A firsthand experience of Gorbachev’s reforms: Elizabeth Sullivan

The Trans-Siberian express was on the platform in Beijing, readying for its weeklong journey to Moscow via the Chinese city of Harbin. Six Westerners were aboard, myself included. I was the only American, with the others, as I recall, including an Australian, a Dutch couple, a Canadian and one other.

The year was 1985. After nearly two and a half sweltering summer months traveling by train around China, thanks to a modest stipend from the wonderful mid-career journalism program then known as the Gannett Fellowship in East Asian Studies, I had a tight schedule to get to Finland in time to catch my return plane to New York City (thus completing my first around-the-world journey).

But how to get to Helsinki?

Soviet consular officials in Beijing were unsympathetic to my request for a Soviet visa or to allow me to travel on the Trans-Siberian through Ulan Bator, fulfilling a longtime dream to visit Mongolia. They kept insisting that “Outer Mongolia,” as it then was called, was a separate country, so I would need to get a Mongolian visa. The folks at the “Outer Mongolia” office were equally insistent that permission had to come from the Soviets.

It didn’t help that, in my effort to look less scruffy after so many weeks of backpacking and rewashing rather threadbare clothes, I bought a dress at a Chinese market — only to find that the Soviet consular official had visited the same market. Same dress. Oops!

The best I was able to manage, and I felt lucky to get it, was a…