A Moscow Education

This chapter examines the author's arrival in Moscow and his meeting with his new United Press International colleague, Ted Shields, and the UPI photographer John Mantle. They explained that the militiamen, whom foreigners dubbed “mili men,” was to record their movements and keep most Russians out. They also warned that they should be careful about what they said indoors because the KGB tapped their phones and bugged their apartments. The author then compares the experience of entering the Soviet Union to his Communist Yugoslavia childhood. The big story that summer of 1968 was that the Soviet Union was making threatening noises against fraternal Communist Czechoslovakia. Its leader, Alexander Dubcek, was introducing liberalizing reforms. Would the Soviet Union invade or not was the question of July and August. On August 21, 1968, as predicted, the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact countries had invaded Czechoslovakia. The chapter also looks at the other important stories that the author covered while he was in Moscow.