The Hindu : Front Page : Once upon a time behind the Iron Curtain

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Thursday, Nov 29, 2007
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Once upon a time behind the Iron Curtain

Kunal Diwan

– PHOTO: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR

FROM RUSSIA AND BEYOND: French Ambassador in New Delhi, Jerome Bonnafont (left) launching the English edition of "Once upon a time in the Soviet Union" by Dominique Lapierre (right) on Wednesday.

NEW DELHI: “I am a reincarnated rickshaw puller,” said the celebrated French author and Indophile Dominique Lapierre on Wednesday at the worldwide launch of the English edition of his book, “Once upon a time in the Soviet Union”, at the French Embassy here.

Describing his book as a “travelogue with open eyes”, the bestseller writer with a penchant for the cause of the oppressed enthralled a wide-eyed gathering with his booming insights into his travels as a journalist across the Soviet Union way back in 1956. Lapierre’s monumental book is an inside view of life across the Iron Curtain.

“It was the first time that anyone was travelling in his own automobile across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. Since we were travelling with our wives, the Russian authorities warned us of them filing for divorce. When we asked them why, they replied, ‘Because the roads in Russia are so bad!’,” said Lapierre.

“Along the journey, a Russian peasant woman asked us if we would be kind enough to deflate one of our car tyres. When we asked her why, she said, ‘So I can breathe the air of Paris for once’,” recalled Lapierre.

Speaking with a resonant voice that cut through the winter air like a heated knife through butter, Lapierre said his journalistic foray into the world of communism 50 long years ago was an “unbelievable adventure”: “When we went to the Russian beaches with our wives, all the local women wanted to know where the ladies had acquired their trendy swimwear from.”

It is these minute and personalised trivialities that convey to the reader the turmoil that lay masked behind all the propaganda about “the happiest people on earth”.

Another repeated travail that the journeyman author encountered was acquiring clean fuel for his car. “There were hardly any gas stations selling high-octane fuel. As an alternative, a Russian official offered us aviation fuel instead,” he said.

“If there are any journalists around here,” he added with a chuckle, “I urge them to convince the Tatas to give them an Indica car so they can do what I did over 50 years ago -- travel across an alien land in an indigenous vehicle.”

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