It was the summer of 1956. No one outside the Eastern bloc had much of an idea of what exactly was going on inside the Soviet Union. The superpower was hidden from the Western gaze by the Iron Curtain. And it had to be checked out. With the help of lots of luck and some totalitarian whimsy, two Parisian journalists — Dominique Lapierre and his colleague and photographer Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini — got permission to travel to the heart of Soviet Union with their wives Alliette and Annie and a customised ‘Marly’ Limousine.

About 13,000 km, many anecdotes and countless chronicles later, Lapierre and Pedrazzini’s USSR emerges as an unreal country, one so full of manufactured hope and imposed gaiety that it was only natural that the two scribes would want to peek into the future. And that future reveals in no uncertain terms the futility of the Soviet project. Either in the endless statues, talismans and posters that embodied Communist iconography or in the little lives of typical citizens — a Minsk railway worker, a Moscow sales assistant, an Ukrainian peasant, a Tiflis surgeon, a Gorki factory worker or even their travel companion, Pravda journalist Slava — Lapierre sees a benign innocence bordering on aphasia. Unlike Eastern Europe in Milan Kundera’s novels, Lapierre’s Soviet lives are unequivocal in their singular lack of ambition or desire. In picking these lives carefully from the Soviet citizenry, Lapierre is quick to show the poverty of lives without imagination, lives too happy with the monthly supply of ration, lodging, wage, insurance, pension and above all, hope.

But never did these men and women ration their hospitality. They had sparsely an extra room, an extra chair or extra food. But whatever little they had, they wanted to lavish on the two couples who they thought came from a fairy-tale country. Something similar awaited elegant ‘Marly’ wherever it went!

Then, there is this story of a woman outside Moscow who wanted Lapierre to deflate the Limousine tyre so that she can breathe Paris air. An Armenian man kisses the Parisian flag in open defiance of the Soviet authorities, near the Black Sea shore. A couple marries in a Russian Orthodox Church near godless Kyiv. In the Ukrainian countryside, Lapierre and Pedrazzini accidentally stray into a prohibited territory and are arrested by the dreaded Soviet military police. Many such incidents peppers the journey, narrated in a tone that borders on casual mockery as much it is filled with cheery gratitude.

One can read the book with necessary consternation at being served typical Western bias about a project they could not comprehend. Perhaps the hope was genuine, the innocence only too human. But to a reader in the first decade of the 21st century, the capriciousness of contemporary history reveals itself nowhere more starkly than in the erstwhile USSR. And hence it would be best to read this wonderful travelogue as one about a country which, according to Lapierre, “belonged neither to heaven nor to hell, but to the history of humanity.”

Once Upon A Time in the Soviet Union | Dominique Lapierre | Full Circle | 234pp