What is this?This is the story of Marcus
L. Endicott's solo bicycle
journey from Yugoslavia to the Soviet Union in 1990. The adventure really began the
year before, in 1989, but really hasn't ended yet today;
though, there have been perhaps more than a few bumps in the road along the way....
This is a travel journal, and was originally intended to become a book. But, two
great historical events occurred virtually one after another and changed the course of not
only my personal history but that of the world as well; the first was what became known as
the "Gulf War" and the second was the "August Coup", essentially the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
After three months in the Soviet Union as a guest of the Soviet Peace Committee and the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the visa extension I had requested was refused and I was
required to leave three days earlier than I wished. During my flight
back to the United States, the Soviet government ordered OMON special forces to occupy the
Lithuanian television tower, which culminated in killing 14 people and injuring 140,
including crushing one man with a tank. When a friend in New York,
Garrick Beck, told me the news just after my return, he watched me suddenly sicken
at the thought that I might have exposed numerous friends and other good people to
potential retribution. Now, nearly ten years later, I cannot even write this without
tears streaming down my face.
Then within only a few days, U.S. warplanes attacked Iraq, and for weeks the fever of
war was in the air, with neighbor turning against neighbor. Even as I waited in New
York's Penn Station to take a train back to my family home near Savannah, Georgia, police
came and searched everything I owned, breaking open locks and throwing everything on the
floor; let me be clear about this, I never received such treatment even one time
throughout the whole of Central and Eastern Europe. Not long after I made it
back to my family in Georgia, I was called by friends to a peace camp in nearby Florida in
response to the war; that camp was attacked by
drunken local vigilantes on the day the ground war started in the Persian Gulf, and as a
result I required hospitalization. Following not long after my recovery, both
physical and psychological, was the next dramatic event... Russia's August Coup.
During the August Coup, I found myself in Elkins, West Virginia, where a number of
remarkable things happened on the way to the first full delegated Green Congress. While driving along
somewhere in Virginia, I stopped to pick up the only hitch-hiker I had seen; it
turned out to be Michael Feinstein, a man I
had heard about throughout Eastern Europe, who was also on his way to the Green Congress.
As the events unfolded that became the
August Coup,
from the floor of the Congress I monitored the same short-wave radio that had accompanied
me throughout my travels, periodically updating the assembly in real time. I also
watched in amazement over Mitra's shoulder
as he managed emergency traffic across the San Francisco Moscow Teleport
(now Sovam) supporting the few computer networks in Russia from Elkins, West Virginia; it
was only then that the full importance of what I had stumbled on while hacking my way
around Russia became clear....
So, what happened to the book?
Well, as it turned out, between the frenzy of the Gulf War and the changes of the
August Coup nearly everyone, and certainly publishers, seemed to lose interest in my
story. In retrospect perhaps my two most significant achievements were: 1) to become
not only the first, but perhaps the only, American allowed to cross the Soviet border
alone and unaccompanied on a bicycle, and 2) to record in text and image what is probably
the first great international technomadic journey in the history of the Internet.
So why this now?
After working on the text and images off and on for many years, even longer than the
actual trip itself, I returned to Russia in the summer of 1998 to re-visit my old friends
for the first time and attend a peace camp there. To my utter astonishment, that
camp near the village of
Mshinskaya was
raided and dispersed by a battalion of OMON special forces backed up by hundreds of other
police and officials, under the order of Vadim Gustov, then governor of Russia's
Leningrad region, now first deputy prime minister with a wide brief encompassing the
construction industry and youth, regional and ethnic policy. As a
result, I arrived at the conclusion that the time had come to tell my story....
Miru mir... still means Peace on Earth,
Marcus L. Endicott
Colorado Springs, November 1998
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