Police Run-Ins, Bad Roads, Few Services : Hitting the Road in the Soviet Union--It’s No Sunday Drive

Soviet friends stared at us in amazement when we told them we planned to drive 2,000 miles round trip from Moscow to Yalta. “Why?” one of them asked. “Can’t you get plane tickets?”

Wet blankets, we thought. No sense of adventure. Out there along Highway M2 was the chance to relax behind the wheel and see what life is like in the Soviet Union’s farming heartland.

My companion, Celestine Bohlen of the Washington Post, and I attributed our friends’ astonishment to their own lack of experience in driving around their country. The vast majority of Soviet citizens do not own cars.

But we were wrong in that assumption.

Not Like America

That was proved to us by five encounters with highway police patrols, being hauled off to a Crimean police station, a collision with a black lamb and our constant, unsuccessful searches for food and lodging.

Motoring in the Soviet Union bears little resemblance to a favorite American vacation pastime.

We set out on a rainy Saturday in a powder-blue, Soviet-made Lada compact, with all we thought necessary: a Soviet road atlas, the Moscow-produced Motorist’s Guide to the Soviet Union, camping equipment and an emergency supply of cheese and crackers.

Four hours south of Moscow, where birch groves give way to rolling green fields on soil as dark as chocolate, we realized that we were not making good time toward our midpoint objective of a campground near Kharkov, an industrial city in the northeast Ukraine about 400 miles south of Moscow.

Trucks, Combines and Smoke

Trucks hauling everything from cattle to farm combines lumber along this winding, potholed two-lane highway, churning out clouds of oily black smoke, blocking the rare car driver’s vision and opportunities to pass.

As darkness approached and there was no sign yet of our campground, we stopped to ask villagers trundling along the gravel shoulder about overnight spots. We got only blank stares and a wave of the hand, indicating that the only place was the side of the road.

After noticing that truck drivers pulled up there for the night, we did too. We set up our nylon dome tent obscurely behind the trees bordering a state farm north of Kursk.

There were no restaurants or cafes around for many miles, and those we passed hours earlier had been closed. We settled for cheese and crackers for dinner and watched farmhands lumber by on horseback after their Saturday night vodka outings.

Awakened by Party

We turned in early, only to be rousted at 1 a.m. by blaring American rock music and bright lights. We feared the police, the farm management or the drunken motorcyclist that we had asked for directions earlier but discovered it was an impromptu party of truckers who hadn’t noticed our tent behind the trees.

We slipped out early Sunday, under the watchful gaze of half a dozen peasants waiting at a nearby bus stop, and embarked on what we knew would be a long day of driving.

The few cafes along the highway sell no coffee, and most were closed because it was a Sunday. We munched cheese and crackers for breakfast and drove into central Kharkov for an early lunch of vareniki , Ukrainian dumplings filled with vegetables, meats and cheeses.

“Good day, comrade-driver,” our first highway patrolman greeted Celestine, just south of Kharkov. We had failed to slow down in a “populated area,” the uninhabited distance between signs announcing the limits of a nearby village.

Citation and Fine

“I will give you a citation and a fine. Next time . . . “ the young officer warned with a tolerant smile as he went off.

“Why were you being hooligans?” asked the patrolman 100 miles later at the next speed zone. He stared uncertainly at our car’s registration license plate, which is yellow instead of white like those issued for Soviet-owned cars. The code K 004 further announced that we were American correspondents. Unsure what to do with us, he let us off with a warning, as did patrolman No. 3, south of Zaporozhye farther along the highway.

Now cautious when we entered populated areas, we had an uneventful drive through the southern Ukraine until rain began to fall and the windshield wipers that had served us well in Moscow refused to budge. We groped our way through the Crimean Mountains in the steady rain, arriving at our one booked hotel in Yalta at midnight.

“How did you get from the airport at this hour?” asked the clerk. Told we had driven from Moscow, she shook her head and said, “You are powerful women.”

Search for Car Repairs

The day we had planned for rest and sightseeing was taken up with a search for car repairs, including the windshield wipers. The repairs finally were arranged by a man slightly reeling from drink who mistook our car for a taxi. In return for our driving him home, he introduced us to his neighbor, Oleg the mechanic.

“In this country you can’t get a driver’s license unless you know how to repair the car,” Oleg reprimanded us as he went to work fixing the windshield wipers, changing a spark plug, repairing a punctured hose and replacing a burned-out gasket. But he would accept only 10 rubles--$15--for the parts.

Off again for our trip back to Moscow with what we believed was an early start, we opted for an alternate drive through the mountains to take in the castle at the town of Bakhchiserai.

After a treacherous drive over the fog-enshrouded Chatyr-Dag cliffs and a cautious descent into rain forest, we were stopped by a police roadblock.

Off-Limits Road

The police were looking for us!

We had been driving for two hours on a road that is off-limits to foreigners, we were told. We had seen no signs nor were there warnings in our guidebooks. And the Yalta residents we had asked for directions had pointed us toward the road; one was a uniformed army officer.

“You should make it your business to know such things,” snapped one of the 20 policemen and internal security officers who questioned us at the station to which we had been escorted.

We were shuttled between dirty concrete-walled hallways and similarly decorated waiting rooms for more than two hours before we had signed enough copies of a statement acknowledging our misdeed.

Missed the Castle

We were set free at 4 p.m. with a police escort to the city limits. The castle that had attracted us had closed an hour earlier.

It was dusk when we came across the only official campsite we’d seen on the trip--a flat, dusty compound of concrete huts in the Ukrainian village of Mikhailovka.

“There’s no place for tents here,” shouted the administrator, angered because we interrupted her knitting. She explained that the huts, called domiki , are reserved for Soviet workers well in advance as vacation spots and that overnight stays are not permitted.

We set up camp for the night with truckers and fishermen on the bank of a nearby tributary of the Dnieper River. Cheese and crackers for dinner.

Beef Patty or Beet Soup

Wednesday morning’s breakfast at the Kurin Cafe in Novomoskovsk offered a change from the routine--a choice between a gray beef patty or beet soup.

Our final day rolled by uneventfully, with stops at village stores for bread (we were out of crackers).

It was about 9 p.m. and daylight was fading as we moved closer to Moscow. Suddenly a flock of about a dozen black sheep surged from a bushy ravine onto the narrow road, fewer than 100 feet from our car traveling at the speed limit of 45 m.p.h.

Our screeching car tires hastened all but the last sheep across the road. An elderly shepherd had jumped up onto the one spot where I could have pulled away from the flock, and the thump of the car striking the last one, a lamb, echoed in my stomach.

50 Rubles or Police

“Fifty rubles. Fifty rubles, now, or I’ll take you to the police,” the shepherd shouted at us.

“I’m a veteran of the Great Patriotic War,” he told us, invoking as testimony to his character the nation’s reverence for those who fought in World War II. It was then that we noticed he was blind, perhaps from a war injury.

We were distraught over the injured lamb, which was removed by two kerchiefed women who seemed to appear from nowhere. We feared another lengthy encounter with the police.

We paid him our last 40 rubles--$63--and climbed back into the mud-encrusted car for the final 100 miles to Moscow, beaten and bedraggled.

Our welcome home came at the police checkpoint at the Moscow city limits--a speeding ticket, in the form of a hole punched on my driving card, for failing to maintain the 18 m.p.h. limit throughout the mile-long checkpoint.