Not too far from where the GUM, the Kremlin and St. Basile’s Church (from which the word basilica comes into Western vernacular) is a bridge of the Mokba River.
At the far end of the bridge, one could easily exchange Western currency illegally for Soviet rubels.
This was large bridge was one of several well-known places to exchange such currency well-below the official Soviet rate.
In retrospect, one has to suspect that this sort of exchange of currencies with dark plain-clothed figures on a bridge in obvious sight of the Kremlin was continuously allowed to occur because (1) it was good for someone with connections at the Kremlin or (2) it was at least good for the police-, military- and/or the KGB as a simple conduit for gaining western currency for their own operations.
As I left Moscow in January 1989 to return to West Germany, I had an inkling that the Evil Empire (and supposedly formidable imperial Soviet Union) and its citizens were ready to cut-and-run from its past.
One month later the Soviet Union would begin its pull out from Afghanistan, i.e. in February 1989. Click here.
EPILOGUE 1
Unlike the USA, which had been defeated in the Vietnam War (1975) and elsewhere over the decades (such as in Mexico 1916, Nicaragua 1933), the Soviet Bear would not rise from the graves it had begun to dig in Afghanistan.
Within a few short months after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the entire Western half of the Warsaw Pact would begin to move en masse towards the West in order to seek a new future in Europe, especially as consumers of goods and services.
Many Muscovites would have liked to have followed me back to Germany and the West -- some would -- and some have.
Now, twenty years after the Revolutionary year of 1989, I have returned to Germany to teach again young college students--only to find in the various English and Business training classes I instruct, German students, originally from Russia, Kazakhstan, the Ukraine or East Germany, and the former Yugoslavian states, like Croatia. Click here.
Over most of the past half century this has been the case but with 1989 this change began anew.
NOTE: “Immigration has been a primary force shaping demographic developments in the two Germanys in the postwar period. After the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the immigration flow, first into West Germany and later into united Germany, consisted mainly of workers from southern Europe. In addition, the immigrants included several other groups: a small but steady stream of East German immigrants (Übersiedler) during the 1980s that exploded in size in 1990 (389,000) but by 1993 had fallen by more than half (172,000) and was somewhat offset by movement from west to east (119,000); several million ethnic Germans (Aussiedler) from East European countries, especially the former Soviet Union; and several million persons seeking asylum from political oppression, most of whom were from East European countries.” Click here.
In Wiesbaden where I live currently, my tiny church has former Russians, Moldovans, Ukrainian, some from Easter Germany or Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, and even Laos—as well as former West Germans and Americans, like me. Click here.
In contrast to this reality on the ground today in 2009, at the time I lived in West Germany in the 1980s, I had been told by my ex-German girlfriend with great confidence that only blood-Germans would ever be allowed citizenship here. Click here.
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