War and Peace

My friend John and I just came back from our Trans-Siberian trip. I had been to Russia, and before that to the Soviet Union. My connection to that part of the world has to do with the fact that my parents were born there, but left the country in 1920 because they were on the wrong side of the Communist Revolution. I grew up with the horror tales of the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalinism. The Russian language, however, remained the mainstay of my family’s life in exile, and I grew up speaking it. But the really decisive factor causing me to engage in travels to “the evil empire” have to do with my own, American family. As the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union filled the headlines in the 80s, I decided that a mother’s job included stepping up to the front lines in time of danger.

My first reconnaissance trip into alien territory took me to Prague. I was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Staten Island at the time, and they sent me as a delegate to an International Peace Conference held there in 1983. I accepted bravely, even though I was terrified to step into Communist territory. To my utter surprise, the experience was positive: an international free-for-all rather than dominated, as I had expected, by a Soviet agenda. My real wake-up call came upon returning home. My late husband Rick had saved a couple of articles about the event, and it is there that I discovered the utter misrepresentation of facts I had personally witnessed in our wanted “free press.”

Having broken the ice with the trip to Prague, when a Quaker group organized a “people to people” trip to the Soviet Union the following year, I jumped on the band wagon. Still, when we visited what was Leningrad to everyone else, it was still Petersburg to me. When my “fellow travelers” spoke of the Smolny museum as the place where the Soviet government was founded – I knew of it as “the school for noble girls” my paternal grandmother had attended. And I also knew that she had starved to death during the years following the Civil War.

But the threat of a nuclear holocaust is a powerful incentive to work for peace. After the visits of Moscow and Leningrad our East-West dialogue was to take place during a river cruise down the Volga. A group of Soviet “peace workers” joined us. At first, they shunned me: Americans are not known for their proficiency in foreign languages: was I a spy? But my obvious naivete must have reassured them, and it became clear to me that peace initiatives were, unlike in the U.S., government sponsored. That, in fact, had also been the “Soviet agenda” in Prague as well. The argument was simple: the Soviets knew that they could not afford the arms race. Did we? Anything wrong with guns AND butter?

Another telling discovery: one of the “peace workers,” who, incidentally, happened to be a Chechen, pointed out a man who always ate alone. “This is ours, he said, which one is yours”? I was baffled. What did he mean? The meaning finally dawned on me: he meant the man was a KGB agent. Didn’t I know which one of us was the CIA agent? I did not. Moreover, the very idea, that one of our Quaker “Friends” must be there to report on us was a shock – maybe something to think about.

My next trip of discovery took place in 1988. This time I was invited by the Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office to be their “instructor.” I was teaching at Rutgers University at the time, so giving background talks as we traveled around was a good fit. This time the trip took us all the way to Georgia and Azerbaijan. The change in the country since 1984 was palpable. Mikhail Gorbachev had instituted Glasnost or open speech, and Perestroika or “reconstruction” in 1985, and Chernobyl had happened in 1986. The Intourist guides looked the other way as small breakaway groups followed me on independent mini-excursions – to hospitals, to churches, to schools, to parks. Everywhere people surrounded us, eager to talk. They wanted to know how Americans live. They couldn’t wait to live freely like Americans do.

When it was time to return home, this took us first on an overnight train ride from Leningrad to Moscow. The woman who brings tea around looked at us wild-eyed: she just heard on the radio that President Reagan had announced “we are bombing in five minutes…” I learned later that he apparently didn’t realize that his mike was still on and indulged in this joke. Back on the Russian train we tried to reassure the tea lady, but she was not reassured. “So, she wanted to know, you use your freedom to elect people like THAT?”

In the 90s President Yeltsin open the country to Western economic advisers. Public companies were taken over by private entrepreneurs, who became very rich, while the country suffered a 50% drop in GDP. Those events would require a separate presentation, and I was absorbed in my academic career at the University of Arizona at the time, and traveled to what was now the Russian Federation in 1996 to do archival research.

Just the same, entrepreneurial initiatives were in evidence everywhere. In Moscow men covered with World War II medals played the accordion and sang on street corners. But their receipts, a couple of rubles languishing in a cap on the pavement, were meager. An elderly woman, her treasures (some silver spoons, an ornate photo frame, a roll of lace) laid out on a towel, awaited customers. She told me that her daughter, a teacher in Simbirsk, had not been paid for three months. Teachers there were on hunger strike. She told me about elderly people she knew who had been talked into signing their apartment over to helpful entrepreneurs. These nice people had warned them that the state was about to repossess their apartments, allocated to them many years ago. When they found out that their apartments would not be repossessed, it was too late: the entrepreneurs now owned their apartments, and they found themselves out on the street.

My late husband Rick was too busy with his own career as international economist for General Motors to accompany me on these trips. He was finally ready to venture out there with me in 2006. We boarded in Istanbul to do a cruise around the Black Sea. Here we enter the much contested topic of Ukraine. Here too a separate talk would be in order. Let me limit myself to a few remarks. We stopped in Yalta, and visited the palace where Churchill, Stalin and FDR had divided the world among themselves in 1945. Greece, which had a large Communist movement, was to be assigned to the Western sphere of influence. Hungary and Romania, both patently on the Nazi side, were ceded to the Soviets. What about Yugoslavia? Didn’t Tito win? O.K., let Yugoslavia be a case of fifty/fifty.

The next city we visited was Sevastopol, where the Crimean War had been fought from 1854 to 1856. Peter the Great of Russia had struggled to open access to seas to his large land-locked country. Crimea, a Tartar enclave under Turkish tutelage, fad finally been conquered by Catherine the Great in the 18th century. England and France, however, worried about Russian access to the Mediterranean by way of the Dardanelles, and formed a coalition with Turkey to reconquer Crimea. It was during that war that Tennyson wrote about the tragic ride of the “Light Brigade,” concluding his poem with the immortal line: “Yours is not to ask the reason “why” – yours is but to do and die.” At the same time Leo Tolstoy, a young war correspondent in Sevastopol, wrote unpatriotic anti-war articles.

The third port of the Black Sea we visited was Odessa, not disputed, like Crimea, as a legitimate part of Ukraine. I duly noted that all the street signs were written in Ukrainian. Not that Ukrainian is much different from Russian. Instead of Kiev, they say Kyiv; instead of Dniepr, they say Dnipro; Putin’s first name is Vladimir, Zelenski’s (the current president of Ukraine) first name is Volodimir. The people on my mother’s side, as it happens, came from Ukraine. As we walked about in Odessa, as well as Yalta and Sevastopol, I kept listening to the people. Every single person spoke Russian.

Nikita Khrushchev was Ukrainian, which did not stop him from being the premier of the Soviet Union just the way the Bushes, father and son, had been presidents of the United States, not just Texas. It’s not as if there were no historical quarrels and moves to independence in both Ukraine and Texas – and surely the American Civil War between North and South is anything but forgotten even today. Just the same, Ukraine was a state, not a separate country and the transfer of Crimea had been a purely administrative decision, which made sense geographically. No one anticipated the unintended consequence we witness today.

There were a couple of other “touristy” trips with Rick, but he was reluctant to do the Trans-Siberian, and I finally got to do it last July with John. Things changed as we got further and further away from Moscow. I happened to speak with a lot of ordinary people. Although the young people sported Nike sneakers and Adidas tea shirts (probably made in China), some of the older people were nostalgic about the good old days when life was not always easy, but they could count on jobs, and reliable healthcare and decent education. The cab driver who took us to the airport in Vladivostok was happy to inform us that their mayor had been in jail for corruption for the last three years.

Among my Moscow friends, however, politics were in. Some blamed Putin passionately for all of their ills, while others defended him just as passionately. Had he not stopped the raiding of Russian resources by the multinationals? And what about all the sanctions? Did he not use them to get the oligarchs to invest at home? Most of all, they are grateful that he is standing up against NATO encirclement. When the Secretary of State James Baker and Gorbachev met to discuss the reunification of Germany in 1989 – the understanding was that NATO was not to move “one inch” East of Germany. Obviously, the agreement was ignored by the U.S. They also praise Putin for holding on to Crimea. After all, was the Back Sea not full of nuclear-armed American submarines?

Going all the way back to my early trips in the 80s, the war and peace issue had been my primary focus. It looked for a while that nuclear arms treaties were being signed, and we all expected a peace dividend. But as we know, there is a new arms race, with “new and improved” nukes. The UN resolution to ban nuclear arms altogether is well intentioned, but as I see it, unrealistic. Do you remember what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muamar Qadhafi after they relinquished their nuclear or other so-called weapons of mass destruction? They had been mercilessly demonized and sanctioned first – and then brutally killed. Do we really expect the Russians, diminished as they are after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union – not to heed the lessons of Iraq and Libya? Can they afford NOT to keep up with the U.S. in the new arms race?

But what is in it for us? Frankly, Russia-gate looks to me as a mostly parochial American quarrel between Republicans and Democrats. And blaming Putin but an escape from facing the fact that our economy is down, our leadership incompetent, our multiple wars a monumental waste – not even to speak of the shame of it all. Is this why our presidential impeachment hearings are all about Trump’s thoroughly unsurprising political “deal making” in Ukraine and not about asking why it’s o.k. to send arms to Ukraine? Is it really a matter of OUR national security to subsidize the Ukrainian Civil War?

A young girl from Sweden is telling us that the empire has no clothes. Is it not a demonstrable fact that the largest carbon footprint belongs to our military? Isn’t it time to reassign our huge war budget to dealing with real issues? It took me a long time and much effort to step out of the comfort zone of received opinion to come to all these conclusions.

One of the most significant aspect of this process was meeting Russians, and recognizing them as people just like us. We are only too familiar with border issues here in Tucson. Our border with the Russians is a border of the mind – a mind border created for us by interested parties – what President Eisenhower warned us about back in the day, and called the military industrial complex. The sooner we recognize that we are the ones paying for it not just with our taxes but with our children’s future, the better for all of us at home and around the world.