Moscow farewell

Author's Hon

Largely to protect Muscovites I lived with sporadically from 1959 to 1971—including a year as a graduate student—I have altered names, concealed identities and rearranged time sequences in this account. Without these changes, I would have had to depart much further from the literal truth by eliminating politically sensitive material. But in the sense that almost nothing has been invented, what follows is reportage of my Russian friends' lives and of my observations. To modify Christopher Isherwood on his rendering of Berlin forty years ago, it is a record more of what happened than of what might have happened to me abroad.

At the same time, my reminiscences make no attempt to describe "typical" Moscow life—the burden of many easily available books—but only what I saw, heard and felt.

Behind the Byzantine apparatus of state, life went on.

— Vassily 0. Klyuchevsky, nineteenth-century Russian historian

He lies like an eyewitness.

— old Russian proverb