Although fluent in Russian, I have traveled to my homeland only once in my life, in the depressive years of the Soviet Union's Communist existence. That trip, in 1977, was occasioned by my position as an executive of a supercomputer company whose products were highly desired by the Soviets. As a result, I was allowed to travel to an area closed to tourists, the remote spot where my father was born before the revolution of 1917.

This is the story of that trip into the heart of Russia.