Mother was summoned to the Visa Office to explain to its head, one Kaija (meaning seagull in Latvian—an amusingly incongruous surname for a high–ranking Interior Ministry apparatchik with KGB connections), why, how, and when she'd signed a letter of protest to the international community against being refused to leave the country. Such letters, organized by refusenik leaders, had been finding their way to anti–Soviet Russian émigré publications, like the Possev in Germany. From what she told me, she'd remained true to form under the questioning. The authorities aimed to find and isolate the instigators who were posing a threat to their rule; the “little people” like Mother were of interest to them only insofar as they could provide information.

Kaija tried both the soft approach—gently berating her like an erring schoolgirl— and the hard—raising his voice and threatening that she'd never be allowed to leave the country unless she cooperated—but in Mother he'd picked the wrong person. “Somebody approached me in the street,” she shrugged. “I've no idea who those people were, I'd never seen them before, and I signed because I've always considered—as you well know—your refusal to let me be reunited with my dear elder brother to be unlawful and in violation of our country's nobly stated policy of ‘Humanitarian Reunification of Families.’”

The growing volume of protests, at home and abroad, became particularly unwelcome as the Soviet leadership decided that to be economically solvent while continuing to re–arm, it needed to play the game of détente and also prepare for Nixon's visit, which was to take place a year later. (According to Kissinger, Nixon suggested a summit to Brezhnev as early as 1970.) For refuseniks like us, 1971 was to be a propitious year, with détente bearing fruit in just a few weeks.

Against this background of lofty global politics (most of which would be shown as either misjudged or misapplied—see, for example, Kissinger's admission, in 1978, of the failure of his approach to the Soviet Union), in my humble microcosm my young man's love life proceeded independently.