Srila Prabhupada in Moscow.
Shyamasundar: Moscow. This, you have to remember and realize, was the height of the cold-war period, and there were threats going back and forth between America and Russia to drop hydrogen bombs at any moment. Leonid Brezhnev was in charge in Russia in those times, and it was a very paranoid and extremely repressive regime. No one was allowed in. But Prabhupada kept saying, “I want to go to Russia. I want to get behind this iron curtain and see what is going on. Those people, they would probably like to hear about Krishna.” At that time no one was able to get Prabhupada a visa. And then, by some fluke, Prabhupada asked me if I could get him one in Bombay, and that very day I secured us visas and tickets to Moscow. A couple of days later, we were on our way. Those days are hard to imagine now. I mean, even in India, there was very little available in the way of consumer goods or freedom, and things like that were very scarce. And I remember thinking, “Hmm, I better have a camera of some kind to take some pictures of Prabhupada in Russia. This is an historic occasion.” And I scoured the streets of Bombay, and I was able to find, finally, a small Brownie box camera with just a hole in one end for a few rupees. And that was it. And one roll of black-and-white film that had twelve shots on it. That was it. And those have subsequently become historic photos. They all came out perfectly by Krishna’s arrangement, because I had no idea how to photograph anything. But anyway, there we were in Russia. And Prabhupada was just like a commander-in-chief behind the lines. We knew we were being stalked by the KGB. All kinds of things were happening. But in five short days he was able to plant the seed of Krishna consciousness resulting in tens of thousands of devotees growing. That was his potency.
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