This story is from Anatole Lokshin:
After the mandatory student construction brigades, Soviet students could sometimes use their summers for something they actually wanted to do. For my dad, that meant the mountains.
He had plenty of experience with rough travel. In winter he and his friends would go north, beyond the Polar Circle, to the Khibiny mountains near Murmansk. They would ski and backpack for weeks in the cold. So when he decided to organize a summer hiking trip in the Caucasus, in what is now Georgia, he was not exactly a beginner.
None of his close friends wanted to go. The route was too ambitious. So he put up a notice at the university hiking club and gathered a group: four boys, including himself, and two girls. He did not know them. But he was in charge, which meant he planned the route, organized the food, and carried the responsibility.
The boys started with packs of about a hundred pounds. The plan was a figure eight through the mountains: carry food to a hidden cache, hike one loop, return to pick up the supplies, and then continue on the second loop. It was hard, beautiful, and, for a while, exactly the kind of adventure young people imagine when they think of mountains.
They climbed to around twelve or thirteen thousand feet. On the way back down, already close to the end of the trip, they came across a summer cattle camp high in the mountains. Local men had brought their cows up to the alpine meadows, where the grass was good, and were spending the season there making cheese and watching the herd.
The men were thrilled to have visitors. They had just killed a huge bear, and the bear skin was stretched out while they cleaned it. Everyone drank local vodka, sang songs, and became instant best friends, in that intense way people sometimes do when there is nothing around but mountains, alcohol, and boredom.
That night, the men said the girls should sleep inside because there might be another bear. The boys could sleep outside in the tent. This sounded reasonable enough.
Around midnight one of the girls woke my dad up. She said the girls did not want to sleep inside after all. They were not afraid of bears. They wanted to sleep outside with the group.
So my dad switched places and went inside.
Later that night, someone gently touched his shoulder. He turned over and saw one of the local men, who had clearly expected to find one of the girls. Instead he found my dad: unshaved, irritated, and very much not the person the man had been looking for.
The man asked where the girls were.
My dad said, essentially: they are not here. I am here.
That was the end of the conversation. In the morning, no one said much about it. Everyone remained outwardly friendly, and the hikers left.
Then they discovered the men had stolen their ropes.
This was not a small inconvenience. The route had been deliberately chosen to include a descent by rope of perhaps a hundred feet. Good long ropes were almost impossible to buy in the Soviet Union, and in the mountains they were not sporting equipment; they were safety equipment. Without them, the group had to climb back up and find another way down.
Eventually they descended to a lower area with natural hot springs. There were no roads and no facilities. Locals came there by hiring men with donkeys, often because they were old or sick and believed the springs would help them. For the hikers, coming down from above, it was the end of the journey.
By this point my dad and the other boys had not been especially kind to the two girls. The girls' packs were much lighter, yet they were usually behind, and the boys had spent much of the trip telling them to hurry up. The girls were understandably tired of being bossed around.
At the hot springs, though, the situation changed. They were Russian blonde girls in a remote mountain region, and local men became intensely interested in them. The men brought them food, fruit, flowers, and attention.
My dad warned them: this is not St. Petersburg. Be careful. Do not encourage these men if you do not understand what they think it means.
The girls told him that the hike was over, he was no longer in charge, and he should stop telling them what to do.
Then one day they announced that some local men had invited them to go horseback riding in the mountains.
My dad told them not to go.
They went.
That evening they came running back to the tent white-faced and shaking. Before my dad could even get a full explanation, three local men arrived on horseback carrying rifles.
Not shotguns. Rifles.
They rode into the camp and said: give us your women.
To them, the situation was straightforward. They had spent time with the girls. They had brought food and flowers. They had taken them riding. The girls had accepted all of it. Now the men wanted the girls for the night. They even reassured my dad that they would bring them back in the morning.
There are moments when civilization is not a set of laws or institutions. It is just a thin assumption that everyone involved shares the same rules. In that mountain camp, the assumption disappeared.
The local men assumed my dad, as the male leader, had authority over the girls and could hand them over. They also assumed the girls' acceptance of hospitality created an obligation. My dad understood something else: he was in the mountains, facing three armed men on horses, and if the situation escalated they could kill him and no one would ever know what happened.
So he argued carefully. He explained that this was not how things worked in St. Petersburg. The girls did not know the local rules. They had not understood what accepting the attention meant.
The men were not happy.
Fortunately, one of them was a student in Moscow who had come home for the summer. He understood enough of the wider Soviet world to realize that shooting a university student in the mountains over this was probably a bad idea. Eventually he persuaded the others to leave.
The next day my dad told the group: you can do whatever you want, but I am going down.
He and two of the boys left immediately. They walked and ran through the night. By morning they had reached the Black Sea beach.
My dad's point in telling the story was simple: not every place is Irvine, California.
It is an easy thing to forget if you grow up in safety. Much of the world does not operate according to the assumptions Americans take for granted. Not every place has the same rules about women, hospitality, violence, police, property, or the value of a human life. A situation that looks colorful and adventurous from far away can become dangerous very quickly when the local rules are not yours and the men explaining them are carrying rifles.
This was not exactly a story about communism, though the Soviet Union hangs in the background: the scarcity of ropes, the strange mix of freedom and danger, the vast empire where a university student from Leningrad could wander into a world governed by entirely different customs. Mostly it is a story about civilization, and about how precious and fragile ordinary safety really is.
If you live somewhere like Irvine, it is worth being grateful. Not because Irvine is exciting, but because boring safety is one of the greatest luxuries in the world.