NEW DELHI (AFP) - They were two young journalists who had what everyone thought was an impossible dream -- travel through old communist Soviet Union and tell Western readers about life behind the Iron Curtain.
But through string-pulling and plain chutzpah, best-selling author Dominique Lapierre, then just 25, and his photographer friend Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini, 27, wangled permission from the Soviets to make the extraordinary journey in 1956.
"The Soviet authorities had never permitted (Western) journalists to roam at will," said Lapierre, now 76, a celebrity in India since he penned the blockbuster "City of Joy" about a Kolkata slum which sold eight million copies.
"The Soviet Union was closed to foreigners unless they went with official minders," Lapierre, whose book "Once Upon a Time in the Soviet Union" had its global English release in New Delhi recently, said in an interview.
But the Soviets "let us go unaccompanied wherever wanted," said the author, who was awarded one of Indias top awards, the Padma Bhushan, in January for his charitable acts, including helping lepers and poor fishing villages.
The journalists, working for French news magazine Paris Match, drove with their glamorous wives along 13,000 kilometres (8,060 miles) of bumpy roads with a stash of tiny Eiffel Towers for souvenir-hungry Soviets.
They travelled for three months in an eight-cylinder luxury French estate car emblazoned with the words "French journalists" in Russian on the back.
"Theres one memory of our journey I will never forget," Lapierre recalled on the weekend.
"An old lady stopped me and said, Can I ask you to do me a favour? I replied, Yes. And she said, Can you let the air out of your tyres -- Id like to breathe the air of Paris -- and so I did and she breathed in the air."
The pair was allowed to mingle freely with the Soviets.
"We were mobbed like movie stars. Everyone was so curious about us. For them we were like Martians," said the author, whose French edition of his Soviet travels has sold more than 100,000 copies since its release just over a year ago.
"No-one can imagine how closed the Soviet Union was, nobody knew what was going in the outside world, ordinary people couldnt travel," he said.
Lapierre and his friend Pedrazzini got permission to travel just as a "faint breath of freedom blowing" was in the air following the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
"It was a golden moment -- a small opening," Lapierre said. "It was the only time we could have gone because just a little later there was the Hungarian uprising. The Iron Curtain was pulled down again."
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and along with it, the old Soviet life, Lapierre said on the weekend, adding that he would now like to make a similar journey through the country to see how it has changed.
Lapierre, who has donated millions of dollars in royalties to his Indian charities, wrote the book about the journey because he wanted to "share my memories of what the old Soviet Union was like."
Just 14 days after the pair returned to Paris, Hungarians rebelled against Soviet imposed rule but the uprising was crushed by the Soviet army.
Dispatched by Paris Match to photograph the uprising, Pedrazzini was hit by machine gun fire and died after being airlifted to a Paris hospital. He was one of the thousands killed in the October 1956 revolt.
Lapierre stayed with him at the hospital until the end.
"When I saw my dear friend dead -- my friend with whom Id shared so many adventures, I knew Id said farewell to my youth," he said.
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