The captain announced our approach into Moscow, and I pressed toward the window. Below, impossibly close, a white plain stretched to every horizon. The snow had stopped, but the earth looked frozen solid—permanently. Here and there, stands of conifers pushed dark needles through the white, and along a thin gray line of road, a few heavy vehicles crept forward like insects crossing a page. We were flying low. Very low.
A ramshackle outbuilding drifted into view, and something about it nagged at me. I assumed, at first, that it was just the Soviet aesthetic—the same gray pragmatism stamped across the landscape from Vladivostok to the Baltic. But then I looked again at the particular bend in the road, the silhouette of the treeline, and I understood: I had seen it before. Ten minutes ago, in fact. The cabin had tilted slightly to the left, and I could feel the lateral G pressing against my right side. We were in a holding pattern, circling Sheremetyevo at low altitude, waiting for permission to land.
Whether the delay was weather-related—runways backed up, snow still being cleared—or simply a bureaucratic form of hostility toward a capitalist airline operating in Soviet airspace, I couldn't say.
This was November 1991, a Tuesday, a few weeks before the USSR ceased to exist. At the time, most long-haul flights from Japan to Western Europe were nonstop, but the Soviets had leverage: if you wanted their airspace—essentially all of Siberia—you played by their rules. Their rule was that a handful of weekly flights had to route through Moscow. I'd been dispatched suddenly to London on business and, despite a growing unease about the political situation, I took the only flight that fit my schedule. The failed coup attempt in August had left the country visibly unstable, and I was uneasy. I remember the day of the week because that airline ran its Moscow stopover on Tuesdays only.
We were already well behind schedule. By the time we reached London, it would be later still. I'd make my morning meeting, I figured, but the hotel would have to wait until close to midnight. I stared out at the darkening white landscape and brooded—until the engines suddenly surged, pressing me back into my seat. Clearance had been granted. The circling stopped. We straightened out and dropped toward the runway.
We touched down at Sheremetyevo. On the adjacent runways, Aeroflot aircraft moved freely—taking off, landing, going wherever they pleased. Whatever had kept us in that holding pattern hadn't bothered them.
When we pulled into the gate, only one door was opened. The airline's ground crew did not board. Instead, a group of men in military uniforms stepped on, Kalashnikovs slung across their chests. Behind them came another group dressed as cleaners.
On a normal stopover you'd expect fuel, a restocked galley, a quick cabin tidy. None of that was happening. The soldiers stationed themselves in the aisles, fingers resting near their triggers, saying nothing. The cleaners went straight to work—opening galley compartments, pulling out untouched meal trays and unopened bottles of wine and juice, stuffing everything into large bags with the focused efficiency of people who had done this many times before.
We were supposed to be able to deplane. That was standard procedure—stretch your legs in the terminal, browse the duty-free. Not today. We sat. I watched.
The cleaners worked their way through the cabin, emptying the seatback pockets of everything: magazines, safety cards, pamphlets. They didn't hesitate. When they reached for items that were clearly personal—a book left on an armrest, a water bottle in a cup holder—a few passengers instinctively grabbed their things back. I quietly slipped my Walkman and headphones into my jacket and pulled my carry-on down from the overhead bin and held it in my lap. By the time they finished, the plane had been stripped to the walls: food, drinks, reading material, utensils, toilet paper. Everything. The cleaners filed out wearing the blank faces of people who were not exactly thieves, but who were doing what the situation required. The soldiers followed, apparently satisfied.
The door closed. The galley stayed empty.
After a long wait on the tarmac, we lifted off into the Moscow night and turned west. The captain came on to apologize for the "minor disruption" at the airport and to assure us that there was plenty of fuel to reach London. The chief purser followed: no hot meals would be served on the three-hour flight to Heathrow, she said, but they'd managed to hold on to some snacks and drinks. Nobody complained.
The Soviet Union collapsed on December 26, 1991—about six weeks after that Tuesday. I've come to think of that layover as the closest I've ever come to watching a country die in real time. The soldiers, the cleaners—whoever they actually were, whatever organization had sent them—I still don't know. I don't know whether they supported the changes that were coming or feared them. What I do know is that I felt something on that plane I hadn't felt before: the specific dread of a system losing its coherence. Not chaos exactly—something colder than that. The machinery of a state still functioning, but barely, and in ways that no longer made sense to anyone, possibly including the people running it. That afternoon in the cabin at Sheremetyevo is why I think seriously about what countries are, what borders mean, and what holds a society together—and what it looks like when it doesn't.
The world hasn't gotten more peaceful since. Russia—the state that absorbed the Soviet legacy—is now a nation at war. Its airspace is closed to most civilian aircraft, and for most travelers, Russia has simply dropped off the map.
That holding pattern never ended.
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