I was in Volgograd in early September 2001. There was no problem finding a spot on one of the boats that cruised down the Volga River for an hour or so, with beer, vodka, and Russian pop music as the main attractions. I was told that during the time of the Soviet Union, there were three places all good communists were expected to visit: Volgograd, previously named Stalingrad, the scene of one of the most savage battles in history; Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin; and the tomb of Lenin on Red Square. Volgograd has a number of war memorials, including The Motherland Calls, a statue which was the tallest in the world when it was constructed in 1967, and a large, cylindrical building with a giant hand and an eternal flame. When I visited, I could count the other visitors on two hands, though it would have been very crowded before 1991. I traveled to Moscow next. I visited the apartment of a woman who lived in the outer metro area. I was shocked to see that every single mailbox in the lobby had been jimmied open with a crowbar. The woman explained that this was normal, with people retrieving their mail at the post office. In her apartment, she kept a large bowl of Soviet coins which became worthless after the incompetent government of the 1990s unceremoniously switched to the new Russian currency, leaving the life savings of many people behind. When I visited Red Square, a experienced tour guide walked over and introduced herself. She asked if I wanted to visit Lenin's mausoleum, but I countered by pointing out that I had a camera, with signs warning that cameras were not allowed into the building. She simply inserted my camera into her bag and told me to walk with her, with the guards not paying us any attention. The mausoleum was only open three days each week with no line to speak of, even though Soviet-era photos of the area from my Russian textbook showed that the line stretched for blocks. I was in Moscow on 9/11, though I was unaware of the full impact until the day after. I stopped by a display of televisions in a department store and watched for a while, though I admit I did not appreciate the significance of the disaster because I was not familiar with the NYC skyline. When some twenty-something Russians heard my American accent, they turned and looked at me in the same sympathetic way people would after recognizing a guy whose daughter had been kidnapped, raped, and murdered. I was staying in a Russian hotel, one where only Russian was spoken. The television only offered the usual Russian fare, mainly music videos and idiomatic sit-coms. The next morning, I found a printed sheet in English on my door stating that the management was in solidarity with me due to the catastrophe that had occurred to my country. I might have been the only American in the hotel, which they would have known from my passport being registered as required by law. I traveled to an Internet cafe to read the news in English. As soon as the young woman renting PCs by-the-hour heard my American accent, she switched to English and blurted out that she was so sorry for what had happened to my country. I bought an even number of roses at a flower shop -- in Russia, one only gives an even number of flowers at funerals -- and traveled to the US embassy, but there were already too many flowers to count just outside the fence (the person in the photo is not me, but a Russian man saddened by the mass murder). Not many months later, George W. Bush and his neo-con henchmen invaded Iraq under false pretenses, erasing much of that goodwill. Russia's tactics left much to be desired with respect to the attack at the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow, with the latter's October 2002 death toll being high because authorities neglected to notify first responders and hospitals that the toxic gas used by the military rendered people unconscious and nauseous, with them drowning in their own vomit after being left on their backs. We had another chance to square things with Russia in early September 2004, when Islamists held hostage over 1,100 teachers, children, and their relatives at School No. 1 in Beslan in southern Russia. At the end of the siege, over 330 hostages lay dead, including 186 children, making Beslan Russia's version of 9/11, though Russia's incompetent, brutal military shared much of the blame. I visited the Baltic States a few years after my trip to Moscow. English was spoken by just about every young person and many older ones. An Estonian tour guide told me that the first time she had ever seen bananas was during the 1980 Moscow Olympics, though they disappeared soon afterward. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania became NATO partner countries in 1991, five days before the official dissolution of the USSR on Christmas Day 1991, because they had lived with the aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact since 1939, as well as British apathy regarding them. Soviet troops did not completely leave Eastern Europe until 1994, to which photos at the Budapest House of Terror Museum and other museums remembering the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe attest. NATO has no intentions of invading Russia, but the Baltic States and Poland have good, historical reasons for being wary of Russian intentions. Russia has no more historical ownership of the Baltic States than the previous rulers: Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Livonia, and Poland, depending upon the era. Russia has a serious fear of invasion. The Mongols, Napoleon's army, and the Nazis all raped and pillaged their way through the country. Stalin's incompetence and paranoia exacerbated the Nazi invasion, to be sure, though many Russians idolize him today because he is a symbol of a time when their country was feared throughout the world. Americans want the world to remember the 3000 victims of 9/11, but the Soviet Union lost over 20 million people during WWII, albeit after Stalin and Hitler divided Eastern Europe between them in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Many in the US laugh at Russian President Vladimir Putin's shirtless adventures, but the reality is that many Russians admire a strong leader, with that being not much different from the millions of Americans who idolize either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, not to mention the many Americans who watch the breathless adventures of shirtless Kardashians and Jenners. Would Putin have invaded Georgia and Ukraine, killed 298 souls on MH17 and then destroyed the evidence, ordered the murder of Russians living in Britain via radioactive polonium and nerve agent Novichok, and ordered his military aircraft to disable their transponders and play chicken with civilian airliners if Bush the Younger had offered to work together to fight Islamists? Putin probably would have done it anyway, but we might have slowed him down.
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AuthorPete Prunskunas Archives
March 2023
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