war

Victory Day

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments
Photo by Michael Kunzinger

Author’s note:

For more than two decades I traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, to teach, to write, and to lead Study Abroad groups. In that time I had the privilege of celebrating Victory Day a dozen times in the city on May 9th. During the day I would attend memorial services at the Priskarevskoe Cemetery, where three quarters of a million people–mostly women and children–are buried. I was there when Bill Clinton was in attendance, and George W. Bush, and Vladimir Putin. It is a somber place, and Shostakovich and Pachelbel play on the speakers while thousands walk around and pay respects to the vets in attendance. Then that night a million people fill the streets and drink and watch fireworks and remember that Hitler, despite his demands to wipe the city from the face of the map, could not defeat the “Defenders of Leningrad.”

This is their story as related in a chapter from my book The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia. Thank you for reading. –BK

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Persistence

(from The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia)

Bob Kunzinger

This evening I sit in the dining car somewhere in eastern Siberia, writing, drinking tea, and the only other passengers are an elderly man and his son, also drinking tea. They’re quiet and both glance at me from time to time. Eventually, I walk to their booth and ask if I can join them—the younger of the two speaks broken English and he waves to the empty spot next to his father.  He introduces himself as Dima; and the elderly man, Sergei, wears two or three medals on his green shirt, and I ask if one particular medal is the same as another I had seen in St. Petersburg, given for bravery during the siege of Leningrad. It is.

The dining car on the trans-Siberian railroad looks much like old Airstream-style diners in America, with booths along both sides, full size windows at each one with small curtains, and all are kept clean, with flowers, a napkin holder and place mats. At one end of the car is a bar with well drinks as well as a small variety of more expensive liquor on a higher shelf, and a generous selection of domestic and imported beers and soft drinks. The menu rivals the most common pub at home. Grilled chicken, hamburgers with French fries and other sides are available, as well as more complete dinners and some appetizers. Caviar, too, and salmon slices with toast, borsch, and traditional fare such as cabbage and sausages for tourists like us who wish to feel part of the landscape, and for locals whose daily diet includes such items anyway.

The prices are about the same as they would be at stateside diners, but Russians for the most part can’t afford that and usually buy their food from the babushkas at the stops along the way. Seeing as how there are so few tourists, the booths are always available, so Michael and I spend much of our time here, playing chess, eating, and working.

Paying attention to this sudden mixture of cultures is the tender. This always smiling woman sits at her own booth near the bar with several pads spread about which apparently need her attention. From time to time she looks up, partly to see if we need anything and partly, it seems, to catch what she can of our conversation. She normally likes to play traditional music on the player whenever I sit down, but when she sees me join this veteran and his son, she puts on Shostakovich. We all recognize it immediately and the old man smiles. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Seventh Symphony, the Leningrad Symphony, in the forties and performed it for the first time to a packed theater in his besieged city of Leningrad. Despite the rattle of Nazi bombs exploding in the background, no one left the performance. Today in the memorial cemetery in that city where nearly 700,000 people are buried, Piskaryovskoye Cemetery, it is still played while thousands of people pay their respects. I have spent many Victory Days there, meeting veterans, offering them a carnation in thanks for their work in the war, so it is an honor to share tea with this veteran.

It would be negligent of any traveler, foreign or domestic, to make this journey without learning about and acknowledging the Blockade in Leningrad, the horrors of the Great Patriotic War, and the incomprehensible courage displayed by the citizens of what is now St. Petersburg, which was bombarded by the Nazi’s for 900 days in an effort to complete Hitler’s desire to “wipe Leningrad from the map.” That history is this old man’s youth; and the fact he survived and went on to raise a son is nothing short of miraculous.

This is where this great railway and Russian history collide.

Some background: 

The original name in Russia for the railway was the “Great Siberian Way,” and it was only in the west we called it the trans-Siberian railway. At the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900, the railway was an exhibit with the most extravagant interior cars on display and promoted as the ride of Czars. While it was true the line from St. Petersburg to Yekaterinburg was indeed the rail for Czar Nicholas II and his family to seek refuge in their palace on the Iset River, the promotion at the Fair was misleading since from the start this railway mostly carried people to war. When Czar Alexander put his son Nicholas on the project, he did so with the assistance of Sergei Witte, a minister in the Russian government and confidant of the Czar. The heart of the empire was, indeed, in the western third of the country. St. Petersburg and Moscow were, and still are for that matter, the center of the Russian universe, and from the time of Peter the Great’s ambition to create a “Window to the West,” the powers-that-be focused their attentions there. But in the late 1800’s, the government noted the potential resources available in the east, thinking Siberia might be an economic boon instead of simply a destiny for dissidents. At the same time, St. Petersburg had its eye on parts of Manchuria and moved forward with the rail to that destination under the pretense of trade; the truth is they eventually occupied the territory, a move which aggravated Japan who also wanted control of the area. Japan saw the TSRR as a tool of expansion and eventual invasion, which, of course, it was. Hence, the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. But the tracks weren’t finished yet, and troop movement in the area where roads even today are poor, meant ultimate defeat for Russia.

Still, they had their rail, which a few years later was completed to the Pacific port of Vladivostok. But Japan had its day, and instead of Russia using the railway to dominate the eastern Asian region, Japan did just that by defeating Russia’s Pacific fleet and controlling territory they long wanted. Their rise to power anticipated the conflict in the Pacific which would be that part of the globe’s World War Two.

During World War One, the United States had many economic interests in the region, not the least of which was a ton of weapons strewn north from Vladivostok along the rail. To protect those interests, President Wilson sent eight thousand US troops to the region—the only time US soldiers were stationed in Russia. The War in Europe would not be over for another three months, but in Russia, change was constant. The Mensheviks had ousted Czar Nicholas and replaced him with Kerensky, who the Bolsheviks quickly ousted, so the allies had no one with whom to work in eastern Asia. But it was during that short and welcome reign of Kerensky that the US took over the operation of the trans-Siberian railway, a move supported by the allies in Europe and seen as the spread of democracy the western world had hoped for. At the same time, however, the Bolshevik Revolution swept east literally following the tracks all the way to Vladivostok. The United States withdrew their interests and in a few short years the noble ambitions of the entire empire would quickly derail.

Josef Stalin took over the Soviet Union in 1922, a post he would hold for thirty-one years. He longed for a railway across the polar region of Russia to expedite travel to the Far East. This “Dead Road” was built by “enemies of the people” of Russia. It is estimated that 300,000 prisoners worked on this project with a third of them dying in the brutal northern winters. The entire project proved short-lived, however, when the short part of the line which had been completed sank into the ice and snow. But Stalin understood the value of rail transport, and the pogroms started by the Czar to relocate Jews to eastern Russia were continued under his rule with the aid of the Trans-Siberian railway further south. It was no possible to purge entire towns, exile anyone who so much as spoke about him without praise, as well as those who outwardly opposed the oppressive government. In fact, not many people during those years rode the railway by choice. It was a means for guards to get to work or to send prisoners east. The rail between St. Petersburg and Moscow remained a crucial route between what is considered the cultural capital in the north and the political capital an eight-hour ride south. And the cross-continental railway in post-coup Russia became a means of transport for workers heading to and from a job, families going to a dacha, and the rare and idealistic tourist heading to Beijing or Vladivostok.

Aside from so much death associated with this transport, there is one glaring and essential exception when rail travel was, in fact, a lifeline in Russia: The Great Patriotic War. World War Two. A separate rail from the trans-Siberian route was built by hand every single winter during the war across the frozen Lake Ladoga just to the east of Leningrad to try and bring in supplies and bring out citizens of the city, which was besieged from September 8th, 1941, until January 27th, 1944. During that time nearly one and a half million people in the city—mostly women and children—died of starvation. The people of the city to this day are most proud of the fact that, despite nine-hundred days of bombardment, the Nazi’s still couldn’t defeat the “defenders of Leningrad.” And because of the invading Germans, factories were moved from the western part of the country to the most eastern reaches of European Russia, in the Ural Mountains, where more than three hundred plants were rebuilt close to the railway, mostly by the prisoner population.

Before me now, however, is a man who refused to leave Leningrad. I mention my understanding of his courage and struggle, and the old man smiles. He places his hand on my wrist and says, yes, he could have ridden the rail across the lake during that first winter—he was just a young teenager, and no one would have questioned it. But he chose to stay and help transport whatever food he could to the front line, which during the blockade was in every direction.

The tender brings a plate of salmon and bread which they share with me, and we drink more tea. Sergei dips some bread in his tea, and his son offers me salmon.

We speak for quite some time about the trail, about Michael and I and our wild idea to see Siberia, and about their present journey to a Dacha to spend August. Eventually, I ask about his medal, about the war, and how much he remembers. Sergei takes a long bite of his bread and nods toward the plate of salmon. “Food was the most significant issue,” Dima translates as he looks in despair at his father, clearly knowing what comes next. “Leningrad’s population of dogs, cats, horses, rats, and crows disappeared as they became the main courses on many dinner tables. Nothing was off limits. People ate dirt, paper, and wood. The vast majority of casualties were not soldiers, but women and children.”

This much I know already: The siege of Leningrad is political history as well as military history, yet it is also personal. It is the story of a child living on a few grams of bread, his mother making sure he only takes small bites throughout the day for fear if he eats it all at once he will surely starve to death. He will anyway, and the history of the siege of Leningrad must include the story of these women who survived, these sorrowful mothers, who had to grasp whatever sliver of hope they could that they would win in the end so to save their beloved Mother Russia.

The siege is one of the chapters in books about 20th-century atrocities; yet it is also the conversation over beers in a corner pub, where as late as the nineties when I first started coming here, most veterans still held back their emotions against the questions of the curious’. Some allowed others to cross the line into their world, allowed them to suffer the starvation through stories and tears because they knew it might be the only way these great heroes, the defenders of Leningrad, will be remembered.

Me on right after giving the carnation to the veteran (photo by Kay Debow)

I recall a conversation I had once with a woman in St. Petersburg’s Palace Square. She was fifteen during the siege when she had to pull a sleigh carrying the body of her sister, who had died of starvation. She made it to the graveyard and left her sister on the pile of bodies. Another there, Alexander, remembered how he would cut up a piece of bread once a day for his brothers. His parents had died of starvation some time earlier.

Nearly three million civilians, including nearly half a million children, refused to surrender despite having to deal with extreme hardships in the encircled city. Food and fuel would last only about two months after the siege began, and by winter there was no heat, no water, almost no electricity, and little sustenance. These citizens still had two more years of this to endure. Leningrad is roughly at the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska. It gets cold.

During that first January and February, 200,000 people died of cold and starvation. Because disease was a problem, the bodies were carried to various locations in the city. Even so, people continued to work in the deplorable conditions to keep the war industries operating. When they were not working or looking for food and water, they were carrying the dead, dragging bodies on children’s sleighs or pulling them through the snow by their wrists to the cemetery.

One man said, “To take someone who has died to the cemetery is an affair of so much labor that it exhausts the last strength in the survivors. The living, having fulfilled their duty to the dead, are themselves brought to the brink of death.”

But the people of Leningrad would not surrender. I met a woman named Sophia in a graveyard on the north side of the city. She had been an adolescent during the reign of Czar Nicholas II and thirty years later lost her husband and son during the siege. We sat on a bench, and she told me of her life, of her family, as if time had turned it into a hazy event she had heard someone talk about years earlier. Her hands were transparent, and she spoke of Leningrad as being a prisoner of war, with no rations and no electricity and little hope. The city became a concentration camp, its citizens condemned to death by Hitler.

But thousands of people were evacuated across Lake Ladoga via the famous frozen Doroga Zhinzni, the Road of Life. During warm weather, some were boated across, but in winter they were carried on trucks across the frozen lake under German fire and moved via the railway. Heading north was pointless; the Finnish Army, allied with the Germans since the bitter Winter War with the Soviets in 1939-1940, held the line there. But once across the lake, this very train took people further east until the rails simply could not run. When we stand between the cars and rumble along, listening to the clashing of metal beneath us, it is hard for me not to think of the thousands of starving citizens transported east, listening to the same sounds.

“We simply had nothing to eat.” Yes, starvation was the Nazi’s objective. The blockade was a time during which one gauged success by being alive or not. Some survivors, however, tell of encounters with people who had such severe mental illness from disease and starvation that it had become unbearable. The accounts are sometimes spurious, but too many narratives contain too many parallel events to write them off as exaggerated. Several wrote of what became known as “blockade cannibalism,” including the story of a boy who was enticed to enter someone’s apartment to eat warm cereal

One woman used one of her dead children to feed the others.

For nearly three years, Leningrad was under attack night and day, and almost half its population, including 700,000 women and children, perished. The Germans left the city of Peter the Great, his “Window to the West,” in ruins. Still, the Nazis could not defeat Leningrad.

The likes of that bravery and sacrifice will never be seen again.

During those years as well as a decade before and past Stalin’s death in 1954, Soviet industrialization moved many citizens to the region stretching from Omsk to the Pacific, and the vast majority of these people worked in towns built for the sole purpose of some factory. But the most infamous use of the railroad during this dark period was to transport prisoners to the Gulag system. Prisoners in the penal system in Russia were tapped to exploit the natural resources in the mineral-rich east. It started officially in 1929, but just five years later, nearly half a million Soviet citizens with a prison term of three years or longer were loaded on these railcars and transported to the Gulags. Five years after that, the camp population totaled more than two million. Some eighteen to twenty million inmates, while suffering the most inhumane conditions, facilitated the exploitation of timber and minerals in remote areas in slightly more than two decades. They also laid railroads which branched off of this one, constructed roads, secured dams, and worked in the factories and on the farms.

The veteran looks around and says more quietly as his son again translates, “Every single person on this train is connected to the war; either a grandparent or parent was killed, or less likely, survived. Everyone on this train is fortunate to be alive because of citizens of Leningrad under the most horrific conditions. I played a very small part, but I am glad I survived to be able to raise my own family.” He smiles at his son, who places his own hand on his father’s sleeve.

Today, war monuments dot the landscape. Most of them honor veterans of the two World Wars, but many as well for those who served in Afghanistan, the most notable being the Black Tulip memorial in Yekaterinburg, named for the ship which carried home the Soviet deceased. The monuments to the Siege of Leningrad, or the “Blockade” as Russians refer to those dark nine-hundred days, are numerous in St. Petersburg, of course, but they also spread surprising far to the east, following the tracks taken by those souls who managed to get out of the city under cover of a cold, dark winter. The same chance Sergei turned down, as his medal clearly shows.

I grew up during the age of the Evil Empire, the Red Menace. Siberia and Irkutsk might as well have been on the moon—I was never going. All I knew of this land when I was young was from playing RISK with my older brother. He usually won but I had fun moving my armies around the board, sometimes skipping from Alaska to Kamchatka, proving to me capture of the Russian coast was key in controlling the outcome. When Michael was growing up we did the same thing. But it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned something valuable: that miserable game screwed up my sense of geography. Siberia is not a country or a state, it is a region, like the American West or heading out to the Plains. Ian Frazier wrote Siberia is more of an idea than a place. Irkutsk is not a country but a city, and Yakutsk is not east of Siberia it is in Siberia. The Ukraine does not take up most of map, doesn’t run from the Arctic to the Med, and doesn’t replace Russia, which that Soviet era game completely left off the planet. Still, those faraway places in beautiful colors with brightly colored armies became mythical. In the end, I didn’t have to move armies to travel to Siberia; no opponents waited across Parker Brother’s boundaries. I didn’t roll doubles. I didn’t pick the wild cards. I just came, and in doing so I wiped out decades of ignorance about these people over a cup of tea and some salmon slices.

The old man looks out the window into the dark evening, and I can sense his mind has recessed into some sharp and tortured memories. His son leaves his hand on his father’s and nods to me, indicating he sees I understand. We sit quietly like this for a long time, drinking tea, as the train rolls forward through history. 

The Dining Car (Photo by Michael Kunzinger)

Speechless

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Some years ago while working at a different college, I wrote this essay loosely ripping off an essay by Tim O’Brien. I’m not ashamed. I found it recently and thought about how I still neglect to complete the very assignment I encouraged my students to complete as often as possible. . Something needs to change.

What Have We Learned

Older students are better than those just out of high school. The big dude with the pierced face and tattooed eyelids is probably a great writer. Many students would rather pull a lower grade than have a professor look at a rough draft. Students who take copious notes don’t always fair as well as students who just listen intently. If it happened before they were born, it really doesn’t have any affect on them and therefore they shouldn’t be required to learn about it.

Hamlet is boring; Oedipus is stupid; statistics is tedious; bio lab is too long; developmental classes are a waste of money; introduction to literature is a waste of time; history is not relevant; philosophy has no practical application; psychology is disturbing and the instructors are disturbed; text messages are read more than text books; face to face communication is obsolete; and the only source of information is the internet.

Here’s the great irony of education: While we should become smarter as time goes by because we’ve been given the answers through the centuries, watched the lessons played out on the battlefields and in seminar rooms, we’re actually ignoring more, learning less, and not really keeping tabs of our decline.

Maybe if I text my lectures they’ll pay attention. Phones go off in class, in the hallways, in their backpacks. They reach in to quickly shut it off because they “forgot it was on,” and spilling out onto the floor are the books they need, a few small notebooks, and various articles of clothing. They carry more in their bags then in their minds. 

The science and math books are ten-pounders, and the anthologies aren’t lightweights either. For lab they need their lab equipment, gloves, goggles, special notebooks, dead animals. Rough drafts, final copies, required journals, various books read besides the textbook, art supplies, tape decks, language discs, keys, wallets, games and personal items. Some have staplers, toothbrushes, condoms, aspirin, medicine bottles, and hand soap. Some carry crayons and cookies because their kids come to class sometimes when elementary school is out or cancelled, or when the kid is sick but the Prof told the parent if she missed one more day she’d fail the course. They carry medicine for those kids, bi-polar, attention-deficit, hyperactive. They carry the same for themselves, medicine for their own ADD, ADHD, OCD, diabetes and manic-depression. They carry a lot. They need to remember when papers are due, when tests are scheduled, including their math tests, their physics test, algebra, pregnancy, special needs tests, mammograms, CT scans, and various other tests they’ve got on their mind and written down in their notebooks at the bottom of their parcel.

They carry cell phones with various rings, various friends calling during class, right before class. They have small machines attached to their ear so they can remotely answer the phone without having to move their arms or lift their hands. They have the numbers of everyone they know automatically programmed in. They no longer have to walk to see anyone, walk to find a phone, remember any numbers, lift their arms, or turn their heads.

Once someone’s phone vibrated during class. The vibration on the desk was as loud as a ring, but she politely excused herself. Some professors insist the phones be off during class, and they won’t even allow them to be turned to vibrate. But this student came back in and said she was sorry and that she had to go, that was her babysitter calling and someone from her husband’s command post was at her house waiting for her to come home. A week later I discovered her husband had been blown up at a roadside bombing on the airport road from Baghdad. Another student’s brother was on television. He worked for Blackwater in Baghdad and she watched her brother’s charred body swing from a bridge in Iraq.

One student shot himself in the head because he thought the paper was due and he thought his medicine wasn’t. True story. A colleague of mine listened quietly one day to a near-suicidal student explain why her paper was late and how her daughter was going through depression and they were bringing her to the doctor to see what was wrong, and it weighed so heavily on her mind that she couldn’t really concentrate on the paper and would the professor mind the paper turned in a few days late, and she agreed. Students knew this about her—she would work with anyone. A few days later my colleague hung herself in her kitchen because her medicine was fucked up.

This is the American Community College. These are the trenches, in the city; some of these students come to get ahead, knock off some basic education classes before transferring and paying more at the university. But some come here instead of jail, or to bide their time, or to hang with old friends and maybe hook up with new ones. Some come to keep off the streets; it can get dangerous these days. But some of these students come from real war-torn areas. My student Deng walked across Somalia to Ethiopia twice looking for safety. Before he found it at ten-years-old in a Red Cross camp, he was given an automatic rifle and taught to kill. Now he tries to write about gun control and crime in seven hundred words, making sure the grammar is right. His mother was raped and hacked to death in front of his eyes. His father “disappeared.” He was a Lost Boy. Sometimes he didn’t concentrate. Yeah, okay, sometimes he didn’t pay attention. But when he came to my office we talked about politics and survival. We talked about Africa and faith. We talked about ideas, and he told me Chinua Achebe knows Africa. He told me how Sartre would not be popular in Somalia but Descartes would. He knew the differences, understood the gentle nuances that separate philosophy and politics. I didn’t ask about his scars. He didn’t ask about mine. Deng came here with an education the likes of which we can’t possibly conceive. He told me he as soon as he found the camp he knew he needed to leave. I said I understood. He said it was too much, and he wanted to die so badly and that’s when he knew he just had to get out. I didn’t answer. I had nothing left to say to him.

What I know now is this: all the lectures in all the classrooms from all the professors in the world will not prepare us to be anything of value if we don’t find any value in what we do and how we live our lives.

Of course we would all do things differently; even just a few small moments. I’d never have left Massachusetts. I’d have gone to Monterrey anyway. I would have passed on the Trout in Prague, the oysters in Asheville. When I left Tucson that last time I’d have headed west instead of back east.

We are always in pursuit of ourselves, aren’t we? Even if we don’t consciously consider such notions day to day. In class one morning I asked my students if there was anything they would have done differently in their short but tech-dominated past. They all laughed and had answers that ranged from staying off-line to trying harder in high school to treating a loved one better while she had the chance. They talked for a bit; they got quiet. They thought a while. And I added this: What are you doing now that five years from now you will wish you had done differently?

They looked at me for a moment with just a little confusion and some wonder about their future, and they waited for me to talk.

But honestly, I have nothing left to say.

My Russian Romance

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
The Infamous Stray Dog Café where I read with Anna Akhmatova and others (not at the same time or in the same century)
I had just given this carnation to the WW2 vet on Victory Day
3 am at The Shack, my hang out for years where I met locals and played music in the woods on the beach of the Gulf of Finland

I’ve traveled all over the world with friends and family: To Ireland, Prague, France and Spain, Norway and Amsterdam. But Russia has been on my mind the past few days as it and the war in Ukraine seems to have been drowned out by the noise coming from the Middle East. For quite some time I had quite some time there. I dined in palaces while quartets played for our private group, and I’ve paid off people guarding graveyard gates so we could explore the backstreets of St Petersburg. I’ve brought friends to apartments of artist and writer friends of mine, sat backstage during rehearsals at the Conservatory, had private concerts at the home of Rimsky-Korsakov, and read my work at the famous, dissident occupied Stray Dog Café as well as Dostoevsky’s flat. I know the streets of that city better than any other place in the world, including places I’ve lived. It has something to do with that heightened, acute awareness we experience when we travel. It also has something to do with going back dozens of times.

The city today in this post-Ukraine-invasion world, I fear, more closely resembles the city it was when I first arrived just after the coup. I thought those times were dead and buried, covered by the fresh grass of several new generations who know little else but freedom and capitalism. But it took one sick man to throw it all back thirty-five years.

In 1994, the streets of St Petersburg were dank, a monotone of browns absent of advertising, neon, or anything other than some Soviet style atmosphere. The only placards placed in random spots on Nevsky Prospect—the city’s Fifth Avenue—were Marlboro signs, the only western clothing of note worn by the suddenly displaced masses was Adidas warm-up suits. It appeared a parody of itself as presented in 1970’s and ‘80’s anti-Soviet movies. For seventy-five years the country, and Leningrad, moved in darkness under the Soviet leadership, and for centuries before that under the long reach of the Czars.

When I first arrived to teach American culture to faculty at Baltic State University, the first of what would end up being more than twenty-five trips in thirty years, democracy had found the streets of Leningrad, which had just changed its name back to the Imperial “St. Petersburg,” and Russians struggled to figure it out. The first week there, I stood in line for two hours at a bakery, and when I pointed this out at the college, my colleagues shrugged and said, “Da. Canushna.” Yes, of course. I explained that in the States, a new bakery would open across the street and be faster, charge less, offer discounts. Then I had to explain discounts and why, explain that the cashier who stood outside smoking while twenty people were in line would be fired. This led to a conversation about capitalism, and everyone was suddenly enthralled to hear about businesses and learn how to make money, the advantages of choices, the value of options. The men of the previous generation on through to the college students present when I first taught in the city, simply understood service to their country as paramount; it involved time away from family, but also provided pensions and a chance to protect their living conditions.

But after the coup, and certainly in the few years which followed leading up to 1994, it was a brand-new way of existence, and the long, cold winter of communism had finally ended. Things changed—and this is where it got tricky. At first everything was different overnight, like their currency, living conditions, international relationships, and availability of goods. But then the changes slowed to an immeasurable pace. People couldn’t find jobs or food, or they had to work for some organized crime group. Old folks lined the metro begging for money or selling items—shoes, loose cigarettes, empty bottles. But within a few years they figured it out.  One afternoon that first year I went to the market behind a cathedral in the arts district. It was a park area with tables covered in tourist items: matryoshka dolls, the famous Russian wooden bowls known as khokloma, pins, small wooden toys bears. Scarfs, shawls, icons, amber jewelry. The following year the market built small booths in long rows instead of random tables. A year or two later, the booths had roofs over them, then lighting was put in for night shopping, and by the 300th anniversary of the city in 2003, the entire market was covered, gates out front, a veritable mall filled with all the previous items, but also fine art, expensive purses, technology, and food were added to the shelves. The Russians were figuring it all out, and many made more money in a month than they had in a year under the Soviet regime. Organized crime groups took over and took a cut, and the city streets once filled with just Russian-made Ladas were now lined with black SUVs.

A friend of mine in the marketplace, photographer and artist Valentine, remained my source of all things business, and the changes almost became too much for him to handle. In 1995, I went in the Catholic Church nearby to find piles of rubble where an altar used to stand eighty years earlier, and the walls had been painted black, on the floor lay statues without heads. The priest, Fr. Frank Sutman, explained it had been used as a storage facility for motorcycles since the Great Patriotic War, World War Two, but the church took it over for the first time since 1917. By the turn of the millennium, the grandeur of the marble floors and beautiful walls had been restored. Across the street was a small shop. In the early years, I had to point to the item I wanted on the shelf behind a counter or in a glass case, and if I liked it, I took a handwritten receipt to the cashier who figured out the total on an abacus (no kidding), gave me a new receipt which I took back to the first worker to retrieve the items. This is how it was in the few grocers, the pharmacies, the bakeries. Only in the tourist market did one deal directly with one person.

Years pass.

A supermarket opened with cashiers at the end of conveyor belts who rang up your items, bagged them, and you walked out like you just left Walmart. The discovered calculators, paper bags, and the shelves were stocked with European goods. And on the streets, neon signs dominated the avenue: KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, clothing brands, cigarettes, alcohol, appliances, cars. Except for the language I could have been in my native New York. The once empty streets were filled with people, all on their new phones, all taking pictures, all donning expensive jackets and shoes.

These were the years of tourism, of an entire generation and the next growing up without memory of Gorbachev, even of Yeltsin. Today no one under forty-five would remember communism. For thirty-years we went on canal rides and took videos, wandered through neighborhoods and graveyards. I went to Victory Day a dozen times, talked to Vets of the Great Patriotic War, who loved to share their experiences, and I talked to the women—St Petersburg became known as a city of old women since the men mostly died in the war and children starved to death—about the changes, often as they swept the streets with brooms made from birch branches. I played guitar with a gypsy band in the woods and danced on stage with a folk group with no inhibitions at all. I have absolutely successfully embarrassed myself behind the former Iron Curtain.

We went to the Kirov Ballet, the opera, folk shows, and soccer games. We dined in restaurants from Germany, Italy, China, and played music, danced and drink at The Liverpool, a Beatles bar.

Peter the Great’s dream of a city of culture, his “Window to the West” as he called it, had come to fruition. Over those decades I have written three books and dozens of articles about my experiences there, and the experiences of the World War Two veterans.

By 2014, after twenty-years of going to Russia, anyone thirty or thirty-five years old and younger only new this new way of life. By 2025, the Soviet system was foreign to anyone under fifty. The very notion that the government would dictate what they could and could not do was as foreign to them as it is to us in the west. Students graduated from college and set up businesses, tech companies, they traveled freely and often to Portugal, the United States, Hong Kong, Sicily, everywhere. After almost a century of needing to walk everywhere and live with two other families in small communal apartments, they now owned cars and nice apartments. The once common practice of tourists bringing Levis or other western brands to trade for Russian trinkets was not only over, but laughable, with malls opening up with shoe stores, clothing stores, phone, sporting goods, and music stores, all filled with western brands.

Again, it’s crazy to realize that the “old country” of Russia had so modified over the course of just two decades, one had to be in their forties to remember the Soviet system. What the average Russian citizen could not know, of course, was that the modifications made in palaces throughout the country, but in particular St Petersburg, was paid for by organized crime to increase tourism and international trade. The city where I could in those early years buy items for a few dollars, quickly figured it out and charged twenty or thirty dollars for the same items. Restaurants appeared everywhere with prices for those driving the SUVs, not for the Lada crowd.

My friends from Russia adjusted. A tour operator learned business well and built a company that dealt with tourists from all over the world. My artist and writer friends found new freedom in being able to take pictures of anything and anyone they wanted without recourse. They criticized the Yeltsin administration without worry of harm. For seventy-five years, the notion of dissidence, which not only included those who wrote against the government, but those who simply didn’t always write positive things about the government; particularly Stalin, had in just a few shaky years, slipped into history. Going to St Petersburg became simple. There was even talk for a while of dropping all the VISA requirements. I wouldn’t call it democracy, as such, but communism was dead. Gone. Lenin’s statues which had been everywhere in the early ‘90s were much more difficult to find. It became simple for a Russian to leave home and travel to the United States. And the did, gladly, relishing in being a part of the world, finally. This wasn’t simply détente; this was the start of a beautiful relationship.

In 2013, my son and I rode the trans-Siberian railway from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, across more than six-thousand miles, and seemingly across decades as we retreated into the previous century the further east we traveled. In Yekaterinburg the western influence was still obvious, but in Irkutsk, another few days east, Soviet style practices still appeared common. The one fortunate thread remained the people, all deeply rooted in new democratic, even capitalistic practices. They drove Kias and Toyotas, they wore Levis and Ray-Ban sunglasses, and they spoke of their vacations in Australia, the Canary Islands, Florida. If I had not been already in my fifties, there would be no basis of comparison to the old, Soviet ways I grew up learning about, fearing, hating. Nothing I had learned about these people was true, even in the early nineties. The propaganda machine, practiced just as efficiently in the west, had turned out to be shallow, and that was with a generation of Russians whose experience had only ever been Soviet or Czarist. This new generation, those already well into their careers, families, homeownership, and substantial investments, just two decades old, was the dominant population across the country, and they knew less about living under a fascist regime than I did.

Until Vladimir Putin.

He came in early and soft, almost friendly, certainly acceptable. He was a man with a vision for this new country who followed the floundering Boris Yeltsin, and as Putin’s power and wealth increased, he rebuilt his native St. Petersburg. He saved the former Soviet Union from ruin and the economic disaster of the Yeltsin years, which left a rampant homeless and starving population to fend for themselves. Right after the coup to end communism, the nationalization of all businesses and housing ended, but so did the pensions. Housing privatized and if the residents couldn’t afford the new rent they were kicked out. Hospitals quite literally rolled patients out the door and left them near churches to fend for themselves. Putin moved from the city’s Vice Mayor up the ladder to President on the promise he would “clean up” the homeless problem, “employ” people willing to work for anyone, and made business deals that brought unprecedented wealth to the nation. Russians welcomed him; so did western leaders. And the population which benefited the most were under forty, tech-savvy millennials who worked their way up, drove expensive cars, and lived in large sweeping apartments on Nevsky Prospect with beautiful dachas in the countryside or Ekaterinburg. Tourists who visited St Petersburg discovered open palaces with gourmet dining rooms, clean hotels with five-star service, shops with icons, malachite and amber jewels, and all-things-fashion. Russians, too, became tourists able to see more than the dachas they shared with other families. They traveled to Italy, to Portugal, France, and the United States. Satellite television common in the nineties became fast internet service enabling partnerships and communication with anyone anywhere.

Then Ukraine happened.

Those same students just out of communism and thrust into capitalism are now in their late forties, at least, and their children, raised in nothing but a mostly free-capital society with all the advantages and freedoms we understand here in the States, are being drafted into an army to attack a country they spent their entire lives visiting on vacation. When the news speaks of “Russian military,” this is who they’re talking about; men and women whose only reference and background was freedom of choice, of employment, of wandering, of economic wealth. Their only requirement was the possibility of two years mandatory service before they turned twenty-seven. Piece of cake; their billets ranged from one end of the earth to the other. So while their parents may not have been surprised to have been called to service in Afghanistan in the seventies for the Soviet government, these men and women dreading duty in neighboring Ukraine had anticipated their best-laid plans to pursue personal ambitions, and went to schools which had been teaching them international relations and economics, until the hope they had for life was disturbingly aborted for reasons beyond their comprehension or desire.

Then western sanctions hit and the country shut down, banks stopped all business outside the borders, foreign companies which lined Nevsky Prospect with signs and tables and parties were suddenly gone. The streets once again seemed grey, empty of life. Employment disappeared and no pension waited by to save them, so the army promised to pay their bills, which they did for a short while, and when word spread that the truth is they could barely feed their soldiers, let alone pay them wagers a fraction of what they had been used to, many fled.

Back in the mid-nineties, a friend of mine would write complaining about Yeltsin, about the lack of support from the United States, about the homelessness and difficulties dealing with “Old Russians,” who knew Soviet Ways, and how the “New Russians,” assume they have a right to whatever they can get. The anecdote which circulated then was how a New Russian in a Mercedes SUV waited at a stoplight when an Old Russian in a Lada with no brakes hit him from behind. The Old Russian got out of his car terrified, but the New Russian simply said, “Aren’t you glad I’m here to stop you? Otherwise you would have run out of control and killed yourself.” That was the propaganda which took hold and brought this nation to life; this nation now isolated and quite possibly on life support.

In the last few months, after a year of no word from friends who still live behind this new Putin Curtain, I heard from the friend who twenty years ago spoke openly of the problems in the city, back when the place was starting to shine. This time he speaks only of pleasantries, of how beautiful the weather is, and how he loves his city. No word of Putin; my friend remains uncharacteristically quiet about all things governmental. Another friend in Europe tells me his own family in St. Petersburg reports the lines are back for the purchase of many goods, like before the coup thirty-five years ago, and families are once again forced to move in together to save money, and he cried knowing his family whom he could visit whenever he wanted and who came to see him often, no longer has the ability to travel anywhere, nor the means even if they could leave. And he spoke as if this was the early fifties and Stalin was still in charge, that “to speak negatively about President Putin is to be thrown in jail.” And today come reports that anyone with dual citizenship with the US and Russia who had been contemplating going back to Russia should not do so lest they be detained indefinitely in Russian “holding” areas.

Maintaining control over the population of the Russian Empire after the Civil War following World War One was not difficult; the people had never truly known freedom as we understand it; Czarist Russia ruled for nearly a millennium. Russians appreciated the promises made by the Bolsheviks, and despite many of those promises never coming to fruition, most people abided by the Soviet system, even out of fear. And following the fall of communism in the late eighties and early nineties, Russians welcomed the opportunity to break free of the limitations of their previous government, but when almost a decade passed and things got worse, not better, it was not difficult for someone like Putin to convince them a little more government control, “like it used to be,” was a good thing. For a while, he maintained a perfect balance of top-heavy government—albeit one on the take to the tune of billions of dollars—and the personal freedom to come and go, grow and expand, as one pleased. This lasted until February 24th, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

But something is different this time. One hundred years ago the people had only known an oppressive government, as was the case thirty-five years ago, so leading them down the path the new leaders desired was not difficult. But now, two generations into a country used to most of the freedoms we have in the west, the population, despite the Russian propaganda to the contrary, is displeased with their government’s bombing of an innocent nation, ending the freedoms of the people of both countries. When the war began, Russia had 360,000 active troops. In the past years, well more than 315,000 of them have been killed or badly wounded, only to be replaced by new “recruits.” According to the UN, that amounts to 87% of their numbers at the start of the war. In the Ukraine since the world changed two years ago, more than 30,000 soldiers and civilians have been killed or wounded. When the communists took over from the Czars, the people only knew submission, but this time they need to be threatened to fight. Things are different indeed. Like Weimar Germany, Russia between Gorbachev and Putin was a fine place to travel, to live, and to have hope. It’s gone, at least until Putin is gone, and the people who remain remember that time of peace and prosperity and can on with their lives.

The Russia I knew is dead. I miss my friends, Valentine, Igor, Sasha the guitar player, and Dima the violin player. I miss the atmosphere, the storied example of perseverance that was the St Petersburg I knew, filled with veterans who miraculously survived the siege of their city for nine hundred days in World War Two; a siege and destruction of people which one of the city’s own, Vladimir Putin, once exclaimed must never be allowed to happen again, until he did just that. The promise and beauty of the Russian artists, the teachers, and the children, are simply gone. And in Ukraine with a history deeper, older, and more beautiful than even Russia’s, a civilization has been annihilated. Historians will not point to a myriad of reasons for this incomprehensible tragedy; studies will not have to be undertaken to better comprehend the causes of the invasion. The brunt of this brutality falls squarely on the shoulders of Vladimir Putin.

Valentine

Valentine loved Ukraine and took many pictures there

Numbers

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

According to the stats page of WordPress, the platform I use for A View from this Wilderness, more than four percent of the weekly readers view it from Israel. None from Gaza. I have been in support of and have promoted the work of Israeli writers for four decades now, including both the journal Ilanot, based in Tel Aviv, which has posted more than a few of my works, and my late friend, best-selling Czech author Arnost Lustig. On the other hand, I have no personal ties at all to Gaza or anyone living there. This is not pro-anyone. This is not anti-anyone. Honestly.

But…

I am not a fan of needless, widespread, pointless killing. Call me quirky like that. So if anything about the following numbers, acquired from the Jerusalem Post, the UN and the WHO, bothers you, you either have difficulty facing the truth or you’ve not done your homework. I have; these are the undisputed numbers.

Killed in attack on Israel October 7th: 1139 people.

Israelis killed since then, 700, nearly all soldiers. Roughly 6000 wounded.

Palestinians killed in Gaza since then: more than 25,000

Including 10,000 children killed in Gaza.

Another 1,000 children in Gaza had at least one limb amputated.

62,000 people in Gaza wounded in life-altering ways.

96% of water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption.

90% of people in Gaza in life-threatening situation from lack of food. (“If your enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty, water to drink! ” ~~ Proverbs (Mishle) 25:21)

16 hospitals still remain out of the 36 pre-October 7th. Of those 16, none have power from more than a generator, and all are “critically close to zero” of medical supplies.

85% of the people of Gaza have been displaced beyond any ability to return home. (“Who is a hero? The man that turns an enemy into a friend.” ~~ Avot Derabbi Nathan)

Honestly, the moment anyone starts defending Israel’s right to kill 10,000 children their argument falls apart.

No one I am aware of has ever spoken against Israel’s right to retaliate after the senseless and horrible attack by Hamas on October 7th, 2023. But their mission has slid definitively over the line from retaliation to annihilation. Simply put, with numbers like those above, the military’s mission is to obliterate not only the citizens of Gaza in their attempts to destroy Hamas, but also to eradicate future generations of Palestinians. Why else on earth would anyone have any reason to kill children—10,000 of them. (Please be clear; this is a reference to the leaders of the government and army in Israel, not the Israeli population at large or Jewish people anywhere). (“They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” ~~ Isaiah (Yesha’yahu) 2:4)

That’s it. If anyone disagrees that the only recourse for Israel was to kill more than 25,000 people including 10,000 kids, I have no interest in a conversation with you. Get your own blog. (“Even on the threshold of war, we [Jews] are bidden to begin in no other way than with peace, for it is written: “When you draw near a city to fight, first offer it peace.”” ~~ Midrash Leviticus R. 9)

My Own Private Camino

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

So many people talk about war, about poverty, emigration, about nuclear fallout and political discourse. The news is now riddled with bullet point reporting about stranded soldiers, homeless families, courageous politicians, and psychopathic leaders. You’d hardly know they were talking about humanity. You’d never guess they were talking about us.

The top of the hour take on today tells me a few million people must live elsewhere, most likely forever, that the cost of gas is so high it is no longer cost efficient for minimum wage workers to work unless they bike or bus. The cost of food will rise, as well as the price of everything trucked, shipped, or flown to somewhere else to consume.

Covid is still killing people, and controversy concerning restrictions consumes organizational meetings and town hall events. Two people were shot and killed in Worcester, Massachusetts, last night, and those late souls were just two of two hundred and seventy others in the last twenty-four hours.

The view from this wilderness is discouraging.

So many people talk about sanctions and retaliation, about cyberattacks, about drone warfare, about soldiers looting and soldiers who have no idea what they’re doing there to begin with. So many people talk about inflation and recession, about climate change and burning swatches of America.

The headlines have gone bold on a daily basis, largest type of the fattest font, that bold type normally reserved for assassinations and declarations of war, set aside until Dewey Defeats Truman, is constant, morning edition, afternoon edition, online version, all full bold above the fold in your face headlines about how many dead, how many fleeing, how many floundering in some nether land on their way to Poland or Germany or Alabama or anywhere that’s somewhere else. Headlines about a leader misleading his nation, another leader leading by example, and a little girl singing a little girl song in a shelter. She holds a kitten.

Some people will believe anything. Some people need to believe in something. Some people believe that if you believe you’ll be fine.

This is not how I wanted my fourth quarter to start. It’s been a good game, mostly. I’ve had some incredible, once-in-a-lifetime plays, well more than once, but I’ve fumbled as well, threw my share of interceptions. But it’s been amazing. I trained across two continents; I walked across a country; I reconnected, resigned, regrouped, then remembered what it was I wanted out of life to begin with. And it’s not to listen to so many people with no expertise decide exactly what’s wrong and who caused it; it’s not to listen to so many people bend toward the fight instead of negotiation, lean toward aggression instead of forgiveness. This is not how I want the fourth quarter to play out. Clearly I have more comforts than the vast majority of this world; I’m not “sitting on the cold floor of a train station” as some random posts remind me, insisting that since I’m not destitute and homeless I should shut up. I agree completely with this sentiment; I’ve no reason to complain. But this isn’t about empathy; this is about my inability to absorb anymore disappointment with a species with such capabilities as to create miracles on a daily basis yet falling faster into a vacuum of violence from which it doesn’t seem possible anymore to escape.

I’ve tried switching my meds, I’ve tried exercise and eating differently, I’ve tried laced lollipops and tiny bottles of Baileys.

I’ve tried. But still, I need to try something else. So I remember that...

when you walk five hundred miles, you note each step, your life slows to some equatorial pace, and you can feel the air move around you, the subtle brush and lift of a soft breeze come across a field. Every day is an eternity, each moment you find yourself exactly where you should be with whom you should be with. Each person crosses your path for a reason, and each reason evaporates with the next step, like a constant stream of rebirths, an endless loop of beginnings.

This is how I escape the persistent pounding of chatter, the numbing talk shows filled with nothing more than speculations. This is how I keep from falling: I wonder, would anyone notice if I just walked away, headed south along the coast, hitchhiked, bussed, trained, away from here? Would anyone notice if I ended up in Pied de Port, France, looking out toward the Napoleon Pass across into Spain, out of reach of the rising tide of so many people?

I’d like to believe that the view from this wilderness is always optimistic, and so many people have commented on the beauty of this wilderness, the sunrises and nightfalls, the slow glow of dawn sweeping gently across the bay and stealing the day, but the true wilderness that must be explored is within, always first and last the wilderness within, and that is very difficult to do with so many people talking about so many people dying.

I wish that I could slow the whole thing down. The world is changing again, and it’s not looking like a strong narrative is headed this way, but there are still so many people I want to spend time with, so many places I’d like to see.