The recent revelations about the PRISM program's role in domestic surveillance and the emergence of privacy concerns associated with Google Glass have reminded me of a bizarre episode I experienced during a visit to the Soviet Union in 1987.
I was a 20-year-old American college student studying Sovietology in Copenhagen, and I had just embarked on the trip of a lifetime. Looking back, that era seems implausibly different from today: The Soviet Union was our principal ideological adversary; the Warsaw Pact was in full force; and it was the Soviets who were embroiled in an impossible conflict in Afghanistan.
Upon arrival in Moscow, customs agents rummaged through our luggage. The person in front of me had his copy
of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward confiscated. Once inside the country, our movements were limited to our tour itinerary, our whereabouts monitored by a Communist Party chaperone assigned by Intourist, the state travel agency founded by Stalin.
My American roommate and I checked into a series of hotels approved for foreign tourists. In Moscow, Leningrad and Tashkent we stayed in what appeared to be the same room. The cities and their people were marvelously distinctive, but every hotel room was a dreary box with the same constellation of shabby furniture: austere twin beds, wobbly nightstands with dim lamps, drapes stained by years of tobacco smoke, and a chunky dresser above which hung an imposingly large painting—always a socialist realist depiction of either contented farmers harvesting a bountiful crop of wheat, or proud, muscular factory workers productively pouring steel. The sad transparency of the advertising campaign, the naive optimism and the retrograde aesthetics made us laugh.
The rooms were also outfitted with a prehistoric black-and-white television. At least I think they were black and white. None of them ever powered on. They were probably just broken, but we presumed—perhaps shrewdly, perhaps narcissistically—that they were bugs, their internal components replaced with listening equipment to monitor American conversations. After all, this was still the Cold War, and no one had any inkling that the U.S.S.R. would soon be a relic.
An unexpected October snowstorm blanketed Tashkent and grounded our outbound flight to Samarkand. But our resourceful guide managed to get us on a rickety mail plane in the middle of the night. Exhausted and shaken, we stumbled into our hotel around 4 a.m. and surveyed the room. It was bleakly familiar: twin beds, nightstands, lamps, non-functional television and dresser. But, to our alarm, the space above the dresser was an empty expanse of wall. Where was the socialist realist painting that we so deserved?
I jokingly picked up a lamp and spoke into the shade: "Excuse me . . . there seems to be some mistake: Our uplifting socialist painting is missing." My roommate leaned over to speak into the television: "Hello, KGB? You forgot to show us the steel workers. Can you kindly bring us a painting that illustrates your remarkable economic capacity?" Next I spoke into the drapes as if calling room service: "Can you please bring up a painting of workers producing a bountiful harvest? We would really appreciate seeing that above the dresser."
We got a few hours of sleep before a full day of touring Samarkand's stunningly beautiful mosques. Late in the afternoon we returned to our room. To our utter astonishment, there above the dresser, right where it was supposed to be—right where we asked for it—hung the painting we requested: cheery farmers, harvest, wheat. We stood, mouths agape, staring at it for a long time.
Was it simply a coincidence? Perhaps the hotel was already in the midst of renovating its collection of agitprop paintings. Or maybe the KGB had heard our request.
In any case, I've been having the same creepy feelings of late as I think about how my email messages and phone calls are reviewed by my government. My own house doesn't seem so private anymore. And can I look a Google Glass wearer in the eye and order a ham sandwich from an NSA officer? I'm not sure that it will materialize, but then again I hadn't seriously thought that I'd get the painting we blithely commissioned one night in Uzbekistan.
I decided to share this anecdote with Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and CIA director John O. Brennan through this publication, to tell them emphatically that I don't want to live in the Soviet Union. But now I realize that they've probably read my story already: I sent it to the editor through my Gmail account.
Mark Applebaum is an associate professor of music composition.
