On a warm day in May 1958, a year that inaugurated the crises that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall, a KGB mobile team in Ukraine picked up a subject of surveillance they code-named “Tourist.” The man was approximately 35–36 years of age, of medium height, and on the slim side. He had a slightly elongated face, a large straight nose, and was wearing glasses. The subject was dressed in a greenish shirt and dark gray pants, tight by Soviet standards, which suggested that he was a foreigner.
They began to follow Tourist at the exit from the Kyiv Highway to the city of Poltava in central Ukraine—a couple dozen miles away from the city. He was driving a Soviet-made Volga sedan. Once in Poltava, Tourist showed particular interest in the Corpus Park, the Poltava Victory monument, and the local museum and theater. As one might expect of any tourist, he took pictures of all those places. But his interest in one of the ordinary-looking houses in central Poltava aroused suspicion. Tourist arrived at Number 28 on Pushkin Street and knocked on the door. There was no answer. He then entered the courtyard, where he met a woman from a neighboring house. He asked her something. The surveillance team managed to catch only one word, “Nina.” The woman then pointed to one of the doors off the courtyard. Tourist knocked on that door; again there was no answer. He then got back into the car and drove off. His entire visit to Poltava lasted less than three hours. The KGB surveillance team filed their report. They had no idea who Tourist was, or what he was doing in the city. All they knew for certain was that he did not find whoever he was looking for.1
“Tourist” was thirty-nine-year-old Franklyn Holzman, a former radar mechanic in the US Air Force who has spent a good part of 1944 and almost half of 1945 at the US air bases in Soviet Ukraine. The author of a book on Soviet taxation, he was visiting Moscow and Kyiv and decided to make a stopover in Poltava, where he had spent eight months, a memorable period that helped decide his future career as a scholar of Soviet economics. The woman he had been looking for was Nina Afanasieva, whom he had met in Poltava in December 1944 and who, on the orders of the secret police, had broken contact with him in the spring of 1945. The Poltava KGB would spend the rest of 1958 and much of the following year trying to find Nina Afanasieva. They eventually located her in the city of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine. Upon investigating, they found no proof that she had tried to make contact with Holzman. She was allowed to continue living a normal life.2
By the time of Holzman’s visit in 1958, World War II had been over for more than a decade and the Cold War was reaching its height. The former allies had become adversaries. Holzman knew nothing of the KGB surveillance and suspicions. Until the end of his life in September 2002 he maintained positive memories of his wartime service in the Soviet Union. In his Lexington home in Massachusetts he kept photographs, letters, and embroidered Ukrainian tablecloths that reminded him of the days when Americans and Soviets had fought together. Yet when asked, Holzman, an accomplished scholar of the Soviet economy, was never able to explain some crucial aspects of his wartime experience, especially the question of why the Soviets had allowed American bases to be established on their territory in the first place.3