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all that curious about Nazi religious propaganda, or about the outside world in general. That’s what surprised me more than anything. Where was their curiosity? Had it been squelched along with their individual freedoms? They were interested in what I could tell them about the latest rock-and-roll music, which at least said something about their preferred art form.
    The stifling suffocation of curiosity and inquiry overwhelmed me after a while. It produced an even more profound urge toward rebellion in me, and when we finally snuck out of the university to return to our hotel, I was told we no longer had a room and that my luggage had been removed by the authorities. Rather than sleep on a threadbare sofa in the freezing cold lobby of the rundown hotel, I made myself purposely uncomfortable on the icy floor. Benny Goodman and his orchestra were in town, so of course he was being followed by a Western reporter. The two of them entered the lobby, recognized me attempting to sleep on the floor, and wanted to know what was going on. I told them the entire story, including a coda which made headlines in the Russian papers later: “I want to come back to the Soviet Union in the winter and dance the can-can nude in Red Square.”
    Two years before, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, had visited the set of Can-Can on a tour of the Fox lot. He watched us dance it and then quipped to the U.S. papers, “The face of humanity is prettier than its backside.” I countered by saying, “He was upset because we wore panties.” (The can-can was performed in France without underwear; that was why it was considered risqué.) Later on, after seeing The Apartment, Khrushchev sent me a note. It simply said, “You’ve improved.”
    As you might imagine, my Soviet adventure was one I longed to get over, but I found I couldn’t. It felt as though so much of Russia itself was buried inside a deeper memory somewhere inside me.
    Years later, I had a complicated, loving relationship with a Soviet director I will call Vassy. He was from an elite Russian family and longed to come to the West to work. I was his unofficial sponsor and found him to be exhilarating, adorable, impossibly difficult, deeply religious, unbelievably chauvinistic, and a profound believer in evil. We fought and argued about everything (I believe now just for the sake of the challenge). We hiked, laughed, and saw movies, and I learned to cook Russian food—kasha, beets, garlic, cabbage—and of course, to drink vodka. Vassy was a very well-educated artist who managed to get hold of caviar and God knows what else, and yet he dried his socks on a teakettle.
    He was certain he had lived many times before (with me, actually). Most of his leading actresses and one of his wives looked like me. He attended many channeling sessions with me. It was through Vassy that I came to know of the Soviet government’s acceptance of the presence of UFOs and of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth, and he was instrumental in my visiting Billy Meier in Switzerland, whose abduction story is the most provable UFO case on record. Through Vassy, I met Roald Sagdaev, the head of the Soviet Space Agency at the time, and was told that UFOs were documented fact, alien spacecraft had visited earth, and that a cover-up was in place so as not to alarm the human race.
    Vassy and I were compatible in so many ways, with the exception of the obsessive belief he had in the existence of evil. He could not wrap his mind around the possibility that humans determined their own negative reality all on their own. He called it “evil interference.” When we argued vociferously, he would often take my shoulders, shake me, and say “Shirlitchka, you are being possessed by the Devil.” He couldn’t accept that the “Devil” was my own negative thinking running amok in my own mind.
    He believed we humans were put on Earth to fight and win the battle against EVIL (when he said it, it always sounded like all