Old Shoe
You just have courage Mom...The Shoe
‘On Easter Monday, while a city of free people were finishing their holidays,’ wrote the Women’s Weekly Staff Reporter, Betty Best, ‘I drove five miles to Mascot airport and found myself in another world filled with mob hysteria, violence and terror’.
Betty Best described how she watched ‘a helpless woman dragged up the steps to a plane which could have taken her from freedom forever’. Along with numerous other journalists who wrote about this moment in the Petrov Affair, Betty was employing her literary licence to dramatize the event. Mrs. Petrov was ‘stumbling helplessly’, the glare of flashlights exposed ‘her flailing white-gloved hands’ and, as she disappeared onto the plane the last thing that Betty saw was ‘a white hand clutching at her little blue hat in a futile, feminine gesture’.
It was at that moment, according to Betty Best, that a woman ran towards her with a small shoe in her hand. She was crying out to the crowd ‘Look, look, it is her shoe. They would not even pick it up’. Then a man called out ‘What does it matter, in a week she will be dead’. Betty Best told Women’s Weekly readers that she looked at the shoe - a fashionable combination of snakeskin and blue gaberdine – and saw a reminder that Mrs. Petrov, more than any other woman at the Soviet Embassy, loved to go shopping. ‘I began to tremble,’ wrote Betty Best, ‘and for the first time I knew that night what real fear was’.
‘The shoe was much more than a symbol of helplessness.’
Of all the many books and essays written about the Petrov Affair, not one has interpreted the shoe as any more than a symbol of Evdokia’s captive state at the airport, of her victimhood, her helplessness. But there is a great incentive for historians who revisit historical records and look afresh at an event such as this one - the chance of seeing the event with fresh eyes (meaning, really, with a fresh perspective) and picking up on something new. In this case, having another look at the primary documents - the newspapers, the magazines, the police reports, parliamentary papers, whatever – has brought something entirely new to light. The shoe was much more than a symbol of helplessness. It was the first element of an image, soon to be more complete, in which Mrs. Petrov was not so much a Schapelle Corby (trapped and in peril), but more like a Princess Diana (a woman celebrated for her consumer discretion and good taste), an advertisement for consumerism.
Darwin Airport
During the flight to Darwin, where the plane had to refuel, a journalist among the passengers tipped off the pilot that the ‘couriers’ were armed. When the plane touched down, everyone on board was ordered to leave. At the foot of the gangway two Northern Territory policemen overpowered the couriers and seized their guns. Mrs. Petrov walked to the terminal where she spoke to her husband on the phone, and soon after decided to seek political asylum in Australia. The Royal Commission into Espionage would now have two star witnesses.
Mrs. Petrov’s phone call and her defection were such big news that no one seemed to notice her footwear while at Darwin airport. She had walked off the plane in a rather snazzy pair of black suede sandals with high heels, on loan from a kindly air hostess.
‘The guards, grimly, unrelenting, heaved her along…’
In the aftermath of her defection, the Woman’s Weekly devoted a pictorial page to Mrs. Petrov’s nightmare journey from Mascot to Darwin and her subsequent rescue from the clutches of Zharkov and Karpinsky. The headline was ‘She Chose Freedom’. One of the pictures was a close up of her face showing her tears and her distress on the tarmac at Mascot. The caption read, ‘The guards, grimly, unrelenting, heaved her along with her feet dragging until she lost a shoe’. That was the last time that the press was to represent Mrs. Petrov as a tragic figure. In addition to being ‘Blond Petrova, Captain of Spies’, she was about to become a fashion item.
She was, according to most reports, dramatically transformed by freedom. The transformation began in Darwin after her decision to defect. Reporters observed her in relaxed mode on the verandah of Government House: ‘She appeared to be enjoying a cup of tea and had changed from the costume which she had worn on the plane into a floral summer frock.’(Canberra Times, 26 April 1954)
On the return flight, the plane stopped to refuel at Cloncurry. There she was reported to have ‘strolled composedly on a lawn near the tarmac and plucked pink oleander blooms. She wore a grey skirt and a pink blouse but no hat’. The fascination had begun. Mrs. Petrov was now the most powerful (and glamorous!) symbol of Cold War tyranny in the Australian imagination.
http://www.hyperhistory.org/index.php?option=displaypage&Itemid=743&op=page
‘On Easter Monday, while a city of free people were finishing their holidays,’ wrote the Women’s Weekly Staff Reporter, Betty Best, ‘I drove five miles to Mascot airport and found myself in another world filled with mob hysteria, violence and terror’.
Betty Best described how she watched ‘a helpless woman dragged up the steps to a plane which could have taken her from freedom forever’. Along with numerous other journalists who wrote about this moment in the Petrov Affair, Betty was employing her literary licence to dramatize the event. Mrs. Petrov was ‘stumbling helplessly’, the glare of flashlights exposed ‘her flailing white-gloved hands’ and, as she disappeared onto the plane the last thing that Betty saw was ‘a white hand clutching at her little blue hat in a futile, feminine gesture’.
It was at that moment, according to Betty Best, that a woman ran towards her with a small shoe in her hand. She was crying out to the crowd ‘Look, look, it is her shoe. They would not even pick it up’. Then a man called out ‘What does it matter, in a week she will be dead’. Betty Best told Women’s Weekly readers that she looked at the shoe - a fashionable combination of snakeskin and blue gaberdine – and saw a reminder that Mrs. Petrov, more than any other woman at the Soviet Embassy, loved to go shopping. ‘I began to tremble,’ wrote Betty Best, ‘and for the first time I knew that night what real fear was’.
‘The shoe was much more than a symbol of helplessness.’
Of all the many books and essays written about the Petrov Affair, not one has interpreted the shoe as any more than a symbol of Evdokia’s captive state at the airport, of her victimhood, her helplessness. But there is a great incentive for historians who revisit historical records and look afresh at an event such as this one - the chance of seeing the event with fresh eyes (meaning, really, with a fresh perspective) and picking up on something new. In this case, having another look at the primary documents - the newspapers, the magazines, the police reports, parliamentary papers, whatever – has brought something entirely new to light. The shoe was much more than a symbol of helplessness. It was the first element of an image, soon to be more complete, in which Mrs. Petrov was not so much a Schapelle Corby (trapped and in peril), but more like a Princess Diana (a woman celebrated for her consumer discretion and good taste), an advertisement for consumerism.
Darwin Airport
During the flight to Darwin, where the plane had to refuel, a journalist among the passengers tipped off the pilot that the ‘couriers’ were armed. When the plane touched down, everyone on board was ordered to leave. At the foot of the gangway two Northern Territory policemen overpowered the couriers and seized their guns. Mrs. Petrov walked to the terminal where she spoke to her husband on the phone, and soon after decided to seek political asylum in Australia. The Royal Commission into Espionage would now have two star witnesses.
Mrs. Petrov’s phone call and her defection were such big news that no one seemed to notice her footwear while at Darwin airport. She had walked off the plane in a rather snazzy pair of black suede sandals with high heels, on loan from a kindly air hostess.
‘The guards, grimly, unrelenting, heaved her along…’
In the aftermath of her defection, the Woman’s Weekly devoted a pictorial page to Mrs. Petrov’s nightmare journey from Mascot to Darwin and her subsequent rescue from the clutches of Zharkov and Karpinsky. The headline was ‘She Chose Freedom’. One of the pictures was a close up of her face showing her tears and her distress on the tarmac at Mascot. The caption read, ‘The guards, grimly, unrelenting, heaved her along with her feet dragging until she lost a shoe’. That was the last time that the press was to represent Mrs. Petrov as a tragic figure. In addition to being ‘Blond Petrova, Captain of Spies’, she was about to become a fashion item.
She was, according to most reports, dramatically transformed by freedom. The transformation began in Darwin after her decision to defect. Reporters observed her in relaxed mode on the verandah of Government House: ‘She appeared to be enjoying a cup of tea and had changed from the costume which she had worn on the plane into a floral summer frock.’(Canberra Times, 26 April 1954)
On the return flight, the plane stopped to refuel at Cloncurry. There she was reported to have ‘strolled composedly on a lawn near the tarmac and plucked pink oleander blooms. She wore a grey skirt and a pink blouse but no hat’. The fascination had begun. Mrs. Petrov was now the most powerful (and glamorous!) symbol of Cold War tyranny in the Australian imagination.
http://www.hyperhistory.org/index.php?option=displaypage&Itemid=743&op=page
posted by professor rat at 12:14 PM
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