Experimental Blog #109

Comments on "Moscow Stories" by Loren R. Graham

"A Boy from Indiana", whose grandparents had associations with both the Ku Klux Klan and the Wabash Valley Socialist Party{his grandmother said that they both had "wonderful" picnics} visits the Soviet Union, or Russia, perhaps 100 times or more, and they all add up to several years of time. His trips begin in 1960, when he is a 27 year old exchange student, and are still continuing in 2005, when this book was written.

Loren Graham was often accompanied by his wife Pat, who apparently also became fluent in Russian. On Graham's earlier visits he silently encountered the "Old Bolsheviks" Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich in the Lenin Library; where they all spent a lot of time. He also had short or long conversations with Iurii Gagarin, Trofim Lysenko, and Anna Mikhailovna, the wife of the old and executed Bolshevik, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin. In later years he meets, perhaps more that once, Andrei Sakharov and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Loren Graham, and sometimes his wife Pat, become well acquainted with quite a few other important Soviet scientists and government people, besides many other relatively unknown people in the Soviet Union and Russia.

Needless to say, Loren Graham has had many encounters, and sometimes conversations{usually not very pleasant} with both the FBI and the KGB.