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car. He spoke quietly to her for a moment and was answered by a vehement shaking of her head and a flurry of negative hand gestures. Clearly, there was no First Class space available, and I was resigning myself to travel among the deodorant-challenged masses when Viktor gently took the stewardess by the arm and walked her a short way down the platform with their backs to us and out of hearing. When they returned, she climbed into the First Class coach and Viktor walked over to our apprehensive group. "It will be a few minutes . . . she is reassigning the First Class compartments, and then we will get on board." Viktor's mysterious badge had again worked its magic. T he trip to Krasnadar lasted 28 hours, and as the giant train roared through miles of primeval forests and across seemingly endless plains, I saw firsthand the abject failure of communism: wheat fields big enough to feed a nation were littered with abandoned farm airport seemed a bit thin, but no one questioned his motives except to ask if train reservations had been made. Viktor shrugged, "We'll take care of that when we get to the station," and I had visions of us crammed into a drafty boxcar filled with smelly peasants and chugging across a frozen landscape like in a scene from Doctor Zhivago. The reality of the train we were to take was pleasantly different. It was huge, with tracks of a wider gauge than ours, and pulled by a gigantic, gleaming engine surmounted by the symbolic hammer and sickle of Soviet Communism. But very uncommunistic, for a supposedly classless society, was that the train offered four classes of travel. Upon learning this, we naturally hoped that we could get First Class seats, but without prior reservations it seemed doubtful. "I'll see what I can do," Viktor shrugged and casually approached a pudgy, cheerful- looking young woman, dressed in what looked like a stewardess uniform, standing by the steps of the yacht-like First Class about $3.50 U.S. for one ruble. The illegal street exchange rate, however, was about ten rubles for a single dollar. The ridiculous exchange rate, as it turned out, was to bring our hunt to an almost unhappy conclusion. The shopping tour was a lesson in Soviet economics, but not particularly a surprise because after the previous days in the capital city, I was getting a clearer idea of what Winston Churchill had meant when he said "Russia is a riddle inside a puzzle wrapped in an enigma." When we got back to our hotel, laden with our survival foods and finished packing for departure for the airport, another Russian mystery presented itself: Viktor's almost psychotic fear of flying. Only he didn't tell us of his fearful distrust of flying on Aeroflot, the Soviet State airline, but rather, lied about the airport at Krasnadar, our destination, being closed for repair and that we would have to go by train. His explanation about the closed $100,000 Deer Continued from page 125 S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 7 6