WE COME SPINNING OUT OF NOTHINGNESS, SCATTERING STARS LIKE DUST.
—RUMI SPIN DOCTOR
In 1985, I visited what was then known as Soviet Estonia with my family. My paternal grandparents, Mimi and Pop, had emigrated to the US from this small Baltic country in 1929. Fifty-six years later, after more than a decade of rejection, the family was granted permission by the Soviet authorities to visit our ancestral homeland, and the whole family, including Mimi, made the trek. (Pop died in 1962.)
Once we were there, we were more or less free to move around in the capital city Tallinn, but leaving the city was strictly forbidden, except as part of a planned group excursion with our KGB minders—er, “Intourist guides.”
Mimi was originally from an island off the west coast of Estonia called Saaremaa. In 1985, it was home to several military facilities, so a visit there was off the table. To get around this, Mimi set up camp inside her room at the Viru Hotel in Tallinn while dozens of long, lost Estonian relatives made the journey to visit her (and the rest of the family) there.
In her room, she doled out the blue jeans, Western music, and other American desirables we had managed to sneak across the border. Each of us had been tasked with bringing two big suitcases filled with all sorts of American goodies. After all, every American tourist needs five pairs of new Levis in various sizes and a pile of candy for a two-week trip, right? When we arrived on the ferry from Finland, the only thing the humorless Soviet border guards confiscated was a vinyl copy of Jesus Christ Superstar.
As Mimi held court at a few hard (ie, Western) currency stores where you could find some Western mainstream electronics—more what you might find at Crazy Eddie than at a high-end store like Lyric HiFi—selling for about 10 times the New York City street price. A lot of it, I’d heard, was purchased overseas by Soviet Navy sailors to make some extra cash when they returned home. Few Estonians had access to foreign currency, so this gear was out of their reach.
