On Your Back In The USSR

[LeoCasey at aol.com]

Now, I can't claim to actually having engaged in sexual relations in the 
USSR or Russia, but when from my visit to Moscow and the Black Sea last 
September, I can report that the demographically wide swath of Russian 
society I was interacting with [civics educators] were probably among the 
warmest and most flirtatious folks I have met in my 48 years on this earth. 
One of the higher points of our trip was a sauna experience, which involves 
not simply the sauna itself, but a social evening interspersed with a 
dinner of various pickled fish and vegetables, and massages. We happened to 
have rented the sauna in what was Stalin's summer dacha, leading me to the 
claim, that Stalin made me sweat, but I lived to tell about it.

I also find somewhat interesting this notion of 'having sex,' as if it were 
a meal someone sat down to, and not an activity requiring the mutual 
participation of two people. Certainly it is true that there is a great 
deal of commercial sex in present day Russia [the market uber alles], and 
that even the best of hotel lobbies are filled with sex workers advertising 
their services. But I don't think that the individual who spoke of the 
quality of sex in the USSR had that particular form of exchange in mind.

I can report that Russian food was quite good, and that one of the more 
humorous moments of my trip was when I opened the menu in what had to be 
one of Moscow's finest restaurants to which our hosts had taken us, a menu 
which had been translated first from Russian to French, and then from 
French to English. One of the items: a game type dish described in English 
as "with Maggots."

Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272
212-98-6869

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who 
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and 
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --

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