'Mission to Moscow' — A Journalist's Memoir

Peter Young was sent by LIFE Magazine to the Soviet Union in the late 1960s with a mission: get out of Moscow and find out what regular people are doing.

He picked up stories at collective farms, 15th century monasteries and college-kid summer camps; met poets and policemen and taught foreign ministry-types the meaning of American slang like "keep tabs on."  

He learned things he hadn't anticipated. And looking back, he told an audience of 20 at a "hearthside" chat and book signing at Christ's Church Rye on April 12, he learned still more.

As Young says in his introduction, "Making sense of the past requires a certain passage of time, for piercing together historic fragments into a meaningful whole."

To check out Mission to Moscow: A Cold War Look at the Warmth of the Russian People, click here. 

Photo gallery by Colin Chapman