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Eleven years after my defection from the Soviet Union, I was finally returning to Moscow. I was travelling without a Russian visa, for the Moscow I was heading for was in America, just a two-hour drive from New York.

I consciously chose Moscow, Pennsylvania (population 1500) as the final point of my long journey in the footsteps of Ilf and Petrov, Soviet satirists who drove across the USA in 1935 and summarised their impressions in the book “Little Golden America”. The writers saw America as “preponderantly a country of one-story and two-story houses”, i.e. the land of villages and small towns, a perception which - sixty-five years later - I was ready to share.

Just like the Russians, I passed through countless little American towns and came to the conclusion that they reflected the country’s character much better than its big and smoky metropolises.

“Everlasting is the automobile and gasoline tedium of small cities,” remarked Ilf and Petrov before observing that, to beat the “tedium”, some of them “make heroic efforts to distinguish themselves from their brethren of the same type”. They illustrated their point by quoting the road signs, “hung at the entrance to the town, quite, let us say, like signs over the entrance to a store, so that the customer may know what is being sold there. ‘Redwood City’. And under it in verse is written: ‘Climate best by government test!’ “ The writers also mentioned another town’s entrance sign: “The Biggest Small Town In The United States”.

I can testify to the fact that the sixty-five years that ensued did little to diminish small-town America’s megalomania and its childish passion for clumsy doggerels.

“To select the ideal vegetation
For our city curbside decoration
Required some botanical discrimination
And horticultural education.”

This is the opening verse of the poem “Petunias” by Ruth Hopkins which I found in “River Life” - a newspaper published in Pierre, the capital of South Dakota. With its incongruous Capitol building, open to public 24 hours a day, Pierre (population 12,000) is a rather charming small town, where strangers say “Hi!” to you in the street and, if you ask for directions, there is a good chance you will be offered a lift. Despite being designated a state capital, in its heart Pierre remains an archetypal “cowtown” - friendly and sheepish in equal measure.

“What sort of beer are you drinking, buddy?” a local man in a blue singlet asked me as I was sitting on the bank of the Missouri, with a glass of Chardonnay in my hand. Having learnt that I was from London, the man inquired if it was very hot there and whether I knew Steve.

Pierre, whose only claim to fame is that “Dances with Wolves” was filmed there, seems to be in the grip of two obsessions: petunias in the streets (“To make our hometown famous and pretty/Pierre will become The Petunia City” - pace unforgettable Ruth Hopkins) and guns.

“Sorry, we are closed, please come again!” ran a polite sign on the door of “River Traders Gun Shop” - one of many similar stores in Pierre, where the only forthcoming “events”, advertised in a local newsletter, were marathon shoots, gun club sitter shoots, handgunners pin matches, bowling pin shoots, Dacota Territory Muzzleloaders meetings, and even a “Ladies and Juniors .22 Pistol Shoot”.

I couldn’t help the uneasy feeling that it was one of those towns, where friendly locals periodically go berserk and, for no obvious reason, start spraying everything around them (including the ubiquitous petunias) with bullets.

Unlike Pierre, the Vermont town of Cavendish had a real opportunity to “distinguish itself from its brethren of the same type”: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer and the Nobel Prize winner, had spent 17 years of his exile there. Yet its residents chose to forsake Solzhenitsyn in favour of their compatriot Phineas Gage, a 19th century railway foreman, who once had his tamping iron accidentally blown through his skull and out of the top of his head - and survived. I could hardly believe my eyes, when I saw a granite memorial to the vivacious foreman in the middle of the town square.

While in Cavendish, I also learnt that the Phineas Gage Historic Festival and Anniversary Commemoration to mark 150 years from the day when poor Phineas’ head underwent its historic piercing was held there in 1998. The events of this Rod-Through-the-Head Commemoration Festival included a “BBQ chicken lunch, hosted by American Legion Post”! The sheer mockery of commemorating the piercing of Phineas Gage with a barbecue was lost on the proud natives of Cavendish, who now want to make the Festival (and the barbecue, no doubt) an annual occasion.

But by far the most peculiar American town that I have visited during my travels was Whittier in Alaska. This “city” (as it insists on being referred to) on the shores of Prince William Sound could easily market itself as the world’s only one-house municipality, for all its 334 residents live in one 14-storied Begich Tower- until recently, Alaska’s tallest building. To be precise, only 333 people reside in the skyscraper: one maverick chose to escape the high-rise hustle-and-bustle by settling down in an abandoned bus, terminally parked in the harbour.

The Tower, built by the US military during World War II, has all necessary conveniences: shops, restaurants, a laundromat, a post-office, a museum (down the hall from the post-office), a beauty salon, and even a church. There used to be a small jail there too, but it had to close down for lack of offenders. One floor is occupied by the “city government”, headed by Carrie Williams, the outgoing and chain-smoking “City Manager”. The Tower also accommodates two rival newspapers - the mild-mannered “Whittier Sentinel” and the censorious “Turnagain Times”, but has only one public “restroom”.

The initial decision to house all the town's residents in one building was an attempt to minimise clearing away of snow, of which there’s no shortage in Whittier in winter. When the military left in 1963, the town, sorry the city, went into hibernation, only occasionally interrupted by the Alaska Railroad trains from Anchorage bringing tourists for Glacier Cruises in the Sound.

The railroad had been the mini-city’s only link to the outside world (if not to count a tiny airstrip, left by the military and locally known as “Whittier International Airport”) until last May, when the Whittier-bound extension of the Alaska Marine Highway was completed. The town is now preparing for a boom and the average price of a Begich Tower condominium has already skyrocketed from $15,000 to $30,000.

Alas, prosperity doesn’t come cheap these days: with the number of annual visitors expected to jump 12-fold, Whittier’s “city government” will most probably have to invest in a second public restroom.

* * *

“The machine flies down the road. Little cities flash by. What pretentious names! Siracuse, Pompeii, Batavia, Warsaw, Caledonia, Waterloo, Geneva, Moscow - a little Moscow, where you can get lunch Number 2 in a drug-store, griddle cakes with maple syrup, and where for dinner you are entitled to sweet-salty pickles, where in the motion-picture theatre a film of bandit life is unreeled - a purely American Moscow,” wrote Ilf and Petrov in 1935.

There are about a dozen little Moscows all over America, and Moscow, Pennsylvania, where I decided to terminate my journey, was no different from many other small American towns. Cars were passing through it without slowing down. It didn’t even have a “motion-picture theatre”. A short town profile, kindly e-mailed to me by Lackawanna County CVB, mentioned “three playgrounds offering recreation for children of all ages” and the annual Moscow Country Fair.

I failed to locate a single playground, but spotted a row of rusty tracks and a half-ruined wooden shed of a long-deserted railway station, with the word “Moscow” still clearly visible on its battered façade. I also ticked off a “China Delight” take-away, a “Synergy” hair salon, a “Moscow Vol. Fire & Hose Company” and, encouragingly, a “Vital Link Chiropractic Center”. It was good to know that I still had some sort of a link to Moscow.

The only building of note was a colonial-revival mansion on the hill. “This building was given by Joseph Loveland to the men of Moscow to be used as YMCA,” ran a memorial plate above the porch. Well, Joseph Loveland would have been upset to learn that, contrary to his wishes, the mansion now housed Moscow Borough Police Department and - aptly - “Women’s Self-Defence Courses”, too.

“Ask Why We Are Successful” invited a poster above a dingy car-wash outlet. I wanted to ask but there was no one inside. Behind the car wash, the town ended.

I sat down on the grass, opened a copy of “Moscow Villager”, which I had picked up in the general store, and read the lead story: “On the first day of this fine month, Moscow’s Borough Council conducted the first of its two regular monthly meetings… Council offered its congratulations to fellow Council member, solicitor Zero [sic], who recently became the father of a bouncing baby boy… Zero now has enough members in his household to warrant two recyclable [sic] bins…”

“We can say honestly, with hand on heart, that we wouldn’t like to live in America,” Ilf and Petrov wrote in the end of their book. As for me, I was not sure about the rest of America, but I knew for certain that I did not want to live in Moscow, Pennsylvania, even if they offered me all recyclable bins in the world.

Having looked up from the paper, I noticed a “Moscow Borough Police” van cruising near-by. A patrolman inside was staring at me suspiciously. Reading a newspaper on the grass was probably an offence in this town.

I walked back to my car, started the engine and, for the second time in my life, defected from Moscow - never to return.

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