ABSTRACT
I was the sole passenger in the Aeroflot plane flying from London to Moscow. Three Soviet officials occupied a forward compartment. One of them asked me, in article-less English (there are no articles, definite or indefinite, in the Russian language), whether I needed anything. I replied in my native and still instinctively fluent Russian that I had no particular wishes except to borrow the latest issue of Pravda invitingly spread on his chair. He handed the paper to me. There were no screaming headlines: Pravda never screams at readers, but rather declares and expounds, in restrained 24-point type. The typographical sobriety of its communiqués dealing with threats to the “Island of Liberty” by “imperialist pirates” made the substance all the more ominous. For I was winging my way to Russia at the height of the Cuban crisis. Understandably, no other tourists boarded the Soviet plane.
