a civil war and another quarter was starving to death. Everybody seemed to have decided that things had to be better somewhere else and determined to go there.
    With its narrow streets, towering walls, and low-slung ramshackle buildings, Moscow was a strange and hectic place. But I never had time to orient myself to it, to figure out where the river was in relation to Red Square, and where the Square was in relation to the seedy, unbelievably squalid hotel Manny and I had settled in. We spent only two days there, long enough for Manny to check in at the Ministry of Natural Resources, and then we were gone again, heading for the Faust platinum mine at Platinumgrad on the far side of the Urals.
    This time we traveled by private railroad car; that was part of the deal Manny made when he agreed to take the platinum mining operation off the government’s hands. We didn’t ask for a mining concession, you understand, we weren’t exploiting the people’s natural wealth. We were taking it off their hands for a time and developing it, enabling them to do what they would not otherwise have been able to do for themselves.
    On the fourth day we arrived in Ekaterinenberg, or Sverdlovsk as they later renamed it in honor of the Soviet Union’s first president. This was the place where the tsar and his family had been executed, and the guides the government sent along with us insisted we go see the House of Special Purpose, as they called it, the house where the shooting had taken place. So why not? They held the train for us a few hours, and we traveled across town to a handsome if fairly modest two-story villa built in the side of a hill. There was a tall fence separating it from the street and behind it a carefully tended garden. An ancient white-haired caretaker escorted us through the rooms, a