When I got to Monterey, I ended up in the Russian Department and spent a year struggling over the difference between perfective and imperfective verbs and singing in the Russian Choir. Both were music to my ears, actually. I loved Russian immediately the minute I learned that tooth was pronounced zoop and paper was pronounced bumaga.
There was a wonderful bunch of Russians and Ukrainians on the faculty - a woman we called Minnie Mouse because of her shoes, the wife of the Monterey Peninsula Orthodox Church priest, for example. She used to carry on with sentimental reminiscences about life under the Czar. There was also a prince of the Romanoff family with the tremors. We called him Shaky Jake. Then there was General Markov, who regaled us with tales of war and maneuvers into places so remote that the locals smashed out the headlights of his jeep, thinking they were blinding it, and an ex-bolshevik no-nonsense lady named Mrs. Nessin, who became my model as a teacher. She knew how to get down to business and stay there. The memory of her kept me professional more than once when I might otherwise have been tempted to lose my cool in front of a classroom.
And Sergei Sinkievich, who could do handstands on the balcony railing. He had left Russia when the Bolsheviks took over and went to Yugoslavia, and then left Yugoslavia for Germany when things got rough and we used to say we need to watch him carefully: if he ever left California we would know it would be wise to follow him.
It was the height of the Cold War and the message from on high was clear and explicit. We were to treat them Rooskies with suspicion and keep our distance. The plan didn't work. We developed considerable affection for most of our teachers. It was my first lesson in never confusing people with the politics of the nation from which they came. (Actually, it was my second. I grew up among German-Americans, post Second World War.)
As the years went by, I wandered off the path I had been set upon, one that would make me fluent in the Russian language and a lover of all things Russian. Much of the vocabulary I once owned has slipped away, but I still have a strong feel for the language, still have an appreciation of the literature, and a huge love of its music. Nobody moves me like Rachmaninoff. Tchaikovsky is close behind. And for years I would have done anything for tickets to a Dmitry Hvorostovsky concert. I return again and again to YouTube for performances by the Igor Moiseev Folk Dance Ensemble.
Distinguishing a nation from the government that controls it now comes naturally to me, as I think it does anybody who goes out into the world and benefits from Goethe's insight when he said, "He who knows no foreign language knows nothing about his own" - and recognizes Goethe meant much more by that than language. I reconfirmed that when I went to live in Japan, eventually even marrying a Japanese, and putting that fact up against the memory of being taught as a kid that "those people (the Japanese) don't love their children the way we do ours." Today it's remembering that while Putin is a thug and Russians are hacking into our national secrets right and left (as we are theirs), there's no reason to hide the fact that I'm a huge fan of almost all things Russian. Today I find myself hoping the world will not mistake all Americans as Trumpists, clueless Evangelicals or white supremacists. And that Americans will stop equating Germany with Nazism. And Russians with Putin's dream of restoring a Russian-centered Soviet Empire.
I understand how a Russian can be a patriot. Listen to Hvorostovsky sing about soldiers far from home crying for mama, if you don't believe me, and remember that 20 million of them lost their lives in the Second World War. Or listen to this rendition of what may be the most beautiful national anthem ever written - at least up there with New Zealand's and Israel's.
Or listen to Vladimir Pozner, an apologist for things Russian, a Russian journalist who grew up in the U.S. and speaks perfect American English. I used to watch him on Ted Koppel's Nightline and on the Donohue show, back in the day when, for a brief time, it became cool to bring an actual apologist for the Soviet way on to tell his side of the story to American television audiences. Pozner is still around, still saying things many Americans find thought-provoking and more than a little uncomfortable. He asserts, for example, that America missed the boat when the Soviet Union fell apart. It might have implemented a kind of Marshall Plan for Russia, drawn it into the fold of Western democracies. Instead it insisted on treating Russia as the same pariah the Soviet Union was, and embracing the Wolfowitz Doctrine, an unabashedly imperialistic political stance which encouraged American triumphalism and helped pave the road to the kleptocracy Russia is today.
It pains me to watch Russia and the West at loggerheads and closer to war than they have perhaps ever been, even during Cold War times. The issue is Ukraine and the fact that Russia has its back against the wall. "How would you feel," Pozner asks, "if Mexico decided one day it had enough bullying by the United States and asked China to send it defensive weapons? And if America and its allies suddenly lined up to help Mexico move out from under American influence and enter China's sphere instead?
I don't want to suggest that I'm totally behind this line of reasoning. I think Ukraine's desire to follow Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia and other former Soviet Republics, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the EU and conceivably even into NATO, cannot be reduced to a black-and-white analysis. "Poor Mexico," Mexicans are fond of saying, "So far from God, and so close to the United States." I'm sure not a few Ukrainians have smiled at that, given their own problems with their giant neighbor to the north and east. Ukrainians have good reason to run toward democracy and not simply away from Russian imperialism. And that doesn't change the fact that, as with Kosovo, which the Serbians - with or without justification - saw as their point of origin, Kievan Russ is every Russian's idea of their original home. This is a situation that calls for the world to learn a lot more about Russian geography and history, and not go to war.
Germany is having a terrible time. Its new chancellor is taking tons of flak for his insistence that Germany will not go to war, even if Russia invades, and that is giving even some of the smartest people in the know - Anne Applebaum, for example, pause and the desire to take a hard line against Putin. And few believe the U.S. and the rest of Europe will either. But Putin may feel he has to draw a line in the sand, and this is it. We can't predict whether or how we might all back down from this crisis. Many Germans, and others, are worried Chancellor Scholz is being perceived as weak and indecisive. I'm happy to see him recognize that the temptation to jump in the squabble can be resisted.
If you listen to Pozner - and, I repeat, he is very thought-provoking - you should also follow Anne Applebaum. Both of them are anti-Putin, both feel he is less powerful, actually, than most of the world thinks, and both agree, more or less, that he is nonetheless dangerous. Donald Trump is a known fool, but we are learning, as the January 6 commission continues to reveal more and more once hidden documents, that he was, and possibly still is, just as dangerous in his bungling incompetence as a more competent leader might be. Ditto for Putin, who might well misjudge both his power and the need to prove himself a decisive leader and proponent of the equivalent of Russia's Monroe Doctrine, i.e., stay the hell out of our back yard!
War over Ukraine is not at the top of the list of things I worry about. Global warming, America's propensity for conspiracy theories, what comes after the Omicron variant of Covid-19 and a whole bunch of other things bother me more. But I do also agonize over the possibility that Russian and Ukrainian young people are in line to be sacrificed to the gods of war.
I once believed my elders when they told me Japanese didn't love their children. Now I marvel at how readily people can be led by fear, hatred and assertive ignorance to believe pure unadulterated bullshit. These days I listen to Vladimir Pozner, share his views on Wolfowitz and am put off by his disparaging of Navalny, Putin's nemesis whom somebody poisoned, either with Putin's knowledge or by somebody hoping to get into Putin's good graces. We should listen to smart people, especially those with insider knowledge. But we should also triangulate information.
The thought that somebody might take a gun, shoot and kill a beautiful young man in a Russian military uniform is the stuff of my nightmares. And the same goes for a beautiful young Ukrainian. (And, to their mothers, they're all beautiful.)
I put on an American army uniform in 1962 and joined in the effort to keep America safe from those damn Rooskies of the evil Soviet Empire. It's now sixty years later. Lots and lots of water under the bridge. These days I just wish I knew how to keep these boys safe from the guns their elders expect them to shoot each other with.
image of Russian soldier above
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