My day at the Russian Embassy in Geneve Suisse 1966

By Kay Ebeling

I was jumping up and down outside the locked gates trying to get the Russians to let me in. At age 17, I wanted to convince the Soviets to stop being enemies and make peace with USA.

Sudden Memory while gazing at Lake Tahoe: 

Visitors' Guide Lake Geneva

I got to live in Geneva Switzerland for six months in 1966. The trip was a high school graduation present, sort of, to fly off and stay with a relative in Europe, but it was not really a present. Every summer since seventh grade, my parents sent me to stay with someone and often that someone did not want me there, my dad probably paid them to “watch” me. So I’d be off on my own in these strange cities. 

With my high school French language skills and a pocket full of travelers checks, I wandered around Geneva Switzerland by myself the summer of 1966, and when I realized there were huge embassies for different countries there, I went “Wow.”

The woman who I was staying with in Geneva left every morning for her job in a real estate investment firm (part of Investors Overseas Services IOS Bernie Cornfeld, whole 'nother story) so I literally had nothing to do but go up to the pool on the Avenue de Bude building rooftop, and for me, being from Southern California, a rooftop pool was not that big a kick.

So I’d wander around.

One day I took a bus to the Russian Embassy. I was seventeen in a foreign country, got on a bus, and rode out to the Russian Embassy which was a massive compound outside the city limits. This was 1966, they were the evil Communists sworn enemies of USA. 

I got off the bus at this windy stop with the lake across the highway, loud traffic whizzing by. I was faced with at least a 20 foot high metal fence that was supposed to have a gate but there was no way I could find  it opened. There was a way to push a button and call in a message, but they did not answer me.

So there I was with my straggle of unkempt hair and chubby body jumping up and down outside the Russian Embassy, the beautiful Lake Geneva on the other side of a busy highway, shouting, “Let me in let me in, I just want to talk Peace. I just want to make Peace!”

That really happened. 

No one ever came to the gate or answered me and I caught the next bus into the city.

Then in 1968 at age 20 I was working full time for the Peace and Freedom Party in L.A.; read about that here:

I was a teenage anti Vietnam war activist

Memoir by Kay Ebeling, featuring Nancy Pelosi and the Black Panthers

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-Weblogged by Kay Ebeling, cogitating  

Russian Consulate General in Geneva website has photos but not jpegs...  https://russian-e-visa.com/consulate/russian-consulate-general-in-geneva-switzerland/ 

Cut paragraph: 

No one told me why I was being sent away every summer and I didn't see it as strange, because when you grow up in dysfunction, it's all you know, so you don’t realize it's dysfunction. You don't question it, it just is.