This is a duplicate of something I posted here a while back. I remembered it because of another thread about some Russian bridge climbing and Jaybro's references to the Gulag. It took me 15 minutes of Googling to find my old story, reposting here so I can find it more easily. Original post:
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=315847&tn=54

Summer of 1990, long nights in the last days of the Soviet Union.

I was in a youth science exchange program learning about their space program. And I was 16 yrs old, away from an overly-restrictive home for the first time, and I had a childhood full of selling boy scout crap, magazine subscriptions, and other stuff door-to-door to build my selling instincts.

So against multiple dire warnings by our American chaperones and group organizers that we'd be shipped off to a Siberian gulag if we participated in the black market, and after horrific tales of what happened to kids the year before, our first night in Moscow our dorms had visitors hawking their wares. I quickly lost the 2 pairs of jeans I brought with me. Upon arrival in Leningrad (now St Petersberg), I traded the Nike shirt off my back for a Sovietsky Soyuz Socialist Respublic shirt with a map of all the states. Then it got serious.... most of the kids in our delegation were crapping their pants worried about getting caught talking to these people, but they wanted stuff. My buddy and I smelled money.

Every night we started going out for a midnight rendezvous, collecting flags, military pins, navy and army hats like in those bad movies with Arnold Swartzenneger or Dolph Lundgren, etc... A week into it we were taking special orders from our American cohorts, then building up our system of suppliers to fulfill requests. We'd buy 3 military watches and sell 1 for the same price, keeping the others as our personal souvenir stash. The most difficult special request was a woolen trenchcoat with navy ensignia on it. In hindsight I realize that our avarice and ignorant longing for adventure came at the expense of some poor souls who probably had their gear stolen to fuel these trades.

What does all this have to do with climbing? Hold yer horses. It's coming...

So one day we were supposed to go on a tour of the Hermitage, quite a large museum with one of the best art collections in the world. Instead my buddy and I ditched the group right when we got there, and hopped in a taxi across Leningrad to do our dirty business. We ran into complications on the way back, not least of which was our lack of a map, first visit to a large city, and a Russian vocabulary that mostly consisted of "that's too expensive" and "would you like to dance with me?"

By the time we get back to the museum to rejoin our group, all the kids are loaded up in a bus. The physics professor chaperones who have tried hard to ignore our hijinks just can't ignore this. They pretended not to notice when we were falling down drunk after a night of beer, wine, vodka, and beating ourselves with leaves in boiling saunas. But with the sweat beads dripping down the windows of the bus in the baking afternoon sun, and the priceless mix of anger and awe and "you're screwed!" written on all the kids' faces, it was clear that our time was up. From that point on, we were tied at the hip to the chaperones. But everyone has to sleep sometime.

And so comes the climbing part of this epic journey...

We slip past security out the back door of our hotel, bound for our last midnight meeting near an abandoned housing complex. The final round of goods scored, we reach the hotel. Crap! The back door we used is locked. And going through the front is out of the question. Now I haven't formally discovered climbing as a sport yet.... But I've climbed up to the roof of a house or two. Now I'm confronted with a 10-story building, and every balcony landing up to the 5th floor is covered in chain-link fence to prevent people from getting in our out. The drain pipes look pretty solid.... away I go. The plan is for me to climb up, reach a balcony where I can enter, then come down and open the door for my buddy.

I'm fully in the zone of my first solo, 4 stories up. A friendly Russian couple several floors above is attentively watching this American idiot. And then my worst fears are realized. No, not smacking the ground. But the thought of pulling cabbages out of permafrost in a Soviet gulag certainly scared the bujeezus out of me. And the voice of authority, in thick Russian, came yelling from below. The police station was next door to our hotel... should have done more research. In the souped up paranoia created by our chaperones and American organizers, we thought these guys were the KGB. We braced ourselves for torture. We would eventually have to confess. And our bloody stumps of fingers would be digging at icy dirt to extract those cabbages, which our bloodied hollow eye sockets wouldn't be able to see.

Speaking of bloody stumps of fingers, I'm still hanging by my fingers in a chain link fence, stemmed out from a drain pipe, nearly 5 stories off the ground. My buddy has been captured. You never leave your men behind. I froze. I can't make out the Russian, but I'm sure it's something like "get your ass down here and join your friend, so we can beat you to a bloody pulp and make you disappear forever." I complied. Pulling myself together enough to finish the task at hand, I reach a balcony and flop myself over the railing. Meanwhile, the friendly Russian couple above is shouting something down to our captor. Now I'm back down to the bottom, out the door, and into custody with my buddy. Rifle in hand, the KGB agent marches us to the deep shadows on the side of the building. Suddenly frozen cabbages don't seem so bad. Hey, I could learn to like a gulag... it can't be all bad! "Hey buddy, let's talk about this..."

But he keeps walking. We find ourselves at the fully-lit front entrance to the hotel, where we are turned loose in the lobby. Filled with wonder and relief that the KGB didn't execute us, we now dread the hotel security that will surely raise alarms to our chaperones. Again to our amazement, we walk back to our rooms with no event. I guess these Russian dudes are pretty cool!

So I got lucky, but that climbing incident could have led to a fate worse than death.