RUSSIA: Beedle in Wonderland

One chill day in Moscow, U.S. Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith decided he wanted to go fishing. He drove his car out to the Moscow Sea (an artificial lake near the capital) without notifying his MVD guards, who shadowed him everywhere he went. He persuaded the head of a-small fishery to take him out on the lake in the only rowboat in sight. Smith assumed that the guards, who had of course followed him, would wait at the shore. But he had underestimated "the Oriental concept .of hospitality" which he encountered in Russia. Related Smith last week in My Three...

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