My own Soviet American road trip ended amid pandemic and war. By the spring of 2020, when Covid-19 closed borders, not to mention libraries and archives, I was, quite fortuitously, ready to settle down to the task of writing. During the anxious months when I rarely ventured more than a few blocks from home, I traveled vicariously with Ilf and Petrov. Looking back, I can see that the unpleasant, often frightening experience of adjusting to a new “normal” aided historical understanding.1 In lockdown, I better appreciated the importance of travel literature for people with little prospect of going anywhere. Dealing with long lines at my local market and chatting via Zoom with family and friends scattered across the continent, I felt acutely the desire for “service” and the life-changing power of tekhnika. As the pandemic suddenly made unimaginable things that I had taken for granted – from dinner out to visiting my parents – it laid bare the presuppositions that so often impede the historian’s ability to understand the people of the past on their own terms.