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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was scheduled to go on a trip to the Soviet Union two weeks after the Chernobyl accident.  We were supposed to go to Kiev for a few days but that got rescheduled and we spent those days in Vladimir and Suzdal.  I remember our American guides talking about how they figured that most produce in the USSR came from nearby farms so that it was probably okay to eat it in Moscow and Leningrad (later St. Petersburg) but I noticed that our guide wasn't eating butter on her bread or ice cream. I figured I shouldn't eat it either but it's hard to be in the Soviet Union and not eat ice cream!

Also there was a famous picture of the destroyed reactor vessel in Pravda, the official newspaper - which was shocking at the time because the Soviet government was basically admitting that there was a problem.  I think it was also considered a sign of the coming of glasnoct (but I may be remembering that wrong - 86 seems too early for that).

Anyway, I'll never forget our Soviet guide standing in the front of the bus and showing us that picture in Pravda. I think she was trying to show that maybe the government wasn't as closed off as it seemed (and as it was in reality).  [/quote]

I am the PP from Minsk. I don't know if this is true, but the prevailing opinion at the time was that the radiation went west, was detected outside the country, and the news were announced over Voice of America, and the USSR couldn't keep it silent. But certainly, there was no stomach at the time for the kind of scary government actions that took place in the 1930s or even 1950s. But until then, they didn't bother telling anyone and the news didn't travel that quickly. These days, with cell phones and social media, things would be completely different, though the rumors would still be a huge problem, I'm sure there'd be a lot of conflicting information going around.[/quote]Yes, and as an American tourist, we were pretty isolated from the rest of the country.  I remember sitting in the hotel bar with people on my trip and we were all talking about what Soviet people were really like based on books we had read.  Because locals weren't allowed to hang out in tourist hotels so we were all talking to ourselves!  I did run into a woman in a local park and talked to her in my pathetic Russian.  She was very interested in whether I had my own apartment all to myself in the United States but she told me how great things were there.  Vsevo svobodna!  (I think i remember that right) Everything was free!  I don't know if she meant "free" in the monetary sense or "free" in the civil liberties sense.  It was a beautiful but mystifying country and I realized that I didn't really have a clue what was going on around me.[/quote]

Svobodni would mean free like freedom. There's a different word for free meaning without cost.  For a really easy read but infomative book about living in the USSR, read Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (it's a memoir, not a cookbook, and it's great).

After studying the Soviet Union for many years, I am very disinclined to purchase any products from, or travel in, countries that don't have freedom of the press. You just never really know what you're getting, safety wise.  it astounds me that Americans are willing to gobble up all these Chinese goods without much concern about the safety rules there, or whether some of it is coming from North Korea, which is even worse.  And because people don''t care, it's impossible to avoid it.  [/quote]

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