Excerpt from chapter:
“Svetlana, Me, and the KGB”
Before the dancers were rounded up for the bus ride to their hotel, Svetlana and I arranged to “accidentally” meet each other the following afternoon at Faneuil Hall. The ballet was dark Thursday, and the sponsors had scheduled a sightseeing day in Boston. The historic site was the perfect place for a chance meeting; a harmless coincidence that no one would ever suspect—except everyone, including the company’s tour manager Alexey Ivanovich, who was on to me quicker than you could say KGB.
Fortunately, Alexey wasn’t sure who I was. My hanging around the theater all day and attending the after-party had thrown him off enough that he hadn’t asked me to leave. By the end of the week, we were friendly enough that he would allow Svetlana and me to disappear together for hours at a time without worry—for the right price.
The inattention of sharp-eyed KGB agent Alexey Ivanovich was available for the princely sum of “teaventy von doler yatean sint.” It was hard to believe, but $21.18 could convince the ballet’s resident member of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Комитет государственной безопасности, Committee for State Security) to look the other way and allow one of his dancers provisional leaves of absence. As long as the official head count at morning rehearsals was spot on, “Nichevo strashnava” (ничего страшного, Nothing scary!).
In hushed tones and giggles, some of the dancers jokingly referred to Alexey as “Ivan” Ivanovich—a reference I didn’t understand and was cautioned not to repeat. Twenty-five years later, during a visit to Washington, DC, I finally learned why.
It turns out that Ivan Ivanovich is the Russian equivalent of John Doe, and it was also the name given to the mannequin used in the unmanned Russian Vostok spacecraft Sputnik 9 in 1961. According to the Smithsonian Institution, Ivan was made to look as lifelike as possible; he traveled fully dressed in a cosmonaut suit with a sign reading макет” (Russian for dummy”). Ivan Ivanovich orbited the Earth on March 23, 1961, just weeks before Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight as the first human to journey into outer space on April 12, 1961. The dummy was ejected from the spacecraft after reentering the atmosphere, parachuted out of the seat and landed near the Ural Mountains’ city of Izevsk.
In 1993 Ivan was auctioned by Sotheby’s in London. The winning bid of $189,500 came from Texas billionaire and two-time U.S. presidential candidate, H. Ross Perot. Since 1997, Ivan has been on permanent loan to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, where he is on public display—still wearing his spacesuit ...
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