Don Fiene (Knoxville, TN.) is our "guest editor" this month. He is also our expert on insulators from the USSR, and has written up the following account of his travels to the Soviet Union in June of this year, which I would like to share with you.

Thanks, Don, one more time, for letting the readers have a glimpse of your insulator adventures in the Soviet Union. I reread the stories you sent in for the June, 1981 and the September, 1984 issues, and it seems you have figured out a few more angles since then. It might be wise if you also figured out a way to keep those people in uniform from reading the same accounts, and I am talking about the ones who live in the USSR!!

SOVIET INSULATOR REPORT, 1985

by Donald M. Fiene

From June 12th through 29th I led a group of 50 students and other tourists on a tour of the USSR, entering at Leningrad and leaving from Moscow. From Leningrad we flew to Yerevan, capital of the Armenian SSR; from there we went by bus through the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, to Tiblisi (Tiflis) capital of the Georgian SSR, passing enroute through a portion of Azerbaijan SSR. Next we flew to Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, thence to Moscow. I made a point of leaving from Moscow because the customs at Leningrad has gotten very rough over the past several years. I got a few insulators out last year but wasn't sure I could do it again. I was hoping Moscow, especially under Gorbachew, would be more tolerant of eccentric baggage. As it turned out, not a single person in our group was searched upon leaving -- so I took out 23 insulators, an iron railroad warning sign 11 x 17", several big pieces of obsidian rock, a huge Soviet flag and sundry other contraband. And I also had my burglary tools to worry about: large pliers, wire cutters, screw driver. All that stuff (including a large glass insulator with much metal attached) was packed into a strong and roomy carry-on handbag. That bag went through X-ray machines at five major airports, both Soviet and U.S., just during the period when the Lebanon hijacking was hot in the news, and not a single airport worker could get up enough curiosity to search it. Makes you wonder, don't it? 

Of the 23 insulators, 8 were small (1" or less) porcelain knobs and the like; of the remainder, all but four were relatively uninteresting porcelain pin-type; and out of the lot there was only one undamaged glass pin type -- and that was a duplicate for me except for color and embossing. So, despite the fact that I was able to consider 12 pieces new (more or less) to my collection, I cannot say this was a brilliant haul. But I had a ball depriving the Russians (and other Soviet nationalities) of all that junk. So I'm happy.

We arrived in Leningrad early evening in a light rain. From my hotel window I could see some interesting construction about a block away. Around 10 p.m., over the protests of my wife, I went out to investigate, carrying my tools in a plastic bag. I found a side street with buildings coming down on one side and going up on another. All the trolley-wire poles had had to be relocated over one long block. Old poles and wires lay in a tangled mass along one side of the street. I could see hundreds of insulators, but all except three of four were tightly tied into long lengths of 3/16" iron wire that my cutters could not touch. I finally got one special type of insulator, used in the support-wire system, unbolted from two metal straps. It was reddish-brown in color and shaped like a sort of square doughnut (see drawing), apparently consisting of fiber glass and plastic baked over a core, possibly of iron.

It took a lot of cursing to get the rusted bolts loose, but none of the people standing around waiting for trolley cars in the rain seemed to mind. They could see me very well, of course, because even at midnight under clouds there was full visibility.

I picked up a couple of loose pin-type porcelain insulators and one unattached strain. There were several nice strains that I craved, but lengths of thick wire up to ten feet long dangled from either end. I finally gave up and went home. My wife was glad to see me. (In general, throughout the trip, I had much more difficulty getting permission from my wife to go insulator hunting than from any Soviet official.) 

Over the next two days I finally figured out a way to get the strains. What I did (on our last night in Leningrad) was to bend those long wires over my knee at a point about one foot away from the end of the insulator. Then I laboriously bent the wire in the reverse direction. And then back again. After about 50 bends it got easier. I must have looked rather odd doing that out there in the street, but nobody bothered me. I ended up after an hour or so with three nice strains -- each with a foot of tough jagged wire sticking straight out from either end. Nice -- but they would never fit in my handbag. Early the next morning I worked my way down into the bowels of the hotel and found the dispatcher. I confessed to being an American insulator collector, showed him my wired-up strains, and told him I needed a hacksaw bad. He practically leaped up from his bank of switches and TV monitors, personally guided me down yet another floor to the repair shop, where he abruptly woke some poor devil sleeping on a table, introduced me, and split.

The new guy appeared to adore all Americans, nearly went crazy trying to find his hacksaw. Finally he gave up and instead used an electric grinding wheel to cut away the wires. In his zeal he burned the heck out of his hands as he pulled away the red-hot metal. I thanked him profusely and gave him some souvenirs for his two kids -- ballpoint pens and a handful of U.S. Army patches that I had picked up at a flea market in anticipation of just such occasions. As I boarded the plane for Yerevan, I carried with me four porcelain pin-type, four strains, and the "square doughnut." 

Our three days in Yerevan, far to the south, were fascinating, but I found no insulators. Usually I would try to take long walks near sunset (like about 9 p.m.) in the alleys and courtyards near our downtown hotel. At the rear of almost every apartment building grapevines had been planted. At ground level they filled massive trellises, and from there they climbed upward from balcony to balcony. The older the building, the higher the vines. Among their leaves I spied many a dormant insulator, but they were all too high to reach.

Not till our bus ride north did I acquire my first (and only) Armenian insulator. We stopped near Lake Sevan for lunch. I took a quick walk along a railroad track, where I picked up a smallish iron warning sign that I decided to keep: roughly pennant-shaped with vertical red and white stripes. In the distance I could see an electric-power substation; lines fanned out from it into the mountains. The lines were anchored at the power station with a dozen or more "sombrero"-type glass insulators -- ice-blue and sparkling in the sun. Long before I reached the station, I encountered two ten-year-old Armenian boys. They spoke Russian perfectly, having learned it at school. I asked them if they had seen any discarded insulators in the grass thereabouts. They hadn't. I gave them each a dime (which they at first refused to take, having been raised by their mothers to be polite) and asked them to hunt for insulator -- and if they found any, to "meet me at that red bus over there in about thirty minutes."

When I finished lunch, the boys were waiting for me. They had asked the manager of the power station to help me out -- and he had said he would. I felt almost faint from greed. I told the bus driver to pick me up at the road leading off to the substation; he said they were leaving in ten minutes. The boys and I ran cross-country all the way to the mother lode. I quickly introduced myself to the station manager, who had been playing dominoes in a comfortable little shack with his two helpers. (Easy work.) I showed the guy some photographs of my collection, but he needed no such convincing. He thought collecting insulators was an eminently sane hobby. As we walked out the door, he said I could have any insulators I found. He took me to one pile of same in some weeds, but there wasn't a single piece in it that weighed less than forty pounds. Darn. Finally we found just one item light enough for me to carry -- the glass-and-metal insulator described in the attached drawing. I had noticed these on poles form the bus window -- as many as six or nine in a single installation. A lot of connecting metal, perhaps switches, had been fastened to their tops. Possibly there were fuses as well, each installation acting as a lightning arrester. The iron metal on the insulator had been covered with aluminum paint. Rust was showing through. 

I told the manager I had to rush off, but "thanks a lot just the same." He was really disappointed; he wanted to give me everything he had. "It would be nice to have one of those,” I said, pointing to the sombreros high overhead. "Hey,” he said. "You can have one. But it will take me an hour to get it down for you." "No time,” I said. "Gotta go..."

The boys and I jogged over to the bus. Before I boarded, I tried to give the kids more presents -- coins, pens and army patches. They refused to take anything, held their hands behind them. So I carefully laid the stuff on the grass at their feet, thanked them, and hopped on the bus. As we pulled away, I saw the boys pick up their presents. They looked happy. But it was clear their greatest reward had been to act as intermediaries in an important international transaction. And I was not only happy, but amazed to think that the manager had been willing to cut off the power to half of Armenia just to add one insulator to my collection, -- and also, of course, to promote world peace... 

Tbilisi is a charming city of narrow cobblestone streets laid out on steep hills. As in Yerevan, I saw plenty of insulators on the sides of buildings but could not get to them. I hated to give up, though. On our last morning we had one free hour before departure to the airport. I talked my wife into taking "a little walk" with me. We climbed up a steep and narrow street, past a Russian Orthodox church, until we came to an open place overlooking the whole city. As we stood there admiring the view, I noticed a couple of workmen off to the side. I approached the older of the two. I asked him if he knew where I could put my hands on some insulators. I told him I was an American, etc. His face lit up. He guided my wife and me through a small orchard to a kind of storehouse where all his tools were kept. Some stairs led up to a small clean room with a table and a couple of chairs, where we were told to wait. Soon the man returned with an assortment of ten insulators (most of them small knobs). One was cemented to an iron bracket. The man thoughtfully sawed it off just at the base. We talked a bit.

The man turned out to be 70 years old, though he looked only 50. (He was perhaps a potential example of those Georgians who live to the age of 130 years by daily eating yogurt and running up and down the Caucasus Mountains.) He said he had fought in the war against Finland in 1940, was wounded; he didn't think that was a very worthwhile war. I told him I had fought in the Korean War and didn't think it was very worthwhile either. The man took a bottle of cognac out of a drawer and poured three glasses. "To world peace!" I said. We all drank to it. He refilled the glasses. "To communism and religion!" he said. We all drank to that, too. And then Judy and I split. We made it back with one minute to spare.

It was hard to believe that my luggage rang no alarm bells, neither in the Tbilisi airport nor the one in Kiev, the next city we visited. I found no insulators during our three days in the Ukrainian SSR, but the five days in Moscow yielded a little something. Our hotel there was the Rossiya, once the largest in the world; it is right next to St. Basil's Cathedral on Red Square -- and directly across the Moscow River from a big old power plant erected during the Stalin years. It took me most of a morning to explore the alleys and trash heaps surrounding the plant, which I had heard was gradually being phased out, but I found nothing and saw nothing worth a second glance. After finally making a complete circle of the area (maybe 20 city blocks), I saw a repair van of some kind parked in front of the building. Sticking out of the roof of the van was a two-pin post carrying two glass power insulators (see drawing). I went up to the driver and went through my routine, ending with the insulator photos. "So, Ivan, what do you think?" I said. "Why don't you just give me these glass babies? You can replace them with porcelain later." "Sure,” he said. "Why not?" Quicker than a flash he scrambled onto the hood, then the roof, unscrewed both insulators and tossed them down to me one at a time. By then the driver's two helpers had showed up. I gave all three a handful each of pins, pens and patches -- a highly successful international trade deal. 

Now I got the bright idea to get permission from one of the power-plant executives to hunt for insulators inside the grounds. So I went into the main building and told my story to a reasonably sympathetic woman guard doing duty in the lobby. She pointed to a chair and told me to wait. She returned after 30 minutes with the information that no one there had the authority to give me the permission I sought; I would have to apply to the Ministry of Electrification on the Kremlin side of the river. The woman in the lobby of the ministry gave me several phone numbers to try. It took me two hours of telephoning, both from the lobby and my hotel room, to reach the most promising name on my ever-growing list of "people to try." But this person seemed almost shocked by my intention of collecting Soviet insulators. "Who gave you my name? Who gave you my name?" He kept demanding. "The woman in the lobby,” I kept shouting. (It was a bad connection.) Finally I hung up on the creep. But next year I'll try to crack that bureaucracy again, and I won't rest until I have a letter authorizing me to request discarded insulators from power plants, substations and the like. Let it be an innocuous letter, just so long as it is written on official stationery from the Ministry of Electrification.

 And think of how valuable such a letter would be at customs! This year I got lucky and wasn't even searched. But next year some gorilla might arrest me and make me miss my plane. However, with a letter from the Ministry mentioning both me and insulators in a positive context, I would have it made in the shade. And the letter would almost certainly work the following year, too. Who knows, it might even get me through Soviet customs for the rest of my life!