The Greatest Gift.

This should be of interest to many readers of this blog: a memoir of survival and Siberia. Get an introduction to the book here:

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The Sovietization of American Media

Is coming to a city near you. Pravda.

The freedom of the press starts with freeing up the printing presses, no? Yet we keep on selling them off and bundling them up and giving them to one man, oftentimes a man in Australia.

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Bread Lines

I was in a very shee-shee part of Beverly Hills today, and across the street from the building where I had a meeting, I saw a line, stretching out the door of what appeared to be a bakery. A bread line, I thought. In the United States of America? But then, it didn't look right, certainly not soviet. The people standing in line all had on sunglasses and designer blue jeans.

They were waiting in line for cupcakes. The bakery sold only cupcakes, and people were waiting longer than an hour or more, standing out under the sun, in the harsh February heat of an indifferent Southern California winter.

Cupcakes.

I told the guy I was meeting, "I gotta my tell my Russian friends about this."

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The Soviet Socialist Republic of Los Angeles

My wife got a job as an accounting assitant the other day, with some company that buys mortgages, or loans, or something, from our nation's banks. It is work that a writer cannot hope to understand, and work that finds her surrounded by tens of other people, at any number of cubicles, including many, many from the former Soviet Union.

She described the scene to me: rows of desks, five long, three across, this being one section, a single honeycomb in a greater hive. In her section alone -- fifteen people -- five are from the Former Soviet Union. She has met so many Russian speakers in her first two days, she's almost afraid to find a job in a more suitable corner of the banking industry, analyzing loans or what have you.

This is, I announce, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Los Angeles. But as we're so scattered, our city so fractured and fragmented, where will the Politburo stand when we celebrate on May Day? One on the Hollywood sign, looking down on the stars below? Another in the Valley, shaking his head over the forlorn concrete channel that is the LA River? A third on the Santa Monica Promenade, waving at the crowd walking by?

Oh, how times change.

Why do I long to be in Moldova?

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Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been ...

The John Birch Society thinks President George W. Bush has gone too far. They're alarmed that he's accumulated too much power and betrayed the US Constitution.

Which means, what, that I'm a member of the John Birch Society?



But wait, not so fast. Because if you read this you'll see they think perestroika was just something Gorbachev dreamt up "to fool the West into accepting a merger with the Soviet system."

See, all those joint ventures between Russian and western companies are really just a Soviet-ploy to consolidate even greater global power. Don't believe me? Just listen to the Soviet-era defector who stayed off the ether long enough to pen such classics as "Red Cocaine" and "Again, May God Forgive Us."

If what this nut-job is to be believed, then "President Putin and the other former KGB commissars that are running 'post-Communist Russia' are likely rubbing their hands together in glee inside the Kremlin at the prospect of deeper Russian cooperation with NATO."

That's "post-Communist Russia," end-quote.

The picture of the John Birch membership card was found at this website. I'll take it down if asked. Of course, I'll consider it another lost freedom and another gained regulation. But if that's what the world Mr. Birch would have me live in ...

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Reeducation Camps

Every good Cold War film or TV show had a scene set in a re-education camp. The one in Red Dawn was a drive-in movie theater, fenced in by barbed wire and with propaganda going non-stop on the big screen. Did the 1987 TV mini-series Amerika have one? I can't remember, but the thing was like 14 hours long, so I'll say it did and hope the percentages are right.

Why am I bringing this up today? Because Boy Scouts in the LA area can now get a merit badge if they study the evils of copyright piracy.

Officials with the local Boy Scouts and the Motion Picture Assn. of America on Friday unveiled the Respect Copyrights Activity Patch — emblazoned with a large circle "C" copyright sign along with a film reel and musical notes.

The 52,000 Scouts who are eligible may earn the patch by participating in a curriculum produced by the MPAA. To earn the badge, Scouts must participate in several activities including creating a video public-service announcement and visiting a video-sharing website to identify which materials are copyrighted. They may also watch a movie and discuss how people behind the scenes would be harmed if the film were pirated.

I'm all for badges for starting a fire with two sticks and skinning a rabbit and cooking its meat. These are the sorts of skills that allowed Patrick Swayze and a small group of high school football players to repel a well-equipped Cuban-Russian invasion force. "The invading armies planned for everything," the poster for Red Dan reads, "except for eight kids called 'The Wolverines.'" Yes.

But a badge honoring copyright protections? Why not just fly these kids to Iraq and have them surrender immediately to the Islamofascists?

"I think it's really good to get the message out that it's bad," said Redondo Beach Scout Rickie Farmbanger, 13. "You can see your friends doing it and tell them why it's bad. I think if you're a role model, you can stop people."

Rickie Farmbanger, I played with your name a little, but one truth remains: You are not going to have an easy time in high school. Why not take baby-steps. Go online and download Red Dawn.

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To omit or to include

A couple years ago, saying a history textbook should foster "a sense of pride in one's history and one's country," President Putin got interested in the textbooks being read by Russia's young students. Some had been discovered to include passages suggesting he was an emerging dictator; others seemed too heavy on all that gulag stuff and too light on the achievements of the Soviet past.


"Textbooks should provide historical facts, and they must cultivate a sense of pride among youth in their history and country," he said.

But opponents of the President, as well as the American press, were quick to remind the President of the dangers of such "censorship."

The Post began one article: "Rewriting history was an important part of the Bolshevik project to remake the world. Throughout the decades of Communist rule, the U.S.S.R. was a country with an unpredictable past: Russia's -- and in fact the world's -- history was continuously being reshaped by Communist ideologue."

The newest textbooks in Russia reduce the emphasis on Stalin's crimes and portray Putin in laudatory terms; Japan has recently performed a similar make-over on the history it teaches its young. Now, putting aside the obvious and uncontestable (no textbook could land in American public schools if Washington considered it "partisan," the way we neuter the truth in this country) let's move on to this, evidence of how a similar story is viewed in another light when it's set in America.

Earlier this year, there was little national press attention when California State Senator Sheila Kuhn authored a bill requiring California textbooks to "accurately portray in an age-appropriate manner the cultural, racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity of our society."

As noted in this Alternet report, when the state senate approved the bill 22-15 on May 11, "LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-, and transgender) activists celebrated because, in academia, what California does matters. Along with also-populous Florida and Texas, it's an "adoption state," which means that books selected by California's school boards are fast-tracked to being adopted nationwide. Kuehl was optimistic, telling ABC News that she envisioned future textbooks describing James Baldwin not merely as "an African American writer" but as "an African American gay writer." (Baldwin himself preferred being called simply "an American writer" to "a black writer.")"

Gov. Schwarzenneger vetoed the Kuehl bill when it reached his desk earlier this month.

"It comes down to the same old skirmish," the Alternet report states. "Should individuals get column inches because of what they did -- or because of who they are in terms of involuntary identity-definers such as gender and class? Who goes in? Who stays out? Says who? Not everyone can fit. The books are already overstuffed: Houghton Mifflin's 747-page A More Perfect Union, a typical middle-school social studies volume, weighs four pounds."

The article is too lengthy to continue to paste and cut here, but it's worth reading on for its passages on the encroachment of religion into American school systems, both Islamic "history" and Christian fundamentalist "creationism."

The problem I see with the Kuehl legislation is perhaps an overly academic one: the word "homosexual" has only existed since 1869, and most scholars support some version of Foucault's claim that there was no such thing as "homosexuality" before the term's invention. So to celebrate gay history, we'll have to out history: "Paul Revere -- gay man? Riding alone in the night? You decide, children. Why's he not home in bed with Mrs. Revere?"

Or: "Could we see something gay in the future president's chopping down the cherry tree? What's really at stake here? Remember the power of the sign and the signifier. A cherry tree, children. He's taken an axe to it, one of your Founding Fathers -- or Framers of the Constitution, I should say."

Inclusion isn't a new concern. Since 1976, California has asked that certain groups be portrayed in a postive, upbeat, inspirational manner, and American textbook publishers, operating in the system of supply and demand, have done what they can to please the market.

Again, from Alternet:

"In one of this country's most popular history textbooks, World Cultures: A Global Mosaic, Michelangelo ranks among the nine figures profiled as history's top "Builders and Shapers." The other eight? Zapotec Mexican president Benito Juárez; Canadian feminist Emily Murphy; 10th-century Baghdadi doctor Muhammad al-Razi; Filipino president Emilio Aguinaldo; Zulu king Shaka; 16th-century Mughal King Akbar the Great; 20th-century Soviet nuclear physicist and activist Andrei Sakharov; and 15th-century King Sejong, "Father of the Korean Alphabet." Not to totally dismiss discerning the difference between smallpox and measles, as al-Razi allegedly did, or winning women the right to sit on Canada's senate -- but we're talking the history of the whole world here."

Look forward, my Soviet people. What do you see?

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Kamkov the Astronomer

The Cincinnati Review's summer issue has just been released, and my short story Kamkov the Astronomer can be found in its pages. Several readers of this blog may be interested in reading the story, as it's set against the backdrop of The Great Terror of the late-thirties and offers a fictionalized account of one man's involvement in the purge of Leningrad's Pulkovo Observatory (English and Russian website).

The story begins:

One night at his dacha in the country, Stalin looked up from his meal of bread, sausage, and smoked carp to consider a matter of celestial importance. With him in the study were Comrades Kaganovich and Molotov, who stood at the far window, arguing about a constellation. The one said it was Cassiopeia, the other Orion. Stalin wiped the crumbs from his mustache, eager for the debate. Such matters had fascinated him since his youth in the seminary, when he’d often tilted back on his heels to puzzle over the stars. He never had been able to make sense of the heavens. Where others saw bears and scorpions and chained ladies, he saw only a messy splatter of light.

Molotov returned to the low table around which they had gathered, while Kaganovich circled the room, defending his position at great length and with great volume. He provided Molotov with Cassiopeia’s mythological origins and drew meaning between each of sky’s bright dots. He gestured. He laughed at perceived errors in logic. He even touched on phrenology, a philosophy he refused to endorse in the end but one he still found worthy of mention, considering Molotov’s limited grasp of the sciences and the flat spot on the back of his head. Stalin was impressed. He grunted and gave short nods of approval. But Molotov could not be so easily swayed, just as he could not be bothered to fortify his defense. “It is Orion,” he said, simply and completely, before smiling as if only a fool would believe otherwise.

Kaganovich could not tolerate such impudence. He spun and lunged at Molotov’s throat, causing Stalin to shake with laughter and Molotov to rise fighting to his feet. The two men scuffled. The one pushed at the other, and the other pushed back, and then the legs of the two were knocking into the table, shaking the many pieces of china and silver set there. Among the items displaced was Stalin’s tea cup. It jumped, sending its contents across a pile of papers. This ended the argument. It turned Stalin’s laughter into a bark and caused Kaganovich to release the foreign minister’s throat.

Stalin snatched his papers from the table. The top one had received a messy brown splatter, but the names were still legible, the list still intact. He frowned, grimly satisfied by this, and then pressed the top sheet into the chest of his high-collared green tunic, absorbing what had been spilled. “The matter can be very easily settled,” he said. “We will call the astronomers. The astronomers will decide this.”

You can purchase a copy of the magazine at the Cincinnati Review's website. I don't know what they charge to ship a copy overseas, but they've been kind enough to send the last two issues to me here in Kharkov.

If you find you want to read more about the Great Terror after getting my story, you should pick up a copy of Stalin by Edvard Radzinsky. It's where I got the inspiration for my story -- and it's the liveliest read on the subject that I've found.

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Cheburashka, the Movie Star

Cheburashka, the Soviet Union's Mickey Mouse, will be hitting the big screen soon, I learned on Vilhelm Konnander's weblog, which offers another fine voice to the online coverage of things Central and Eastern European. Read the Moscow Times story here.

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Dom Pavlova

A final report from Volgograd:

Dom Pavlova "was a four-story building in the city centre of Stalingrad, built parallel to the embankment of the river Volga and overseeing a large square, the '9th of January Square'. The house was attacked by the German invaders in September 1942. A platoon of the 13th Guards Division was ordered to seize and defend it. The platoon was commanded by Yakov Pavlov, a junior commander replacing his wounded superior. They were successful, although only four men survived the combat. Together they went on defending the building on their own." (from NationMaster.com)


Dom Pavlova today

The Germans attacked the building several times a day. Each time German infantry or tanks tried to cross the square and to close in on the house, Pavlov's men took them under heavy fire from within the basement, from the windows and from the roof top. Leaving behind a square covered with corpses and steel, the Germans had to retreat again.

Eventually the defenders, as well as the Russian civilians who kept living in the basement all that time, held out during intensive fighting from 23 September until 25 November 1942, when they were relieved by counter-attacking Soviet forces.

The warehouse facing the apartment building remains preserved today on the grounds of a museum that includes panoramas of the Battle of Stalingrad.

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Dear, Central Committee of the Communist Party

I came upon this via two sites and thought I'd post this here. It is the suicide note of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeev, Soviet author of the The Rout and Young Guard. I haven't read him, but after reading what follows, which was written almost 50 years ago to the day, I feel I should.

To the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:

It is impossible for me to live any further since the art to which I have given my life has been destroyed by the self-confident, ignorant leadership of the Party and can no longer be corrected. The best cadres of literature--in number far more than the tsarist satraps could even dream of--have been physically exterminated or have died thanks to the criminal connivance of those in power. The best literary people died at an unnaturally young age; all the rest who were, even to the smallest degree, capable of producing true works of value died before reaching 40-50 years of age.

Literature--this holy of holies--was handed over for extermination to bureaucrats and the most backward elements of the people, and from the highest tribunals--such as the Moscow Conference and the XXth Party Congress, came a new slogan: "Onward!" The path by which they intend to correct the situation provokes indignation. They gathered together a group of ignoramuses, with the exception of a few honest people who find themselves in exactly the same situation of persecution and therefore are unable to speak the truth--and their conclusions are deeply anti-Leninist because they arise from bureaucratic habits, accompanied with the threat of the same cudgel.

With what a feeling of freedom and openness my generation entered literature during Lenin's life; what unbounded strength was in our soul, and what beautiful works we created and still might have created!

After Lenin's death they brought us down to the level of children; they destroyed us; they threatened us ideologically and called this "the Party spirit". And now, when everything might be corrected, primitivism and ignorance--along with a disgraceful share of self-assurance--manifest themselves in those very ones who are supposed to correct everything. Literature has been placed under the control of untalented, petty, rancorous people. Those few individuals who have retained the holy fire in their souls find themselves in the position of pariahs and--because of their age--will soon perish. And there is no longer any stimulus in the soul to create...

Born for great creative work in the name of Communism, connected with the Party for almost sixty years, with the workers and peasants, endowed by God with an unusual talent, I was filled with the most lofty thoughts and feelings, which can only be given birth by the life of the people, united with the excellent ideas of Communism.

But I was turned into a horse pulling a broken-down cart ...

To read more, go here.

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Mamayev Kurgan, Volgograd

Above you'll see the entrance to the Mamayev Kurgan, the giant statue in Volgograd commemorating the sacrifices made during the Battle of Stalingrad. On the steps you'll see the words, "For our Soviet Homeland, USSR." The paint is a fresh coat, and the look on my face decidedly disturbed.

Once you get to the top of the steps, you see the statue in the distance.



The next thing you reach is this massive soldier, who rises up to block the view of the statue, which represents Mother Russia. Hence, he's rising up in her defense, keeping you from her. In the second photo, you can see he's just a tiny figure at the end of the column of red flags.



Pass the above and you enter a corridor that depicts the defense of Stalingrad and then the move to drive the Nazis out. The walls -- one static, one active -- are covered with Russian sayings made famous during the war. Here, some rather ghostly music begins to play.



After that, you move out onto a reflecting pool like at the Washington Mall.



Then, inside a cavern of sorts and up some stairs, an eternal flame, with the names of fallen soldiers on the walls around it (only one percent of those who died at Stalingrad; many weren't known, owing to a lack of the equivalent of a "dog tag"). In the below photo, you'll see the hourly changing of the honor guard.



And then you reemerge onto a hill that leads up to the statue, passing, along the way, a memorial to Vasily Zaitsev, the sniper made famous by the movie Enemy at the Gates.

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Victory Day

Yesterday -- when my internet service got derailed -- was Victory Day here, honoring the end of The Great Patriotic War, World War II, or hostilities in Europe, however you wish to call it. The holiday is a huge deal over here, with parades on Red Square and through the capital of Ukraine, and every TV station playing movies honoring the millions and millions of Russian and Ukrainian lives lost.

You really have to meditate on the numbers to feel the full effect. More than 25 million citizens of the Soviet Union lost their lives during the war, some 16 million of them civilians. It's no wonder this is no Veteran's Day parade on Main Street, with a handful of members of the VFW waving a flag from the back of a convertible with an advertising placard for the local Buick dealership on the side of the front door. Consider: The fatalities suffered by the Russians at the Battle of Stalingrad exceeded the total number of US soldiers killed during the entire war.

The photo above is from the central square in Volgograd (veterans want to rename the city Stalingrad, as it was under this name the city became famous -- before the revolution, it was Tsaritsyn).

You can view some pictures of Veterans here, including one of "three elderly women (two of them with medals, one in WWII uniform) hold(ing) a poster, which reads (RUS): "May 9: How good that the dead cannot see what you have done to my country." (Neeka's Backlog.)

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The Baltic States, an unlikely tour

I found myself needing this information today to acknowledge some research for a magazine bio, so I thought to post these links here. You may not be in the area to visit, but you can at least have a click and see. It's important that everyone does, I'd say. The lessons of history and all that, don't know them they repeat today; you know the routine. Anyways:

Two summers ago, I visited Moscow with my girlfriend, who was kind enough to take me, with my interest in the Cold War and 20th century history, to the Lubyanka Building, in the heart of the Russian capital. Here, in a beautiful yellow building, the KGB used to do not so beautiful things in the basement. Isaac Babel is believed to have been killed here, caught up in one of Stalin's purges. His last words: "Let me finish my work!"

From there, I left alone by train for a tour of the Baltic states, and a tour, I'm sure, few travel agents would book. The Museums were located in each of the capitals: Tallinn, Latvia, Vilnius. By the end, I thought to get a faux-rock concert shirt printed: Stephan Clark's Tour of Oppression and Repression, Summer 2004.

In Tallinn, I visited the Occupation Museum, which tells Estonia's history from 1940 until the end of Communist rule in 1991. Located in a modern building on the edge of the city's beautiful Old Town, you'll find lots of video here documenting the period, from the initial Nazi occupation to the take-over by the Red Army and the subsequent authority of the KGB. The website offers Russian, English and Estonian versions.

Riga also has an Occupation Museum, and it too is housed in a beautiful building in the Old Town. No video that I recall, but plenty of personal items are on display here, including many, like this facemask used to fight the cold, that detail the gulag system in ways that were invaluable to my research of "Kamkov the Astronomer," a short story forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review. This website, while beautifully designed and offering a great virtual tour, does not offer a Russian version, like the following website, something I find a little peculiar. The above image was borrowed from this site.

Finally, I visited The Genocide Victims' Museum in Vilnius, which is housed in the basement of the city's former KGB headquarters. You enter it as a prisoner would, moving from the registration desk to those more chilling rooms in back, such as the Room of Inquiry and the Room of Execution. All the while, if you listen to the voice of the poncey Brit on the supplied Walkman, you learn about the many horrors that took place here. It is chilling. An experience best taken alone, on a slow day, when, if you're lucky, you might not bump into anyone with a camera swinging from their neck.

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The White House Goes Red

Whenever one company takes over another, it absorbs those products or techniques that are profitable and discards those that are not. The United States, which governs more and more by the corporate model than the civic version, is no different. When it triumphed over Communism, it might as well have been a corporate takeover. Overnight, the world went from being dominated by two brands to one. Markets expanded for American and western companies. McDonald’s came to Moscow, German supermarkets opened in Kyiv. The politics in Washington, now unchallenged on the world stage, also began to change, pushing out to fill in its new, roomier boundaries. My short story "The Secret Meeting of the Secret Police," which came out in Night Train magazine a couple years ago, talked about where this might lead, saying how easy it'd be for the KGB -- or any other government agency -- to spy on you in the age of the Internet and the mobile phone. Now we have the payoff.

President Bush has authorized the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens without the oversight of even one of the Patriot’s Act hastily-assembled secret courts. I can only imagine what the talking heads are making of this on cable TV back in the states, but if it surprised anyone, I can’t see how it did. Anyone who bothered to read the Patriot Act, either before it was signed or in the months afterward, knew that such a thing was bound to happen. If you’re suspected of being a terrorist (and there’s no evidence needed to justify that suspicion, just the suspicion itself) the government can send the police or its own agents into your house or apartment to perform a “sneak-and-peek” inspection, all without your ever knowing it. This isn’t even limited to terrorism; the powers are granted for the investigation of any criminal offense. So while Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia insists that the US Constitution should be viewed as it was intended when it was written, I find it hard to believe that he and his fellow conservatives can support laws that pervert America's most sacred legal document. Notification is required in these "sneak-and-peek" intrusions, but it can be delayed indefinitely. That's like saying, "We believe in the Fourth Amendment, but only tomorrow, or next week, or better yet the day before you're dead."

When Ronald Reagan was first promoting his ideas for a laissez-faire Washington, he made a joke about the Democrats’ hands-on, overly-regulated form of governance. With that winning smile of his, he had people imagine the Democrats going door-to-door. “I’m from the Government,” he joked, “I’m here to help.” And yet now I’m sure the same people who laughed at this line continue to believe that the government only serves to protect you, that it should even be able to reach out beyond the borders of the Constitution because it’s just doing what’s good and right and proper.

That's what Condoleezza Rice believes. She defends the President’s right to act without any external oversight, because it's a different world and all. Faster and spookier, full of email and cell-phones and the devices of the Evil-Doer.

Just listen to her.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency must obtain search warrants from a special court before conducting electronic surveillance of people suspected to be terrorists or spies. Ms. Rice said the administration believed that it needed greater agility in investigating terrorism suspects than was possible through that process.

"These are stateless networks of people who communicate, and communicate in much more fluid ways," she said. But several national security law experts and civil liberties advocates note that government officials are able to get an emergency warrant from the secret court within hours, sometimes minutes, if they can show an imminent threat.

– From the New York Times.

Maybe there was more evidence that all of this was coming. In 2004, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reversed the ban that kept the FBI from spying on American organizations. It won’t be abused, he promised. But then J. Edgar Hoover promised the same thing when Martin Luther King and other civil rights workers were brought under small government’s version of Big Brother, COINTELPRO, a secret and blatantly illegal government organization that aimed to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the FBI found objectionable.

Which today would be just about anyone, what with your either being for or against the guy in the Oval Office.

But again, it's only natural that it's come to this. After acting unilaterally on the international front, by bypassing the United Nations in Iraq, the President is now acting unilaterally on the domestic front. “Unilateral” is a very clean word, isn’t it? If this unilateralism was happening inside the Soviet Union, or in present-day Belarus, we might be using a word more easily associated with one of those leaders who used to stand atop Lenin’s tomb, his breast heavy with medals and red stars. Dictator. That's the word we might inch toward. But if I suggested there were shades of that word moving into DC, it'd just be more evidence of the contemporary caterwauling that is politics.

At some point you have to turn your back on a President. If you don’t like the United Nations, that’s one thing. But Congress is a pretty sacred institution, cherished in my book, as it, along with an independent court, keeps us from the age of kings. If President Bush needs to act more quickly, he should talk to the country, he should talk to Congress -- hell, if he has to he should watch that Saturday morning cartoon about bills on Capitol Hill and do something about it. Because he's not God's Holy Warrior, sent here to protect us with his great wisdom and valor. He's just another guy in a cowboy hat who walks a little funny.

And remember, for every one crime that is reported, another nine go left unsaid. Do you know what's happening in Washington?

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Smokestacks

The Soviet Union conjurs up many images in the western mind: the hammer and the sickle, the yellow star against a flag of red, the more-than-slightly androgynous member of the female shot-put team. But perhaps nothing remains more prominent to this day (when steroids are the American athlete's drug of choice) than the smokestack.

What exactly is a smokestack? Just a tall tower, spitting smoke? Does it serve a purpose, or is it in fact just a symbol of progress and productivity? Like, Look, there in the distance, a smokestack - we must be a prosperous people, we must be doing something. Or: The people are unhappy? Build another smokestack!

I took a picture of this set of smokestacks in Moscow, a week or so back, from the window of my hotel overlooking the Moscow River (Moscow on the Moscow, I suppose). It was a nice hotel complete with a VIP board in the front lobby. There were the Clintons, Al Gore, Putin's wife, a guy from Microsoft, and Some King or President of a large Muslim island nation whose name was Megawatti Something or Something Megawatti. Makes me wonder if he was named after the light-bulb, his father fascinated by this modern device, this light-giver -- and I name him Megawatti -- like a character in my terminally-forgotten novel is named Aspirina. There were also several rock bands noted on the board, all of whom were popular during the Soviet era: the Scorpions were there, as were Queen, or at least one member (Brian May). That's how it was listed on the board. Queen (Brian May). There's something sad in that. As if Brian May showed up all alone.

I'd like the VIP Suite please.

And who are you?

I'm Brian May.

No response.

I'm Queen (with Brian May).

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The Blood Road

When I was in Norway, I visited the Blood Road Museum (in German and English) in Rognan, the town where my mother was born and raised. The museum commemorates those many thousands of prisoners of war, mainly Red Army soldiers, who died working on the railroad Hitler hoped to build through northern Norway. The railroad never materialized (it fell just short of Rognan, well short of Kirkenes, the launching point into Murmansk) but the Germans kept their captives working even when they realized their initial plans, to complete the project in three years, were overly ambitious.

One of the worst camps in Norway was in Botn, a beautiful fjordal inlet just a couple miles from my mother's cabin. After the war, it was deemed to be an execution camp because so many prisoners there died, some from mass executions (this during the first year of operation, when the SS ran the camp) and then many later, when the Wehrmacht took over, from drinking water that was allowed to mix with raw sewage (this is what gave the camp its legal definition as an "execution camp," like Dachau or Auschwitz, because securing clean drinking water should not be a problem in Norway, where the streams run clean).

The picture above is of a headstone from a former Russian graveyard located at the edge of my mother's cabin's property line. The graveyard and camp were just up the road from her, though the former was moved, as were the graves of all but a few Red Army soldiers, when the Cold War came around (the graves were moved to a cold Norwegian island where Soviet visitors could be more easily contained and surveyed).

Anyways, all of this is a sort of quick look at the subject; I'm working on an essay that goes into it in greater depth. Because here's the thing, and I hope she doesn't mind my saying so (if so, I'll take this down): My girlfriend's great-great grandfather was in one of these camps, but we don't know which one. I probably want to find out more than her; if I don't know something, I want to know it. Call it a form of autism, or mental retardation, or just plain curiosity -- I don't know. Anyways, what I do know is this: that one-third of all Soviet soldiers were held in Saltdal, the county where my mother was born and raised; beyond that it's like grabbing at the fog. In the final days of the war, the Germans did a good job of destroying their scrupulously-kept records, while after the Cold War, Moscow was mum on who was where or when. So: I'd like to write about all this, and it seems logical that my search be part of the essay.

Anyone know how I can find more information? How I might match a name to a camp?

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Four Men Carrying a Refrigerator

So I've added a photo feature to the sidebar (Flickr, for those familiar with it) and I've posted some pictures of Kharkov to start it off. Didn't get around to including the photo I've posted here, which my girlfriend says the locals call, in the great Socialist Realist tradition, "Four Men Carrying a Refrigerator."

The only other news for now is that I recently had a story accepted at The Portland Review, with that issue expected to be released in December. Strange but true, and I hope she won't mind my saying this, but the editor moved my story from the big slush pile to the little slush pile after seeing I'd mentioned Kharkiv in my cover letter. She then took the story with her to Kharkiv, that's right, to Kharkiv, where she went to visit relatives in September. If another literary magazine in America can produce an editor and writer who have visited Kharkiv in the same month, I challenge you to find it.

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Samizdat

A bit of a long absence, this. I'd intended to be much more prompt, very thorough; it is my way. But many things have happened, and as a result I've been driven under-ground, hence this posting's title. What can I say? Well, I have to rely on an internet cafe to post, and there was the stuff with the reading list ("About this Stalin story ..."), and then the fact that much of what I found myself writing involved people I'm around most every day. Perhaps that is why books will always survive blogs; you can reveal more in a book that you publish later, from the safe remove of time and place. Then there's also this, I've been in and out of doctor's offices since I got here, hacking, coffee, sometimes limping, and through it all I've been given a glimpse of a medical system far different than the one I've come to know (and hate) in America. My doctor asked that I not write about this, and to honor that request (after getting over the shock of the request itself, which is a weird validation of sorts) I've refrained from posting here. So: I'm actually writing a great deal, but when I got here I found that what I was writing about and what I'd expected to write about weren't exactly the same thing. Maybe this is evidence of a deeper work. I don't know. But for the time being, the press is in the garage, running through the night, and leaflets are being hidden in the linings of coats, handed out to only the members of the underground.

It's probably just temporary, while this first chapter is deatlh with, and after that I'll be able to open things up again. And now that I'm getting over this flu, which has kept me down much of the week, I'll at least be able to get out and about and see more of Kharkov, which is for the most part clothed in either tiger-print or Dolce and Gabbana, so far as I can tell. Then too I'll be visiting Belgorod, just across the Russian border, where a friend lives. I had hoped to do that sooner, but this last week I had my passport taken away -- for a week, I was first told, then two weeks, I was told -- so my presence here could be registered with the local police, who sound more sinister when you use the Ukrainian name: militia. No other Fulbrighters that I know of have had their papers -- and hell, I'll go ahead and call them that -- taken away for such a long time, and I only know of one other who has registered with anyone other than the US Embassy -- a fellow Kharkovite -- but then this is the Northeast of Ukraine, not flag-waving, chest-thumping L'viv in the west, not sunny Odesa or laid back Yalta to the south, and certainly not Kyiv, the country's most international city, right smack in the center. Kharkov, more than any other oblast, leans East, and it has been slow to change in some sectors, particularly those relating to security and a certain governmental agency that went by three letters, the first of which I'll spot you: K.

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The Soviet Union's National Anthem

The Soviet National Anthem.

Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics,
Great Russia has welded forever to stand.
Created in struggle by will of the people,
United and mighty, our Soviet land!

Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!

Through tempests the sunrays of freedom have cheered us,
Along the new path where great Lenin did lead.
To a righteous cause he raised up the peoples,
Inspired them to labour and valourous deed.

Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the stength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!

In the victory of Communism's immortal ideal,
We see the future of our dear land.
And to her fluttering scarlet banner,
Selflessly true we always shall stand!

Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the stength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!

Written: S. V. Mikhalkov
Music: A. V. Aleksandrov
Date: 1977 (original version written in 1944, mentions of Stalin later removed).
Lyrics: Also view the lyrics in Russian (Courtesy of the Funet Russian Archives)
Transcription/Markup: Brian Basgen
Distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

For more Soviet Sounds visit Marxists.org, where these lyrics were found. The author of this message is not responsible for any FBI files that may be started on you as result of your use of this link.

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