As on several past occasions, it is once again my pleasure to share with you this account of Don Fiene's most recent excursion to the USSR. Herein, Don makes reference to several insulator styles, and for the benefit of those readers who do not have the current books on foreign glass and porcelain insulators, the following drawings are shown:

SOVIET INSULATOR REPORT, 1986

This year I organized and led a trip to the Soviet Union that took our group of twenty-three Americans first to Leningrad (four days), then to Tashkent, capital of the Uzbek Republic in Central Asia. Our three days in the latter city included a side trip of one day to Samarkand, ancient capital of Tamerlane, about an hour's plane ride due west into the Kyzyl Kum desert. Our next stop, for about two days, was Dushanbe, capital of the Tadzhik Republik in the Pamir Mountains and only about a two-hour bus ride from the Afghan border. From there we went to Ashkhabad, capital of the Turkmen Republic, for two days; it is directly north of Iran and a good way into the Kara Kum desert. Camels abounded. We took rides on some of them. We finally went on to Moscow, where we stayed five more days to end the trip.

Although I accumulated a number of interesting insulators in my travels, I have to report sadly that Moscow customs took them all away from me. However, my tale of found and lost is probably still worth telling. Regardless, there was at least one other insulator collector who took a trip to the USSR this year -- William Ogden of Virginia, Minnesota. Bill managed to find three porcelain insulators and get them out, so I'll tell a few details of his story to balance out mine. His trip, incidentally (a guided tour like the one I arranged), covered the cities of Moscow, Erevan, Sochi, Rostov and Leningrad. It lasted twenty-two days (June 29-July 10) and cost $2300 out of New York. My trip lasted eighteen days (June 13 - July 1) and cost $1900 out of Montreal. These prices cover absolutely every expense -- all food, lodging, transportation and many entertainments. Comparable tours anywhere else would probably cost twice as much. But tours to the USSR are heavily subsidized by the Soviet government because of the need for hard currency. Meanwhile, ordinary Russians are very friendly to Americans, and hotel accommodations are good -- so trips like these make an excellent vacation. In my case the vacation is perfect, since, as the leader (I teach Russian, by the way, at the University of Tennessee), I go for nothing, provided I recruit at least fifteen people. If I get thirty, then my wife, Judy, goes free also.

This year I brought with me to trade about twenty-five military patches, a couple of badges and three or four small American flags. On my first evening in Leningrad I was approached by a teenager who wanted to trade military insignia. I met him two days later for a trading session in the park and again the following day after he said he could get me an insulator. For my handful of junk I got a tremendous package of Soviet military insignia and buttons, cloth patches, a couple of medals, four pairs of epaulets, two brass buckles (one army, one navy), several old coins, a nice flag about three by four feet, and a mint glass insulator similar to CD 540 (see my drawing of another of these I picked up in Siberia, on page 6 of the September, 1984, issue of Crown Jewels). I told the kid I was robbing him and that my junk had cost me nothing -- but he said his stuff hadn't cost him anything either, and he was delighted with his haul. We exchanged names and addresses and are going to meet next year; he promised to have a good selection of glass insulators ready for me. (I already have a trip planned for 1987 to Leningrad, Moscow, and the Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.)

Incidentally, I was able to smuggle out all that military stuff, which is strictly illegal, through the devise of false bottoms in two of my suitcases, which I had thoughtfully prepared before I left home. I have showed my loot to several collectors of military items, and they assure me that my stuff is worth an easy thousand bucks (on the basis that a large flag goes for $200, belt buckles for $75 each, etc.). Now all I need are buyers. One more thing I got in Leningrad was a heavy blue and white convex porcelain street sign about six by eighteen inches -- a beautiful thing and probably about fifty years old. 

Though I looked daily, I found no other insulators in Leningrad, or in Tashkent. However, during our trip to Samarkand to view the ancient architecture, I took a walk through a series of alleys that took me a considerable distance from the main boulevard. Here I saw animals being slaughtered for market right in the street. Near a high mud wall I saw a half-rotted goat's head on the ground. On top of the wall I caught the glint of a brown porcelain insulator. I went closer and could see that there were four or five insulators up there, some broken, left by a lineman. A power pole in the yard had new insulators on it. The old ones looked something like U-3067. I could not reach the insulators, and there were people around anyhow (all Muslims), so I asked the owner of the property if he would help me get the insulators and then give them to me. The request, which took him a long time to fully understand, as he was an Uzbek and his Russian was poor, made him very uncomfortable. He finally decided to play it safe and not mess around with government property. I was only mildly disappointed. Those insulators looked pretty heavy.

While at Dushanbe we went on an excursion by bus into the Pamir Mountains. All was peaceful. We saw no Soviet soldiers or any Afghanis either -- but I did spot several strings of glass sombreros hanging from the bottom truss of a high voltage tower. I had already alerted the bus driver to my hobby, showed him pictures of my collection; he cheerfully stopped his vehicle just off the edge of the narrow and dangerous highway. The insulators were in strings of three and four; they had been discarded; several were broken. I stowed about three strings (heavy!) in the luggage compartment of the bus. Back in the city, I dragged all that glass onto the front patio of the hotel. I borrowed some tools from a maintenance man and worked out there for about an hour, removing the very tight clips that held the pieces together. The hotel management knew what I was up to but did not seem to mind. Incidentally, I would have used my own tools, but these had been confiscated from my hand luggage in Mirabel International Airport in Montreal. (I picked them up on return.) To get tools through, I was told, you have to stow them in checked-through luggage.

Anyhow, I finally picked out four of the best pieces. There were two slightly different types, with one type being similar to the Pyrex sombrero, the other carrying more metal and therefore heavier. They were a beautiful light aqua color (like those I had seen in Armenia last year -- see pp. 13-14 of my article in December, 1985, Crown Jewels), with exceptionally sharp embossings; there was writing all over the top surface of the glass, with the letters raised up at least one-sixteenth inch. I kept one insulator of each type for myself and two to sell or trade. This added forty pounds of our luggage, which had to be completely repacked. This did not please my wife at all, even though I did not ask her to carry any of the glass. Interestingly, even though I lugged that terrible weight through the Dushanbe, Ashkabad and Moscow domestic airports, no X-ray operator ever paid the slightest attention to my metal and glass. I had high hopes of getting it home.

In Ashkhabad I found my last insulators of the trip: a white porcelain cube with red underglaze markings, about three inches on a side with two flat metal projections, possibly some sort of circuit breaker; a common white porcelain pin-type, CD-1654; and two rather large brown porcelain power types, quite similar to those I had seen in Samarkand. The latter I secured by persuading another bus driver to stop, this time out in the middle of the desert. I had spotted about six discarded insulators in the sand (under an overhead line), but all were tied very tightly to a long cable. I borrowed the driver's pliers and managed to cut through the cable one strand at a time -- sitting out there in the hot sand of the Kara Kum desert. Luckily it was a cool day, only about 120 degrees!

Before I ever got to Moscow I discarded one of the porcelain power insulators. I had reached my limit of self-torture. In Moscow I got too busy to look for new pieces -- and I was afraid I might find something anyhow. As we went through customs on the last day, I got delayed helping someone who had problems getting his money cleared. What I finally did was hide his $600 in my pocket without declaring it, hoping I would not get searched. And suddenly there I was -- the very last person in line, with the x-ray machine all lit up like a Christmas tree. The woman assigned to that station made me show her the insulators and then sent for her boss. While she was waiting, she x-rayed a doll she found in the suitcase -- looking for diamonds or dope, or both. It looked like it would be a bad day in Black Rock. Fortunately, the boss was a fairly human guy. He looked at my insulator snapshots with interest -- but he still took away all the big stuff. When he found the smaller pieces, he took them, too, although I pleaded with him to give me a break. Then he found the huge street sign) still dirty and half-covered with paint), could hardly believe his eyes -- but he let me keep it. 

Somehow they decided to wrap it up. I escaped a body search. Probably their insulator haul had satisfied them -- they had already done a good day's work. So I made it. On the whole I was not sad. I had all that other contraband to comfort me -- and I would have to schlep that extra fifty pounds in my personal hand luggage through five more airports before reaching Knoxville. Also, my wife suddenly seemed easier to get along with, to say nothing of the guy with the six hundred bucks. And I was not in jail! I had been like the monkey who could not pull his fist out of the jug of nuts. But now I was free.... 

Bill Ogden told me on the telephone that he was in principle willing to be as greedy as I was, but simply lacked the opportunity. What he found, however, he took. His first find was a small white porcelain top-groove item shaped like U-1633. It was on the back of a telephone booth (paired with a working insulator) in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi. A couple of days later, near the city of Rostov, he removed from some downed poles two white porcelain insulators with one-inch pin holes, both like U-1705 (or possibly 1710?). He noted that the latter were used on both distribution and long-distance telephone lines. He had seen a considerable number of transposition brackets, some like those used in the United States. He observed also, as I have, the large number of wooden poles that are strapped to concrete posts or piers sunk into the ground. The wood itself is at least a foot about the ground. I suspect this is done not so much to keep poles from rotting, as to facilitate pole replacement in the winter, when the ground in frozen to great depth. I saw thousands of such installations when I traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railroad for four days in June of 1984.