The Border Guard’s Sleazy Offer
A train to Ukraine, a missing visa, and the informal economy of the post-Soviet 1990s.
At the Russia–Ukraine border, on a night train stopped in Kursk, a thick-lipped border guard in a green uniform flipped through my U.S. passport.
No visa. No entry.
He was heavyset and sweating, the collar of his uniform dark with it. He looked up, then past me, and fixed his eyes on my fiancée. He said something in Russian—quick, casual, almost bored.
“What did he say?” I asked.
Kate leaned in and whispered, “He said he’d let us into Ukraine if I had sex with him in the train toilet.”
I was stunned. Not angry, just stunned. By my third year in Russia, I had learned that corruption in the former Soviet Union wasn’t an aberration. It was an essential part of an inefficient system.
The collapse of the state had made ordinary life difficult enough that parallel systems filled the gaps. If you needed something, papers, money, or permission, you didn’t waste time on laws or procedures for results. You looked for people with connections, блат, as Russians say.
The phone in my apartment in Perm existed only because a Russian friend knew someone at the phone company. Registering my visa within the impossible three-day window after entry was made possible by slipping cash to a man in a leather coat outside the police station. He disappeared inside with my passport and returned with the right stamp. My wallet was thirty dollars lighter, but the essential job was done.
Even exchanging U.S. dollars required choreography. At the market, money passed from one flat-faced man in a leather jacket to the next, then the next again, until finally it reached someone who nodded and produced the rubles. Fast. Professional. Illegal. That was Russia in the late 1990s.
So the border guard’s offer, sleazy, blunt, transactional, felt grotesque, but not surprising. It was simply another man using his position at a choke point for leverage.
After a brief negotiation, we settled on a different arrangement: one hundred dollars each. No visa. No paperwork. Just cash.
He took the money and waved us through.
Getting into Ukraine turned out to be easy.
Getting out was another squirrley matter.