Thirty years ago I first came to the United States. Thirty years! October 22,1991. I will never forget that date. At the time, it was emigration, not travel. At the time, I didn't know if I would ever return. It was still the USSR, which collapsed just two months later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDxRpMXXrTA Why did I leave? Many dreamed at that time of escaping USSR, and I, in particular, thought about it, from the very beginning of Perestroika and Glasnost. Suddenly, after many, many years of censorship of the Soviet Union, new information about Stalin, about Lenin, about the Gulag, about the repressions , poured into the mass media. I eagerly listened to Voice of America and dreamed of escaping to the West. In the summer of 1991 I got an invitation to some conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. I don’t even remember now what kind of conference it was, but by some miracle I got invited. Then there was the fuss of getting permission to leave the country and to obtain t
