It was about 8 o’clock on a warm, sunny evening in July. Natalia, the young woman keeping pace with me along Leningrad’s Nevski Prospekt, was easily the most beautiful woman on either side of the Urals. An associate something-or-other at the Smolny Institute, the Communist Party’s local headquarters, she bore a striking resemblance to Julie Christie. But, alas, Natalia’s pout was distorted by genuine anger. It was 1969, and she was holding me personally responsible for the war in Vietnam.

Not that I, a 21-year-old American college student, had much to do
with the war effort. As even a casual perusal of the files of the
Selective Service System will reveal, I sought to distance myself
from both the war and the military as far and as fast as the torn ACL in
my right knee would carry me. Besides, I had protested, I protested. But none of this mattered a whit to Comrade Natalia. This was her moment to defend the
cause of international communism while practicing her English. So as any
hopes faded that she might prove a deliciously corruptible Ninotchka, I
looked for a path of retreat to beat.

Across the grand boulevard slicing through the heart of Russia’s second
city stood Dom Knigi, the House of Books. I made for the imposing building, the largest bookstore in Leningrad, with Natalia dogging my steps, saying things about Richard Nixon that I then thought quite paranoid but, years later, had to admit were oddly insightful. My hope was that the library-like atmosphere of a bookstore would, if not silence her tirade, at least mute its volubility. That
worked, up to a point. She calmed down amid encyclopedic collections of
the works of Marx and Lenin. She even asked what I intended to purchase.
The prices were unbelievable. Everything was sharply discounted,
presumably to move the merchandise to the masses.

Still, I had no intention of buying anything. For one thing, I had a
train to catch early the next morning from the Finland Station. After
10 days visiting Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad, I was bound for Helsinki
and a decent meal, and I planned to travel light. Moreover, my pocket
contained but four rubles (then worth a handsome $4.40 at the official
rate). And, even if I could have shaken Natalia, I had no desire to
engage in any last minute money-changing on the black market. But then,
glancing about, I was beckoned by a full-size poster of the founding
father himself, V.I. Lenin, hanging in a back room down a dim corridor.

As I approached, it was evident the entire room was given over to
posters that were nothing like the posters then common at home. There
were no psychedelic montages idolizing a Lennon, a Hendrix or a Joplin.
There were no Richard Avedons and no saccharine pleas for world peace
adorned with daisies or the sentiments of Kahlil Gibran. And there was
certainly nothing even vaguely reminiscent of Robert Indiana’s insipid
but wildly popular Love poster. No, what we had here were seriously
classic works of agitprop, posters drawn in a range of styles from
socialist realism to fantastic primitives. At least a score were
variations on Lenin, whose waxy remains I had viewed days earlier at his
Red Square mausoleum in Moscow. Most of the others showed brawny workers
of both sexes building monstrous dams or reaping bountiful harvests. (In
retrospect, it’s remarkable how closely these selfless icons of Soviet
industry resemble today’s personally trained, buffed-up
celebrities.)

Then there was the most striking poster of all. Against a dark red
background stood a shirtless and exceptionally muscular black man of
indeterminate nationality. In his right hand, he held an ancient rifle
while a broken chain dangled from his wrist. In the lower right corner
of the poster was a silhouette in white of the battle cruiser Aurora,
the warship that had fired the shot signaling the start of the Bolshevik
coup in 1917. Inscribed in Russian across the top (but needing no
translation) was the famous command: “Rise up — you have nothing to lose
but your chains!” As propaganda, it was, even for that time, well over
the top. As pop art, though, it was to die for.

I asked Natalia to inquire about the cost.

“They are 10 kopeks each. Do you wish to buy one?”

“Of course I do. But I want not one but …” (pausing to do a quick
calculation) “40.”

Natalia was puzzled. Had I suddenly undergone some
revolutionary epiphany here among the icons of Soviet life?

“Why so many?” she asked hesitantly, not quite knowing what sort of
answer she might receive.

“To bring home with me. This is a gold mine. A license to print rubles.
You can’t imagine how much these posters would be worth in America.”

She was confused. Worth is a variable concept. But she had her
suspicions. After all, to her I was already a warmonger.

“What do you mean? You would not sell them, would you?”

It wasn’t clear whether it was anger or disappointment that hit her
first.

“So you will give them to your friends?” she offered.

“No, Natalia. Sell. I’ll sell them to friends and anyone else who wants
to buy one.”

Cautiously eyeing me, obviously praying to her socialist gods that I
would redeem myself with charity: “Oh, you mean you will sell them for
what they cost you.”

Silly Communist. “No, you have no idea how much these will fetch. Maybe
$10 each or more. The profit margin will be incredible.”

Profit margin. The concept, of course, was as familiar to her as it was
antithetical. She may have been the most beautiful woman east or west of
the Urals, but the look she now assumed was horrid. Before her stood not
only an agent of U.S. military aggression in Vietnam but a gold-plated
capitalist.

I couldn’t resist a last dig. “By the way, do they have any of Trotsky
and Stalin in stock? I hear they were prominent here at one time.
Perhaps there is something of them behind the counter for special
customers?”

She was not amused. After all, this was 30 years ago, long before
Gorbachev and Yeltsin came to Western attention. There was a Cold War
going on globally as well as a very hot one in Southeast Asia. And just
the previous August, Soviet forces fraternally seized control of
Czechoslovakia from the Czechs. The Evil Empire was still open for
business. So maybe if I waited until hell froze over, perhaps then
Stalin, Trotsky or even Khrushchev — giants of Soviet history — would
be sufficiently rehabilitated to be shrunk to poster size.

The next morning I took the train to Helsinki along with my thick roll
of posters. From a post office there, I mailed the package via surface
mail to my college address in Worcester, Mass., where I’d pick
them up when I returned in early September. In all, my investment came
to $5.60.

When I showed up for classes at Holy Cross just after Labor Day, the
posters were awaiting me, only slightly worse for the trip. After
retrieving the package from the post office on the first floor of the student union, I went upstairs to the cafe for a coffee and to
inspect my booty. Within 10 minutes of unraveling the roll of posters,
I had sold two at 10 bucks a crack and one for $8 plus a
jelly doughnut. (It was all the guy had, and I happily took it.) Not
only had I covered my initial investment, I was well on the way to
paying for the entire trip to Russia.

That fall of 1969, in case anyone of a certain age recalls, I was the
fellow selling Soviet propaganda posters from Worcester to Boston. As
one would expect, sales were especially brisk in Cambridge, where I
turned Brigham’s ice cream parlor just off Harvard Square into something
of a showroom. Also, as anticipated, the most popular poster by far was
the one of the fearsome, gun-toting black guerrilla. Sales of that item,
which made up nearly half my inventory, tended to divvy up about equally
between guilty white liberals and black revolutionary manquis.

None of this story would amount to anything more than a mildly
entertaining yarn were it not for a certain customer who turned up on my
doorstep that October.

Knocking on my dormitory door one night were a couple of black Holy Cross
students, one of whom I knew from a seminar on racism in
American culture. Along with him was a shorter, stockier man who was a
year behind us. Both were big in the college’s small Black Student
Union. The one I did not then know wore what appeared to be combat
boots, a choice of footwear I did not take to be an artifact of a
previous life experience but rather a Statement. So shod, he didn’t need
his skin color to stand out on a campus where nearly everyone else wore
Chuck Taylor rejects or ancient Bass Weejuns held together with white
surgical tape.

His name was Clarence, but he was introduced as Cooz — a nickname he
had appropriated from a decidedly white basketball player who years
earlier had starred at the college and then achieved some notoriety with
the Boston Celtics. Ironically, Cooz, I would soon discover, was also a
devotee of Malcolm X.

They had come, they said, to check out The Poster. It was obvious which
one they had in mind, and, as luck would have it, there was just one
left in stock. I got it out of my closet and rolled it out across my
desk. They looked. They hemmed. They hawed. We negotiated. Or rather, I
told them I wanted 10 bucks for it, and they allowed as to how I was
ripping off the BSU. How about I donate it? I demurred, telling them at
great length of the great lengths — not to mention the dangers — to
which I had gone to bring this work of Soviet art into the United
States.

“Hey, this is contraband. I’ve probably got an FBI file because of
this. What do the feds have on you?” In the battle of drawing room
subversives, I had just trumped them.

In the end, we exchanged one poster for two $5 bills.

Over the next several months, I ran into Clarence a few times, most
memorably that December when a campus protest against corporate
recruiters got out of hand and a number of students were arrested. Those
charged with failure to disperse were disproportionately black, leading
to charges of racism. Clarence was not among those arrested, but, along
with the rest of the BSU, he withdrew from the college in protest. For
its part, the school suspended all normal activities for three days and
went into the sort of collective soul searching that small, Jesuit
colleges do best. In the end, Clarence and his colleagues returned,
albeit hesitantly, to a chastened college.

After graduation the following June, I moved to California and never
gave Clarence another thought. That is, until 20 years later when I
saw him on television. He’d put on a few pounds. He was standing next to
George Bush at the summer White House in Kennebunkport, Maine. The president
was telling the press and the nation that this man, Clarence Thomas, my
old customer, would be his nominee to replace Thurgood Marshall as an
associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.

The rest is history. My part was prologue. But I can’t help wondering
what he’s done with that poster.