I have no stories of personal heroism, just the observations I made on a ten-day tour of Moscow and Leningrad (as it was then called) in late December 1973 and early January 1974. The USSR was just beginning to open up to the West, and a thriving industry catering to tourists from capitalist countries was just getting going. For example, gift shops at the hotels that catered to tourists took only American dollars for their lovely fur hats, musical instruments, craft items, and other souvenirs.

We never went where Intourist, the Soviet tourist bureau, didn't want us to go, but we *were* able to observe the Russian people themselves standing in long long lines to buy ugly, poorly made appliances such as stoves and refrigerators. There was a general air of dreariness, depression, and--particularly among older folks, who had probably lived through Stalin's massacres, a sense of constant dread and fear.

The tour guides themselves spoke good English and better propaganda. Despite the sense you got that they were sneering at us Yanks, though, I could tell that the entire thing was built on toothpicks and that, later or sooner, it was going to fall into a million splinters. People appeared unhappy, their daliy affairs plagued by joyless inefficiency, their quality of life poor; also, it was becoming harder and harder for TPTB to keep the rest of the world from encroaching.

As it turned out, it took another fifteen years, until 1989, for the collapse.

Leave poor Jar Jar alone! ;-p

LOL -- I always did wonder what the Easter Bunny was up to the other 364 days of the year!