Ahead of Time by Ruth Gruber

Author:Ruth Gruber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

*Although Samoilovich was one of the Soviet Union’s most brilliant and honored Arctic explorers, he was murdered by Stalin’s secret police in 1939. His crime was that he was a Jew. I learned this in the 1990s, when the KGB files were opened.

26

At five in the morning seven Russian men and I climbed into a small twin-motored plane.

We studied each other surreptitiously, but none of us spoke. I held myself tight as the plane rolled down the tarmac, then rose smoothly, swiftly, easily, over Moscow.

Ralph Barnes had cabled the Herald Tribune: “Please telephone Ruth’s family telling them they may not hear from her for months. She is flying to Siberia, then north to the Soviet Arctic.”

I could see Papa’s face, tense with worry. I could see Mama at the dining-room table. “Dave, we should never have let her go.”

“And who could have stopped her?”

Below us, the Kremlin with its prisonlike red brick walls, the huge nothingness of the Red Square, even the multicolored onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral grew shapeless in the yellow of me rising sun.

With two maps on my lap, one in English and one in German, I followed our route over the Central Russian Plateau. We were cruising at just over a hundred miles an hour, skimming and bouncing over an uninterrupted expanse of earth and trees and waving wheat fields without fences.

We landed in towns with names like Arzamas, Kazan, and Yanaul, and each time we entered a new time zone I set my watch back. The USSR spanned eleven time zones, but the clocks in the airports were all on Moscow time. Thus, Muscovites were probably eating dinner, when, at midafternoon, our ANT-9 plane dropped its wheels and landed in Sverdlovsk, the new name for Ekaterinburg, where the last Czar and his family were murdered.

“In less than ten hours,” I jotted in my notebook, “we’ve reached the great Ural Mountains, nature’s wall between Europe and Asia.”

The airdrome had a small wooden hotel to which a porter carried my duffel bag and typewriter. I followed him down a hall of doorless bedrooms with men sprawling fully dressed on iron cots. I seemed to be the only woman.

“Vot.” The porter dropped my bag in a small room with a double bed that extended wall to wall. I felt a surge of relief. The bed was occupied not by a man but by a buxom young woman. Lying on her back in a long, old-fashioned serge skirt and jacket, she smiled warmly and moved to make room for me. I stretched out and for a few minutes felt the world turning dizzily.

“My name,” I heard her say in Russian, “is Olga Ivanovna, and I’m flying to Vladivostok. I’m going to live for a month with the Red Army in a camp in Okhotsk.”

I sat up in the bed. The dizziness had evaporated. I saw the beginnings of a story about a woman in Siberia. “Are you a soldier?” I asked.

“No. I’m an electrician. I won the trip as an award because I organized lectures, plays, music classes for my union.

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