A Russian scholar recently found my blog and was intrigued. He sent me an email with the following story:

Long-distance motorcycle couriers were often used in the early years of the USSR – telegraph lines and railroads were cut and blown up almost daily during the Civil War.  You can imagine the distances involved. Just think 11 time zones of unpaved roads. One account (perhaps apocryphal) of these brave men quotes the courier Ivan Zakharov, a Red Army private, as saying, “Hundreds of thousands of kilometers traversed, carrying the documents, the blood of the revolution beneath my coat in a wallet made of rubber. Perhaps the Motherland will soon forget this modest labor of mine.  But, as for me, my hindquarters will never be the same. God grant that it be so, too, with the Motherland!”