The airport was illuminated as if by those dim bedside lamps hotels give you, not to read by. One of the young soldiers was pawing through a well-worn Playboy some blushing fur-trader ahead of me had tried to smuggle in, and my first impression of how life worked under Communism was the glare of that poor centerfold’s sweet bare skin under those brownish airport lights. The magazine was confiscated, but I just don’t want to believe the travelling salesman was sent to the gulag. He had a touch of Asia in his cheekbones—it wasn’t like we had corrupted a pure-blooded Russian. The State Department boys swooped me out the customs door into a chauffeured limo that smelled not of boiled potatoes exactly but very deeply of tobacco, another natural product. My granddaddy’s barn used to smell like that, even after the cured leaf had been baled and sold. I—Eddie Chester, internationally admired banjo-picker—knew I was going to like it here.

On the airport road into Moscow in those days there was this humongous billboard of Lenin, leaning forward with a wicked goateed grin and pointing to something up above with a single finger, like John the Baptist pointing to a Jesus we couldn’t see yet. “I love that,” my chief State Department escort said from the jump seat. “To three hundred million people—‘up yours.’ ” His name was Bud Nevins, cultural attaché. I saw a lot of Bud, Bud and his lovely wife, Libby, in the weeks to come.

Already, Washington had been an adventure. I had been briefed, a couple of afternoons, by a mix of our experts and refugees from the Soviet Union. One portly old charmer, who had been upper-middle management in the KGB, filled a whole afternoon around a long leather table telling me what restaurants to go to and what food to order. Smoked sturgeon, pirozhki, mushroom pie. His mouth was watering, though from the look of him he hadn’t been exactly starved under capitalism. Still, no food like home cooking; I could sympathize with that. Those Washington people, they did love to party. After each briefing there would be a reception, and at one of the receptions a little black-haired coffee-fetcher from that afternoon’s briefing came up to me as if her breasts were being offered on a tray. They were sizable pert breasts, in a peach-colored chemise that had just outgrown being a T-shirt.