When the Soviets invaded Tinseltown, I laughed -- and fought on the American side

In 1977 200 Communist bureaucrats, propaganda specialists and KGB agents put on a pathetic propaganda show in downtown L.A. The booster media cheered but I tried to make trouble.

I originally wrote about this encounter in L.A. with an unhappy Soviet travel agent named Anya in 2007. In 2013 I wrote a shorter version for the English-language Moscow Times called ‘Looking for Anya X.’ As of 2024 nothing has changed and Anya’s fate remains a Cold War mystery.

Russian collusion, L.A.-style

My subversive affair with a lovely Communist travel agent during the Cold War still needs a happy Hollywood ending.

Los Angeles, 1977

It was just a sideshow, a minor skirmish in a long global Cold War. 

It lasted less than three weeks. No one was killed or wounded on the communist or capitalist side.  

It was a battle of words, ideas and peaceful protests, and it was fought entirely on America soil – in downtown Los Angeles more than four decades ago.

I’m proud to say that I participated in the fighting – on the American side.

I’m also proud to say I tried my best to make a little trouble for the invasion force of 200 bureaucrats, public relations specialists and KGB agents that the Kremlin deployed to Southern California in the fall of 1977 to put on a historic communist propaganda show at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

The first exhibit of its kind in the United States since 1959, the Soviet National Exhibition was designed to impress everyday Americans with the glorious scientific, industrial and cultural achievements of 60 years of Communist Party rule and to provide a glimpse of how wonderful life was in a socialist paradise.

What the sprawling exhibit ended up proving to anyone who looked closely at it, however, was that the socialist superpower many experts thought was winning the Cold War militarily and economically in 1977 was an antiquated police state that wouldn’t let its citizens be free at home or abroad, still couldn’t make a decent TV set and was clueless when it came to marketing itself to a free society.

Free of charge, protected by police and primitive metal detectors, the exhibition ran from Nov. 12 to Nov. 29, 1977, and attracted 310,000 visitors.

The L.A.  media and power establishment and devout socialists couldn’t have loved  the exhibition  more. Civic boosters and cultural elites in and out of Hollywood wined and dined its workforce from Bel-Air to Disneyland.  The Los Angeles Times, kicking off its copious and embarrassingly positive coverage, gave it a glowing preview, calling it “splashy,” “seductive,” “cheerful” and “interesting.”

 “Clumsy,” “dull” and “unintentionally hilarious” would have been more accurate, however, since the exhibition looked to me like the perfect set for a Soviet parody sketch on “Saturday Night Live.”

But, hey, what did I know? I was just a libertarian bartender from Hollywood who had read too much Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Friedrich Hayek and William F. Buckley Jr. All I knew for sure about the Soviets before they hit Tinseltown was that they were bums in the human rights department and their command economy couldn’t keep their working classes in toilet paper.

***

Because I had plenty of free time, and because I had delusions of writing a free-lance op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, I visited the Soviet exhibition six times.  On my first trip, I barely had time to go inside the convention center because I spent so much time observing the crazy political circus that surrounded it.

Gangs of anti-communists from every other corner of the Evil Empire had descended on the exhibition like angry white blood cells attacking a virus.

As the LAPD watched for trouble that never came, protestors waved Armenian and Ukrainian flags, held up “Free the Baltic States” signs and shouted about “Bolshevik murderers.” They and everyone from the Socialist Workers Party to the “Save the Whales” crowd pushed pamphlets, newspapers and fliers into the unwilling hands of arriving exhibit-goers.

Inside the convention huge silk-screened panels celebrated the fall of the Czar and the rise of Lenin. Ten ceiling-to-floor propaganda banners extolling the perfection of all human life in the Soviet socialist utopia bore slogans like “Medical Aid and Social Security Are Government Financed.”

Beneath a hanging garden of shiny models of Soyuz spacecraft and weather satellites was a 150,000-square-foot flea market of arts and crafts from various captive Soviet republics, esoteric scientific instruments,  reel-to-reel tape decks the size of Volkswagens and large-scale models of consumer-unfriendly things like hydroelectric dams and BN-600 fast neutron reactors.

For those seeking an alternative to the official Soviet propaganda show, there was a small, somber but powerful counter-exhibit on the convention center’s second floor. It had been mounted – despite official Soviet complaints -- by Soviet Jews to protest the denial of their human, religious and political rights in the U.S.S.R.

Called “Soviet Jewry: Six Decades of Oppression,” it focused on the plight of thousands of the Cold War’s so-called “refuseniks.” They were the Jews who were denied the right to immigrate to Israel – and who were then discriminated against and had their jobs and apartments taken away by the Soviet government. It drew 62,000 visitors, 30 at a time.

****

Anya was not a happy Communist. In fact, as she picked at her fruit salad during lunch in the convention center cafeteria, she was close to crying.

For five straight 10 a.m.-to-9 p.m. workdays she had been standing behind the Intourist information booth, handing out pamphlets, smiling and answering dumb questions about what life was really like in the Soviet Union.

Now she was depressed, emotional and feeling under-appreciated. Here she was a grown adult in the middle of one of the most exciting cities in the Free World, and she was being imprisoned like a child – by her own government.

I had met Anya on my first visit to the Soviet exhibition. She was a guide for Intourist, the Soviet travel agency. Smart, pretty and personable, she seemed to have it all.

In her late 20s, she was a graduate of Moscow University and spoke English better than Orson Welles.  Since 1973 she’d been living on 49th Street in Manhattan with her husband, who worked at the Soviet mission at the United Nations – which I learned years later meant he was almost certainly KGB. 

I had become friendly with Anya by hanging around her booth and taking pictures of her and her older, warier sidekick, Tanya. One afternoon I slipped Anya a note containing my full name, phone number and an offer to take both of them out some night and show them Los Angeles.

What can I say, your honor? I was single and they were rare lovely faces among the Evil Empire’s sullen, frumpy, middle-aged propaganda force.

I wanted to do my part to warm up East-West relations. All Anya wanted to do was see Los Angeles at night – once. And on her own, not with a dozen of her comrades as they were led around by security chaperones. Or maybe go to a jazz club.

Most of all, she wanted to see the Pacific Ocean – and swim in it.

I bravely offered to take Anya to the beach any time she wanted. She said she wasn’t allowed to leave the Holiday Inn, where she and all the other staffers were sequestered, but said she might be able to sneak out late at night. I told if she did, I’d drive her anywhere she wanted to go in my topless red 1960 MG Midget.

****

Orwell would have had a field day with the exhibit’s sloppy and drab publicity literature. Poorly reproduced government booklets about Soviet Armenia were stuffed with geographic and socioeconomic numbers. A handout aimed at potential foreign travelers to the U.S.S.R. included statistics about electric power capacities, rolled ferrous metal output and 10-year plan goals. The exhibition’s main brochure itemized how many lives, towns, villages, mines and large factories the heroic Soviet Union lost in World War II.

The best example of how helpless the Soviet Ministry of Public Relations was in trying to appeal to the American market was a cheap 32-page booklet containing the rousing speech Leonid Brezhnev had recently given at a massive Communist Party gala marking the 60th anniversary of the “Great October Socialist Revolution.”

Along with a string of laughable predictions about the course of the Cold War, Comrade Brezhnev droned on and on about the heroic political accomplishments of the Party, the superior socioeconomic achievements of socialism and the already clearly evident death spiral of capitalism.

After predicting that “We are advancing towards the epoch when socialism … will be the prevailing social system on earth,” Brezhnev woke everyone up with his thrilling finale -- “Long live our great Party, the Party of Lenin! Onward, to the victory of communism!”

If any American visitor to the exhibit voluntarily read more than 50 words of Brezhnev’s oration, it was because he was a comedy writer looking for priceless material like the irony-free parenthetical note at the speech’s end: “(L.I. Brezhnev’s report was heard with great attention and punctuated with prolonged stormy applause.)”

The Soviets made a big mistake when they scattered guest books around the exhibition space for people to write comments in. Many entries were naive love notes to the Soviets for their pursuit of mutual East-West understanding. One anonymous admirer wrote, “You are far more advanced than we are in health care. We are centuries behind.” 

Other Americans could see more clearly through the Soviet smoke. “Very interesting, but stupid,” one wrote. Several quipped “This is almost as impressive as the Berlin Wall.” Another asked “No toaster, no microwave?” Another wondered where the SAM’s and AK-47s were. One said, “Your planes kill more people than any other airline in the world – so do your disastrous space missions. P.S.: Lenin needs a hair transplant.”

While I was copying these all-American comments, a deadly serious Soviet staffer came up and asked me what I was doing and expressed concern that I was taking down names for “the police inspector.” No, I told her. I was writing a newspaper article and I thought some of the entries were very funny. I showed her the “Berlin Wall” quip but she didn’t laugh. “I don’t like that humor,” she said. “It is not friendly.”

She disappeared and returned with the deputy manager of the exhibition, who somehow was even more humorless. As I explained myself and asked him a few innocent questions, the woman staffer picked up the guest book and took it away.

****

For the next few days, while I hoped Anya would decide to risk a wild night of illicit LA-style freedom, I played journalist/spy. I went to the Holiday Inn, where two Soviet security goons in stereotypically bad suits sat in the lobby pretending to read newspapers while monitoring the elevators.

The manager said the FBI told him not to tell anyone how many of the visiting “Russians” were staying there (nearly all 200 were, a room maid told me) or what floor they were on (the 7th).

He said the Soviets were quiet, polite and well-behaved and didn’t hang out in the lounge. A maid on the 7th floor said the “Russians” were neither especially clean nor dirty, and – despite the cultural stereotypes -- didn’t do any heavy boozing or partying in their rooms.

If this were a Russian fairy-tale, it would end with Anya sneaking out of her motel room, the two of us dancing till dawn in the surf at Zuma Beach, falling in love and living happily ever after under assumed names in Malibu.

If this were a bad TV docudrama “based on a true story,” it would end with me helping Anya defect, getting in a shoot-out with KGB thugs on the Santa Monica Pier and creating an international incident that exposed the Commies’ crude propaganda show and hastened the collapse of the evil Soviet Empire.

But this is a completely true story.

Anya’s complaints about being tired and unhappy finally got to her boss’ heart and he let her go back home to New York City early. Before she left, though, he kindly took her out to the Universal Studios movie lot and to Santa Monica, where she got her wish and swam in the Pacific.

I said goodbye to Anya on Nov. 21, 1977, on my final visit to the convention center. I mailed her the best photos I took of her working at the Intourist booth, but she never wrote back.

What became of her, how she fared when her country collapsed, if she is in Russia today or is even still alive – I don’t know.

To track down Anya for the first version of this article, in 2007, I tried everything I could do from the U.S., including emailing people at Moscow University and Sistema, the private company that now owns Intourist. No luck.

At the Moscow bureau of the Los Angeles Times, reporter Sergei Loiko did some looking around for me but it only deepened the mystery. According to Intourist's records, no person named Anya Ryukhin ever worked there either in the 1970s or later. 

So did Anya tell me details of her personal life, expose her fragile emotional state to me and consider sneaking out of her motel -- and then give me a phony last name? Not likely.

Was Ryukhin her maiden name? Was she KGB, as her husband probably was? Who knows? For now, Anya's fate is unknown to me and her trail is as cold as the cold global war that brought us together.

I had other first-person encounters with Soviet Communism that I wrote about in the LA Times. In Hollywood in 1981 I watched the movie “Reds” with some of Marxism’s oldest fans. And in 1988 I survived a day under Communism when I visited gray, sad, shabby East Berlin in search of a metaphorical cafeteria that was so popular, the story went, that polizei with machine guns were posted outside to keep the customers in line.