The Time I Flew With Gary Hart on Aeroflot

Who would ever expect to run into a guy who might've been U.S. president in the Moscow airport in 1991?

In 1991, I unexpectedly got to be buds with one-time presidential candidate Gary Hart on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Latvia.

Just a few years before that, Hart, who is now 87, had a solid chance of becoming president. Charismatic and handsome, during campaign season for the 1988 election Hart was for a while the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. He got derailed by a scandal that today, after years of bathing in Trump sludge, would barely get a shrug. Journalists caught him messing around with a woman named Donna Rice, who was not his wife.

Soon after that story broke, Hart dropped out of the race, and at least from my perspective went quiet.

By 1991, I had made several trips to Moscow and to some of the countries that were escaping the old East Bloc. On this particular trip, I wanted to write some stories out of the Baltic nations – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. First, I traveled to Moscow to do some more reporting there, and then I bought a ticket to fly from Moscow to Latvia’s capital, Riga. The only airline flying that route was the old Soviet state airline, Aeroflot.

Flying on Aeroflot in those days is where things could get weird.

As an American, I bought my ticket with dollars – which was known as “hard currency” in the old Soviet Union. The USSR’s rubles were not then an international currency – pretty much worthless outside of Soviet borders. The Soviet government and industries needed international currency – or hard currency – to buy goods from most other countries, like Germany or Japan. So whenever possible, the Soviets sought to charge foreigners in dollars, pounds, yen or anything that could be used for international trade.

Paying in hard currency won you VIP treatment. It got you into the best stores, hotels and restaurants in Moscow. (And you really didn’t want to go to the less-than-best stores, hotels or restaurants in Moscow. The drop-off was severe.) The VIP thing also applied to flying – to a point. Once I got to Moscow’s airport and found my gate, I was ushered into the “nice” gate for those paying in hard currency, while the Soviets who paid in rubles got pushed into the shitty gate.

The nice gate was about as nice as a Texarkana bus station, so I can’t imagine what the shitty gate was like – though it was certainly a lot more crowded. Most of the people taking the flight had paid in rubles. Only foreigners paid in hard currency, and not many foreigners traveled around the disintegrating USSR at the time.

So I walked into the nice gate where there were maybe a dozen people. I looked around to see if someone looked American. Most of the travelers seemed to be from somewhere in Europe. But as I gazed around, there was this one tall guy across the room, and he looked like…wait…wait…holy crap, that’s Gary friggin’ Hart!

If I’d seen him across the gate in a U.S. airport, I would’ve enjoyed the celebrity siting and left him alone. But there’s a different sensibility when you’re the only two Americans about to board an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Riga. It was kind of like strolling around Mars and running into the only other human on the planet. So I walked over and introduced myself, and let him know I was a journalist from USA Today.

Hart seemed happy enough to meet me. We started chatting about what we were each doing there. He was, remarkably, traveling alone. Another aspect of flying Aeroflot was that there were no assigned seats, and certainly no first class – this was, after all, a communist nation. Although the hard-currency passengers got to board first and choose their seats. The reason I say Hart seemed glad to meet me is because he then asked me if I’d like to sit with him. So, I did, and we talked through most of the flight – again, mostly about why were there and what we were observing.

Why was Gary Hart in Moscow and Riga? Basically, consulting for U.S. entities that wanted to do business or make connections in these newly-opening economies. Hart had also been working on a book about that part of the world. (It didn’t get great reviews.)

After we landed, Hart gave me his card and suggested we keep in touch. We parted ways and I went to my hotel. As it turned out, my hotel was apparently the only Riga hotel Westerners would want to stay in, and when I later went to dinner there, I again ran into Hart, who was having a business dinner with a couple of Latvians.

Over the following few years, I called Hart once in a while when working on a story about Russia, or something that had to do with technology and government. He always took my calls and was helpful. He’s stayed active since then, consulting, writing, speaking and working in academia. In 2014, President Obama made him Special Envoy for Northern Ireland.

I haven’t talked to him in ages, but the internet says he now lives in Kittredge, Colo. Next time I fly through Denver, I’ll keep an eye out for him.

I just published a novel, Red Bottom Line, that is based on my adventures in Moscow as the USSR was breaking up.

This is a short story I wrote from Riga for USA Today, appearing in October 1991. It’s not available online. I searched for some of my other stories that quoted Gary Hart but, again, USAT was lame about digitizing older stories, so nothing came up.