Russia: Points of View
Lilacs and gold domes, Old Moscow in springtime, 1988 (photo: Rami Schandall)
I had the pleasure of being reminded today of the thoughtful organization and website, Russia: Other Points of View.
When I was fresh out of highschool I had two opportunities to visit the Soviet Union. This was an incredible, eye-opening experience.
I grew up in the anxious time of the Cold War between East and West. It was a period colored by a black fear of looming cataclysm. I knew that the world's leaders were playing a terribly dangerous game, and I was sick with anxiety with imagining the end of this beautiful world of ours. I realize now how my youthful nightmares were colored by after-images of the devastation of WWII in Europe, and the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that resonated for decades afterward. How vividly my childhood was affected by fear of something even more catastrophic, and seemingly imminent.
Russian schoolchildren in Red Square, Moscow 1988 (photo: Rami Schandall)
As a teenager, I took hold of this fear and used it to propel an engagement in Peace activism. I knew certainly that the propaganda on both sides of the Iron Curtain served political schemes that were sharply at odds with the common good. I disbelieved most of what I heard about the USSR, but I had no genuine picture to replace the propaganda. My grandmother was involved at that time with a group who sought to connect real people on both sides of the divide, to develop a "citizen diplomacy" that would take the wind out of the rhetoric. The Center for US / USSR Initiatives began organizing visits of Americans to Russia, and as the period of Perestroika and Glasnost began, these tours facilitated hundreds if not thousands of personal connections: people who had friends either side of the divide knew that what they experienced and the propaganda they were fed were completely different.
Al Davis, dear friend and an American WWII veteran, meets Soviet veterans of the same war. Sukhumi, Abkazia, 1988 (photo: Rami Schandall)
I went on two of these tours, in 1988 and 1989, and witnessed massive, painful change between the two trips. The infrastructure of the Soviet Union was in a state of collapse in November of '89, and while my group was there, the Berlin Wall came down. People were having a hard time acquiring the basic necessities of life, as the state imposed order came apart without a new system to replace it.
A lush tea plantation in Sochi, Georgia, 1988 (photo: Rami Schandall)
The outome of these trips for me was a strengthening of my compassion for the Russian people generally, and some beautiful bonds with individuals, specifically. My travels in Russia, Georgia, and the Ukraine, showed me incredible depths of history, art, culture, and spirit. My emotions climaxed at the mass graves in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) where thousands upon thousands of people died during the siege that took place there in World War II. How could we in North America even begin to grasp the losses sustained by Russia and the other Soviet Republics? Between the Revolution, the two World Wars, and the Stalinist purges, not to mention famines, millions died. Every family suffered. I cannot tolerate my country's blindness to this pain.
Piskariovskoye Cemetary, Leningrad: Eternal Flame, Mass Graves, and Grieving Mother Russia, 1988 (photo: Rami Schandall)
It is a hard history, and this does not make a gentle bear. But I can personally affirm that the way western media has portrayed Russia from the Soviet Era to the present, is embarrassingly slanted. Russia to this day fails to allow honest, open-eyed reportage and critique. But what is our excuse, in the "free" west? Why is our media coverage still so hostile, disrespectful and skewed? Are we so married to the model of "us and them" that we cannot get beyond the knee-jerk reactivity of Cold War days? Those days are long over, to my great relief. I am grateful to Sharon Tennison and the good people behind Russia: Other Points of View for offering an other more rational platform for discourse.
