So we went to Moscow and one day at a reception I found myself in front of Nikita Khrushchev himself. And I said, 'Mr First Secretary, my friend and I have a request to present to you: we would like that you give us the permission to come to the Soviet Union in our car and discover the country. We would invite a couple of Soviet journalists to come to France and do exactly what we were able to do here.'

Khrushchev looked at me and started to laugh and he said, 'What's the matter with you? Don't you know that after two weeks your wife will ask for a divorce?'

I said, 'Why?' And he said, 'Because our roads are so bad!' So we understood we'd never get permission to do that. The Russians didn't want their people to get close to us, to young people like us, because we might give them bad ideas, capitalist ideas, you know. So we gave up and came back to Paris. And one day in July, as we were going on our own vacation somewhere to the beach, a telegram arrived from Moscow, which said 'Permission granted. You will enter Soviet Russia from the city of Brest Litovsk near Poland. Just tell us about your itinerary.'

We got crazy, we had to get a car, pack up all kinds of things we wanted to take along, a lots of gifts to give on the way. In two weeks we got prepared and it was on July 14, a national holiday, we left Paris in a normal car that anyone could have bought. We didn't want one of those sophisticated jeeps or whatever. The car was painted in two colours and we put the name of our newspaper on the fenders. On the back, in Russian, we put up a board that said 'French journalists', and we left for Brest Litovsk. As we arrived in Soviet Russia, Brest Litovsk, my first memory, that I will never forget, came from an old Soviet lady. She came to me. As I was driving, I stopped. 'Can I ask you for a favour?' she said. I said, 'Yes, what is it, ma'am?' And she said, 'Can you deflate one of your tyres? I would like to breathe the air of Paris!' So this new book is the story of the three months and fourteen days that we (me, the photographer, and our wives) spent on 13,000 km of Soviet roads with a couple of young Soviet journalists. Why have I written this book today? Because today it is history. Ten years ago it would have been journalism. Today it's about a world that has disappeared, about people who are no longer there, about a regime that is gone. It has been an enormous success in France, and now, for the first time, it has come out in English, in India. Yesterday we had a launch at the French Embassy. It is not an exhaustive book about politics; it is just two young journalists opening their eyes without prejudice and discovering this forbidden world. Viola!

... contd.