The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Looking for information about the place where my colleagues and I are spending the weekend (on one of those awful "away days" modern businesses use for "bonding") I found the interesting account in the linked article by Henry Kissinger of the first visit by westerners to what was then "the Politburo hunting lodge" or "the Soviet Camp David".

I grew up in the countryside next to my grandfather's farm, but I am a city boy now. I have had all the nature I need for my lifetime. While I respect and defend the rights of hunters (Man is a hunter-gatherer, and I have no sympathy for those sentimentalists and inverse snobs who would deny our nature) I have no personal desire to kill my own food. While I have enjoyed a Finnish sauna in the past, physical modesty precludes my trying a communal Russian banya. The waters of the Volga and the Shosha are far too cold right now for me to risk falling into them from a boat. So the attractions of this place are not really for me. Still, it will be interesting to walk where Kissinger, Nixon and Brezhnev once did.