Stockholm, yes. My mind, you can see, shows my sixty-seven years. . . .
And stayed there, and that was when Stockholm was getting much talked
about in this country because of its following what it called the
"middle way" of trying to be in between the capitalist and the socialist
economy. Again, Harold was informed about it and was a good person to
give information about that beautiful city and the country. So this was
a very stimulating experience for me. From Stockholm, we went to
Helsinki in Finland and stayed there a few days, which was mostly
memorable, as far as I was concerned, by the Finnish baths. Something entirely new experience. Then we went by train from
Helsinki to Leningrad and stayed in Leningrad for about a week.
Leningrad, as you know, is a beautiful city with a tremendous history.
Part of the tremendous history is the Russian revolution, the historic
sites there. The Hermitage museum was really the best museum I had ever,
ever been toan enormous collection of the French impressionists and of
the great artists of all around. There's no sense in my talking about
the history of the Hermitage. It's well known. But that was a very
stimulating and awarding trip there to Leningrad. Then we went on by
train to Moscow, and there again, there were all sorts of things. There
was a friend of Mildred's who had worked for the YWCA in Moscow. She had
left for reasons I don't quite recall. But anyhow, she left Mildred
introductions to some of the people that she had known in Moscow,
including a woman who had worked in the office or something or other and
had been connected with Lenin. We went to see her in her small apartment
where she lived. Remember, I was rather young., and I was uninformed.
This was a very stimulating system. Then the Pushkin museum, the modern
art museum in Moscow is wonderful. We lived across the Moscow River. We
could see the Kremlin across the river, but I never went in the Kremlin.
Whether it wasn't possible to get tours; it was not as open in the
Soviet Union as it is now. It was not as easy to go to these places. One
had to have an in-tourist guide who went with us all the time, someone
who could translate for us and arrange the trips that we wanted to make.
There was very little of my being able to go out alone, not because of
restrictions but because even though I tried hard
to learn some Russian before I went, I did not have really enough to
manage. I can remember, though, going somewhere or another and written
out the name of the place where I wanted to go, and how very kind the
people on the streetcar were about being helpful and showing me where to
get off, and exactly showing it. So I got a friendliness towards the
Russian people because of their friendliness to us. It developed further
in the course of that six-weeks tour that we had.
We went from Moscow over to the Volga, and there again, my memory falters
about the river port on the Volga where we got the steamer and went down
the Volga River for about four or five days, down to what was called
Stalingrad. I believe it had some other name at that time, but I can
assure you in the course of later years, I remembered very well that
stay in Stalingrad because it was a developing, industrial city there on
the Volga River. It was a most interesting experience to be there.