Ukraine-Russia 1961

Ukraine-Russia 1961 reveals the unseen Russia and Ukraine behind the impenetrable Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War, when no foreigners could gain access to Russia or its southern territory, Ukraine.John Loring and Jean-Louis Karcher, both twenty-one-year-old first year students at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, were going to see Russia, however difficult that was and were told by older Russians in Paris who had escaped the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 that the only, but maybe impossible, chance was via Helsinki in Finland near the Russian border.They weren't to be dissuaded from their adventure into the forbidden and drove in a new French 2CV from Paris to Helsinki and its Russian embassy and waited in Finland for weeks of negotiations between Helsinki and Moscow until by miracle, the embassy received clearance from Moscow for them to be given visas with strict limitations to travel route and permitted photography. Any revealing photos were not allowed to leave Russia.Their trip was closely watched by the Russian secret police (the KGB), and arrests were daily but useless until the KGB locked them in a dreary hotel room for a night while they sabotaged their car's steering, which the next day came apart and sent them crashing down a rocky mountainside, which after seven rolls, wrecked the car but not them.They and the remains of the car were driven to Lvov, where the workers at the state garage agreed to completely rebuild the car, which gave them a week in Lvov.The car rebuilt, they set out west to the Czechoslovakian border, where things got ugly during fourteen hours of interrogation by the KGB, who developed and destroyed much of their film, somehow missing those images in this book.At 4:00 a.m., they were finally released and able to cross the border to freedom with these many unique forbidden photographs.

-- John Loring