The sour faced Soviet foreign exchange teller was a bully.
"These dollars will only buy you one hundred rubles," he barked at the girl in front of me in a Central Moscow bank queue. "Don't waste my time. Buy one hundred now or go away. Hurry," he ordered.
Her shoulders shuddered as if she was about to cry. "But I can't afford to lose that much on the exchange rate. It's wrong. You're meant to pay half that again," she pleaded.
I'd recognized the girl's accent. Her English came from New Zealand, the small country where I'd been raised, but had left long ago. I listened to the official's belligerent tirade for another minute and eventually could no longer stomach it. I tugged gently at the girl's elbow, and whispered in her ear.
"I'm a Kiwi too. Don't make a fuss. Just stand here like you know nothing, and I'll get our Comrade sorted." She turned to me, her brimming brown eyes wide in astonishment. Her shiny dark hair brushed the collar of her thick coat as she nodded her pretty face. "You're quite sure?" she asked. "Thanks. I'm sinking here."
This was Cold War Russia in 1975, and it was surly. The bank stood just off the enormous expanse of Red Square where only a week before Party Secretary Brezhnev and his Politbureau heavies had stood on the dais, taking the salute as Soviet Russia made its threatening annual parade of troops, tanks and missiles. I'd been in Russia three weeks as a mildly feted guest of the communists, who wanted to do serious business with technology from my electronics firm. They'd entertained me lavishly, and watched me closely.
I saw she'd given the teller a fifty dollar travelers' check which was enough for three days tourist class travel if he didn't cheat her. Her hand brushed mine nervously as I leaned passed her and poked my head in the teller's window.
"I think you have your rates wrong, Comrade," I told him. He looked up at me angrily, his thick moustache quivering. "Who are you? Show me your papers. All of them - now," the bully demanded. He'd reacted as I hoped. I pushed him my thick credentials document, signed by several top party men, each of whom could send the teller-cheat to the gulags with no beg pardons. He glanced at them contemptuously. Then his eyes popped and his face turned ashen.
"Why, sir. Good morning and welcome. Let me have the pleasure of double checking," he stammered.
The teller made a show of thumbing through a small manual, before looking back up. "I'm terribly sorry sir. It's an honest mistake. It should be 160 rubles, not one hundred," he said.
"The lady's with me, comrade. She requires the diplomatic rate. You'll find that's 230." The official started, and then bowed. "Yes, of course," he said, and dealt out another handful of notes. I thanked him -- almost politely - and I pushed the bigger bundle of notes into the girl's hand. She blinked back the tears from the limpid pool of her eyes, and shook her head in disbelief.
"Wow, how on earth could you do that? Are you an ambassador or something?" she asked.
"No, they're just shit scared of New Zealanders," I told her. "They sit up at nights worrying we'll bomb them with butter."
Now she giggled. Her full lips transformed to a warm smile, and the dark eyes sparkled. "Sorry I was so pathetic," she said. "I've been here a week, and it's getting to me. The officials are sour, and the people intimidated. Thanks a million - and I 'm Anna from Geraldine," she said, naming a small farming town in New Zealand's south.
"Peter. A long time back I lived in Auckland. So what brings a country girl to faraway Moscow?"
"A farmer's daughter escaping," she said." My dad's getting old, I'm the only child, and he wants me to take over our family sheep station next year. I said I'll do it, but let me have twelve months seeing the world before I climb on your horse. So here I am in Moscow, with only Iran left to go, and near the end of my budget.
"And you just made it stretch a few days further, "she added, smiling wryly.
"In that case you must owe me coffee," I announced.
Outside it was ten below as we pulled on hats and gloves, and left the teller speaking more politely to his next customer. She was in her early twenties, with smooth olive skin, and classic wide cheekbones. I sensed the figure beneath the bulky full length coat was slim, but couldn't be sure. I figured a farmer's daughter travelling by herself in the Soviet Union in 1975 was gutsy. We chatted as we walked, and discovered for ourselves that Moscow then had no coffee shops. And I found that she, like me, was on her last day there.
"I think we're out of luck," I said, noticing she'd begun to shiver in the cold. "But there's a smart restaurant where I'm staying at The National. Any chance you'd have dinner with me tonight instead?"
She seemed unsure, but then agreed. "You don't need to pick me up, because I'm staying around the corner at the Hotel Russia," she said, naming a monolithic hunk of Soviet architecture the communists had built for their few tourists. We made it 7.30, and as I watched her walk briskly off huddled against the cold, I realized I felt lonely, and not just because Russia does that to you.
I headed back to my hotel for meetings. It had taken six weeks to work out our agreements to install electricity grid management technology at power sites in the Ukraine, Georgia, and around Moscow itself. Because the technology was categorized as strategic, we needed consent for the sale from the US Government, and when I visited the Embassy the First Secretary finished our meeting with a warning.
