Monthly Archives: February 2005

by | 11 February 2005 · 9:12 am

Studying in the Soviet Union in the 1960s

David McDuff‘s retrospective on studying in the Soviet Union in the 1960s continues. The following are only short excerpts from each post.

Going Back V

It’s hard now, in retrospect, to recreate or even re-invoke the atmosphere of those years. At home, in Britain, there was a sense of social change, the dropping of old certainties and taboos and also a degree of willingness to experiment with new lifestyles and patterns of living. This was accompanied by the burgeoning pop culture, the new cults of fashion, drugs and sex, the advent of rock music, the Beatles and the Stones, and the Wilson government with its slightly tongue-in-cheek, but none the less real commitment to the “white-hot technological revolution”. It all had an air of adventure, but at the same an innocence whose essence is hard to recapture or understand nowadays. In some ways, as students (our official designation was that of “scholars”) travelling on British Council stipends and the recipients of a Foreign Office briefing, we were, I guess, meant to be representatives of the New Britain, carrying the Western way of life into the heart of the Soviet monolith, in the hope – entertained by some – that some of it would rub off and act as diplomatic grease for the rather rusty state of British-Soviet relations at the time (strangely, perhaps, the installation of a Labour government at Westminster and Whitehall had led to more, not less tension between London and Moscow).

Going Back VI

In the morning, we all left the train with our luggage and were herded into another bus. Our mood was generally cheerful, though also somewhat apprehensive. To begin with, the group was housed at a university hostel (studencheskoye obshchezhitie) on Lomonosovsky Prospekt, with the promise that in a couple of weeks’ time we would be transferred to the main university building. The university district, in Moscow’s south-western suburbs, is a rather characterless and sprawling area of geometrically planned avenues, which also takes in Lenin Hills (Lenskie Gory, now Sparrow Hills, Vorobyevye Gory), and the university skyscraper. Our hostel was a five-storey building, indistinguishable from the other five-storey apartment blocks that stretched for kilometre after kilometre on either side. We were fortunate enough to each receive a room to ourselves, though we soon realized what a luxury this was – most of the Soviet students in the building had to share two, three or even four to a room. For the first day or two we restricted our outside forays to such activities as finding the nearest foodstore – something of a necessity, as the university stolovayas (dining-rooms) were situated some distance away. We got used to queuing for such items as bread, kolbasa (sausage), cheese, and so on, and then joining the second queue at the cashier’s desk, in order to pay. The whole process could take as long as an hour. Back at the hostel, we experimented with cans of pork and salted fish, which we prised open and devoured in the floor’s communal kitchen.

Going Back VII

In the basement of Zones B and V were the stolovayas (dining rooms) and shops and stores. Here we could spend our money. We were fortunate by comparison with our Soviet colleagues, receiving a monthly stipend of 250 rubles, supplemented with a monthly British Council grant of £25 in hard currency traveller’s cheques. Most Soviet students had to subsist on a maximum monthly stipend of 150 rubles, many receiving less than this. At this time, one ruble was supposed to be equivalent to one US dollar. The main stolovaya was a self-service canteen which, for very little money, provided a basic diet of shchi (cabbage soup) or borshch (borsch), kotlety (meatballs, usually served with rice), cabbage and/or carrot salad, sour cream, kumys (fermented mare’s milk), kompot (stewed dried fruit in a tumbler, really a kind of fruit juice), black bread and/or white bread, and tea. This was served for all meals, including breakfast. It could be eaten for two or three days before becoming intolerably repetitive. There was also a coffee bar, which was supposed to serve coffee, though I never saw any during all the time I spent in MGU. There was also a store selling such delicacies as Soviet champagne, wine, cigarettes, Cuban cigars and candy. Outside the main building, on Prospekt Vernadskogo and Kutuzovsky Prospekt there were foodstores (gastronom) which sold staple groceries, and it was even possible to buy fresh meat if one was prepared to queue for a long time. If one was feeling especially extravagant, in certain areas of town there were also the so-called beryozka hard currency stores, earmarked for the use of Communist Party officials and high-ranking bureaucrats, but also open to foreign diplomats and their families. Some of these stores sold fresh fruit (often virtually unobtainable with rubles) and superior quality cuts of meat, and after a little argument one could usually be served by presenting one’s traveller’s cheques to the kassirsha behind the often brutally overcrowded sales counter, though this often involved prolonged arguments about whether one’s signature was genuine or not.

Going Back VIII

Lidiya Prokofyevna, or “L.P.” as we soon began to call her, was in charge of all the foreign “philology” (arts and humanities) students in the building and its environs. Her office was therefore often very busy, and the time spent waiting outside it for one’s appointment, which was sometimes delayed by up to two hours or more, could be considerable. When one did gain access to the inner sanctum, one began to realize why these delays occurred. To begin with, L.P. would fix you with her somewhat steely, but none the less friendly gaze, through thick glasses, and ask you questions about your zayavlenie, or application for research and archive facilities. When she had learned what she wanted to know, she would pick up the telephone and call the relevant authorities – however, the people at the other end of the line usually seemed to be busy or absent: the phone would go and ringing and ringing, and L.P. would sit there looking at you through her glasses. She might then briefly change the subject to the questions of how you were faring in Zone V, or who your group leader was, or some such topic, but would then revert to silent waiting, as the phone at the other end of the line continued to ring and ring. Sometimes this process of waiting went on for ten minutes or more – then she would call another number, with the same result, and so on. Eventually the required information would come through, and L.P. would issue instructions about the appointment with the archive director, librarian or other official. I think most of us found these sessions in L.P.’s office something of a Kafkaesque joke – and what made the joke even funnier was that L.P. seemed to share an awareness of the absurdity of the situation. Eventually one day, the leader (or starosta) of our group and his deputy brought her flowers and chocolates, which finally seemed to break the ice.

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by | 11 February 2005 · 8:42 am

Soviet vs. Western Dissidents

Here’s an excerpt from what A Step at a Time has to say about Cold War dissidents.

In the 1960s and early 1970s there existed an almost complete disparity, a dislocation, even, between the dissident movement in Soviet Russia and the radical movements in the West (those which gravitated around the Paris “revolution” of 1968, for example). While Western radicals sometimes paid lip service to Soviet dissidents – and there was a mild flurry of sympathy for them during the events that immediately followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 – in general there was an almost total lack of comprehension on both sides. Western radicals could not understand the admiration felt by most Soviet dissidents for Western democracy and culture, while most Soviet dissidents were appalled by the disdain and hatred felt by much of the Western radical left for Western society. Later, this dislocation crystallized out in the situation described by Sharansky in The Case for Democracy, where Western “ban-the-bomb” marchers walked side by side with KGB operatives who were bent on exploiting the radical left-wing and peace movements, while in the Soviet Union, anti-nuclear protesters and peace activists languished in jails and prison camps.

Looking back on it now, it’s hard to see how anyone could seriously have compared the two movements – the radical Western left and the Soviet dissidents. While the Western students and activists were free to utter their opinions, hold public demonstrations and even burn down buildings, in the Soviet Union those who resisted the established order were imprisoned, tortured and killed. “Who could turn away from themselves even under enormous strain, after seeing Ginzburg’s tenacious refusal to compromise?” Cali Ruchala writes. Although the dissident movement was by no means homogeneous, and comprised different levels and qualities of disagreement with the power of authority, the example of fortitude, moral sanity and defiance, even under impossible conditions of repression, shown by Ginzburg and others like him was simply over the heads of most Western observers, even those who for their own political and ideological reasons wanted to sympathize with the Soviet outcasts.

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by | 10 February 2005 · 8:49 am

Nick Kristof on North Korea

In the 10 February edition of the New York Review of Books, Nick Kristof reviews two recent books about North Korea: Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s) and Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies by Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang (Columbia University Press).

Kristof captures at least two interesting ironies:

Americans routinely try to increase the country’s isolation by trying to cut off its few links to the outside world, even though this only increases the longevity of the regime. [This, of course, is exactly why the Kim dynasty tries to keep its subjects isolated.]

For example, Western journalists and commentators have periodically written exposés about North Korean labor camps on Russian territory in Siberia. These are typically logging camps or occasionally mines where North Korean laborers, under North Korean supervision, work for negligible wages, without any freedom to engage in political activity, under constant guard so that they cannot escape. Westerners have assumed that the workers are slave laborers forced to toil in the grim conditions of Siberia, and they have demanded that Russia crack down on such abuses.

The articles seemed persuasive to me. But in fact, Martin writes, the laborers were not forced to go to Russia but went willingly:

Indeed, they had competed fiercely, using bribes and any other means available, to exert enough influence on North Korean officials to get themselves on the list. They saw going to Russia as their tickets to wealth otherwise almost unimaginable by North Korean standards. The work was approximately as arduous as what they would have experienced back at home. The big difference besides huge salary increases was that it was possible to leave the camps occasionally and interact with Russians and ethnic Koreans and Chinese in nearby communities. Many loggers were transformed by experiencing Russia’s relatively liberalized atmosphere.

Martin cites interviews with defectors like Chang Ki Hong, who said that the average income in North Korea was about sixty won a month, but that in Russia he got nine hundred won a month. The thousands of North Korean workers in the camps were all under North Korean supervision and were not permitted to leave the restricted area without a pass but they did get to see something of the country. But those allowed to work in the camps were transformed by the experience. “Until I got to the Soviet Union, I believed in the regime,” Chang Ki Hong said.

But when I got to the Soviet Union and started meeting people there, I realized there must be something wrong back home. It was after I had been there about six months that my mentality started to change. We are taught that the whole world worships Kim Il Sung. I met Russians who made fun of this Kim worship, and then I realized that he was not in fact worshipped by the whole world.

Ultimately, Chang defected from the work camp, as did others among these laborers in Russia. But partly because of pressure from Western human rights activists, and partly because of Russia’s 1998 economic crisis, almost all of those North Korean laborers have since been sent home—a loss, it would seem, for human rights.

Shades of blackbirding (PDF) in the South Pacific! Now compare the role of missionaries in the South Pacific, or the relative success of Christian missionaries in Japan and Korea.

The evidence suggests that Kim Il Sung was a genuine nationalist hero and guerrilla leader, albeit not nearly so heroic as the later hagiographers would suggest, since his group’s attacks on the Japanese were not decisive in the war.

More remarkable, it turns out, Kim’s father was a Christian. Korea was fertile ground for Christianity in the early twentieth century, partly because Christianity was a way to quietly express defiance of the Japanese colonial rulers who had formally annexed the country in 1910. Kim’s father attended a school founded by missionaries, and later attended church regularly; he was also a church organist. He taught Kim Il Sung to be an organist as well, and the boy attended church throughout his teens. “I, too, was interested in church,” he once wrote, but later “I became tired of the tedious religious ceremony and the monotonous preaching of the minister, so I seldom went,” although he acknowledged receiving “a great deal of humanitarian assistance from Christians.” Still, after taking power, Kim completely wiped out Christianity from his country, keeping a couple of churches for show but staffing them with actors and actresses to impress foreign visitors with his tolerance.

Ironically, in view of his ideological extremism in later life, Kim was initially accused by other guerrillas of being a “rightist deviationist,” and he complained that some guerrillas were too ideological and not pragmatic enough. Yet Kim genuinely did fight hard against the Japanese at a time when many Koreans (including many future South Korean officials) were quislings of the hated occupiers. Those nationalistic credentials gave Kim Il Sung an authenticity and moral authority among Koreans that leaders in the South lacked, and that is one reason why many ethnic Koreans in Japan (even those from the southern half of Korea) have sided with North Korea rather than with South Korea. They weren’t Communists; they were nationalists. Some moved to North Korea in the 1960s, thus ruining their own lives and those of their families.

via The Marmot

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by | 10 February 2005 · 8:27 am

North Korea Tries to Censor Czechs

For those of you who are still a bit befuddled how everything on this disparate bunch of blogposts ties together, I give you this headline from the CBC: North Korea calls for ban on ‘Team America’ in Czech Republic. Go Czechs! And congrats Japan! And go Canada!

via NKZone

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by | 10 February 2005 · 7:41 am

Pol Pot’s Slave State

In the 1 February edition of the Christian Science Monitor, Clayton Jones reviews journalist Philip Short’s (psycho)biography of Pol Pot.

Reading the biography of a 20th-century tyrant takes courage. The tales of atrocities can be numbing, the motives unclear, and the lessons uncertain. Evil seems like a lurking character in such books, either in one man, the body politic, or foreign players, and is eventually exposed as, well, a rather stupid mistake….

Short’s contribution is in describing Pol Pot’s Cambodia as a modern slave state, as North Korea still is. Even today, Cambodia is ruled autocratically by former minor Khmer Rouge leaders, despite the efforts of the United Nations to bring democracy there. (Pol Pot’s top men may face trial next year.)

Much like slavery’s demise, the Khmer Rouge’s downfall was due largely to its internal contradiction in denying each person’s basic humanity. Its leaders eventually turned on themselves in a paranoid purge that provided an opening for Vietnam to invade Cambodia.

Just before he died in 1998 in a jungle hideout – unrepentant and unpunished – Pol Pot claimed in an interview that his conscience was clear and that he had done it all for his country. Like other tyrants of his century, we may never know enough about him to draw the right conclusions. Short’s book, however, takes us more than half way there.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 9 February 2005 · 6:10 pm

Generals Grant & Sherman vs. the Press

“Grant was a long way from the flagpole, and he had a pretty long leash. He had taken thirteen thousand casualties at Shiloh, and while he finally had a national reputation, he knew that if he failed here he would be cast aside.”

So far, Grant’s Civil War career had demonstrated how war, like the frontier, provides the opportunity for meritocratic advancement. Grant had exploited one narrow opening after another. Having failed at farming and real estate, Grant, who had finished in the unimpressive lower middle of his class at West Point, showed a knack for leadership once the war began: he volunteered for the army, then recruited, equipped, and drilled troops at Galena, Illinois. In late 1861, he captured Belmont, on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and Memphis, but this campaign had not been specifically ordered, and the press criticized Grant for an unnecessary engagement. Then, in February 1862, Grant won the first major Union victory of the war when he captured fifteen thousand Confederate troops at Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River in Tennessee. In April at Shiloh Church, near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, Grant repulsed an unexpected Confederate offensive, but with such heavy losses that the press raged at him, though military historians now see Shiloh as a Union triumph. The captains and majors [on an excursion from Fort Leavenworth] argued that had the interfering press then been more influential than it was, Grant and Sherman both might have been removed from command and the war prolonged for lack of aggressive Union generals. (Sherman celebrated with his aides when he learned that four reporters had been killed near Vicksburg.)

As I had learned at Fort Leavenworth, the power of the media foreshadows the end of the heroic period in American military history. Great battles of the type fought by Grant and Eisenhower mean risk and blood and a wide berth for error.

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 346-347

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by | 9 February 2005 · 6:09 am

When Vicksburg was the Frontier, and Grant a Frontiersman

This post is for Geitner Simmons, of Regions of Mind, who’s writing a book about the South and the West.

“Gettysburg changed the war less than Vicksburg did,” explained Chris Gabel, a military historian [at the School of Advanced Military Studies] at Fort Leavenworth, who led one of the four seminars into which the large group of captains and majors was divided. Gettysburg was an accidental, set-piece battle. After Gettysburg, the Union field commander, [General George G.] Meade, kept doing what he had always been doing. The Confederate commander, [Robert E.] Lee, kept doing what he had always been doing. Little of strategic importance happened. But Vicksburg cut the South in two, and it brought Grant east, to take control of the Union Army.”

Though situated in the Deep South, in 1863 Vicksburg was considered “the West,” just as Leavenworth was during the later Indian Wars, and just as the Rockies and the Cascades are today. Grant, the Union commander at Vicksburg, was in every respect a westerner. He grew up in Ohio and lived in Illinois, both part of the original “Northwest,” the first territorial possession of the young United States and in the early nineteenth century–the time of Grant’s youth and early adulthood–a frontier, with its own Indian wars. Grant had also served in California and Oregon. This experience of the Pacific may have steeled his commitment to a united union, which he shared with Lincoln.

As a general, Grant was blunt and practical, lumbering ever forward, risking what he had achieved in the knowledge that standing still means failure. And because he considered himself no better than his men, he was the ideal democratic leader. For Grant, war was never heroic: like everything else in America, it was business. Grant exemplified the serviceable engineering education at which West Point excelled: so American, so unlike the more theoretical “chessboard” curriculum of European war colleges. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, written at the end of his life, is the archetypal American narrative, perhaps more so than Thoreau’s Walden or Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, to which Edmund Wilson favorably compares it. With rough austerity, it tells of its author’s struggles, setbacks, and ultimate rise, through sheer practical application in the course of extraordinary events. If I could boil America down to a single, exemplary personality, it would be Grant. For me, Grant, in his rough-hewn, unsophisticated ambition, was America. I was taking this bus journey on a hunch that learning more about Grant and what he had accomplished at Vicksburg might allow me a final insight into this country.

At Vicksburg, Grant truly came into his own, pulling the Union and the coming Industrial Age nation along with him. Vicksburg is about process: the little-by-littleness of change. Though Grant’s victory there gave Union forces strategic control of the settled part of the continent, the exact moment of that victory is obscure; for Vicksburg was not so much a battle as a complex campaign of several battles and skirmishes. The turning point in the dense malarial marshes of the lower Mississippi Valley occurred in the midst of bloody weeks of drudgery, between Grant’s seventh, failed attempt in late March 1863 to cross to the east bank of the Mississippi (where the Confederate fortress was) and the Confederates’ final surrender on Independence Day, the same July Fourth when the guns stilled at Gettysburg.

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 341-343

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by | 8 February 2005 · 6:55 am

Studying the Soviet Union in the 1960s

Siberian Light has dawned upon a blog by longtime Russian translator David McDuff entitled A Step at a Time, which describes itself as “Reflections on the world post 9/11, by a writer and translator who engaged for many years in the debates of the Cold War, and who tends to see the world’s present troubles as a continuation of the old common struggle with tyranny and oppression.” Here‘s his Normblog profile.

McDuff was an exchange student in the Soviet Union during the 1960s and has written a fascinating, serialized essay entitled “Going Back” about his experiences during those years. I’d like to excerpt a paragraph or two from each installment–except the introduction, which I’ll quote in its entirety. (Perhaps it will incite me to set down a few of my memories of life in Ceausescu’s Romania.) So here goes:

Going Back

In writing the entries about “Dissidents” [link added], I’ve begun to realize that for me the issues in this subject go back a long way – probably to the beginning of my involvement with Russian studies in the early 1960s. In those days, such an involvement also inevitably entailed a prolonged encounter with the Soviet Union. Since for someone from a Western democracy it’s almost impossible to understand cognitively the reality of the fabric of life in a totalitarian state, a Westerner’s memories of contact with that fabric are almost always bound to be selective, personal and subjective to an extent that may make them irrelevant in terms of historical truth. Yet I believe that since part of the legacy of the Cold War has been a consciousness of the old divide between East and West, and the barriers it created between human beings on either side of it, it’s perhaps important for those in the West who did have first-hand experience – however partial and “cushioned” – of life in the Soviet reality, to talk about it and discuss it. For it was a world that was not merely physical and geographic, but also extended far into realms of thought, morality, political awareness, aesthetics, and other regions, while at the same time functioning as a kind of reversing mirror of Western social and intellectual norms.

“A man cannot bear the thought of being crushed by a physical compulsion; therefore he deifies the force that rules over him, investing it with superhuman traits, with omniscient reason, with a special mission; and in this way he saves a bit of his own dignity. The Russian writer Belinsky, for instance, made use of Hegel during a certain phase of his life, to deify czardom.” This is how, towards the end of his autobiographical work Captive Realm, the great Polish-Lithuanian author Czeslaw Milosz illustrates the choice between “madness” (the refusal to recognize necessity) and “servility” (the acknowledgment of one’s complete powerlessness), which he saw as a defining characteristic of life in a totalitarian society. I think it was a dawning consciousness of this choice – or rather, of the fact that in certain conditions of social and political development such a choice might have to be made – that eventually made clear to me, somewhere around the end of the second year of my studies in Russian literature and history, the essential difference between Russian culture and the culture of the West, and made me want to understand it further.

In future postings under this heading, I’ll try to describe how that process of discovery and understanding developed for me.

Going Back II

I’d grown up in Edinburgh, Scotland, far away from the complexities of East European politics, but had had at least some small experience of “physical compulsion” at the school I attended, which in itself in those distant days of the 1950s was probably not unlike a totalitarian entity of some kind, with its cult of obedience, its prefects, its canings and beatings, and its assertion of a monolithic, corporate identity….

Occasionally the Russian department received visits from Soviet writers and public figures, but these were nearly all rather obscure – no one had ever heard of the “poet” who arrived one day, accompanied by two “minders”, with a slim volume of verse in written in the most austere and conventional social realist style. He was an engaging man, who had taken part in the defence of Moscow in 1941, and had later fought in tank battles – he told us that all the skin had been burnt from his body, and had had to be re-grown. As a military man, he was interested in the technical problem of how best to scale the rock on which Edinburgh Castle stands, and I remember that we students spent a long time discussing the logistical details of this with him, as it was good practice for our knowledge of Russian.

Going Back III

I visited the Soviet Union for the first time in the summer of 1966, travelling with my girlfriend in a white Morris Minor convertible which we took aboard the Soviet ship Mariya Ulyanova (named after Lenin’s sister) from London’s Tilbury Docks, via Copenhagen and Helsinki, to Leningrad….

That summer we didn’t stay in hotels, but slept in a tent we’d taken with us, striking camp at official State campsites whose locations were entered on our visas, together with the obligatory time of arrival at each site. We started with a week in Leningrad, then drove to Novgorod and Kalinin, followed by a week in Moscow, then to Kharkov and Kiev, and finally out of the USSR via Vinnitsa and Chernovitsy, into Romania – four weeks in the Soviet Union in all. In general, at first we were surprised at how “normal” everything seemed – the weather was warm and sunny, the streets and thoroughfares of Leningrad looked much like those of any European city, and it was only when we got out of the car and gazed at the actual texture of the place – the strangely rough, unmodernized surfaces of the roads and buildings, the dust that blew everywhere, the absence of commercial advertising, the old-fashioned look of people’s clothes – that we realized we were in another world from the one we were used to. Even so, during those first days I think we were so pleased to have reached our destination that we didn’t really notice much of this – my memories are mainly of visits to the Hermitage and other museums, to the Petergof Palace and park, of walks along the Neva embankment, and so on. For us, it was almost like being back in Vienna or Copenhagen – or even Edinburgh….

Engaging as some of these encounters were, we were, I think, glad to leave Soviet territory. At Chernovitsy, after the car had been searched for nearly 2 hours by Soviet border guards, who extracted every single piece of paper from it, we crossed into Romania, where we underwent the ritual of having the car sprayed against foot-and-mouth disease, and washing our hands in disinfectant by the roadside. We were then told by the Romanian personnel that we could pitch our tent “wherever we liked”, as long as it wasn’t in a forestry zone. The year before, Nicolae Ceausescu had been chosen first secretary of the central committee of the Romanian Communist party.

Going Back IV

The drive through northern Romania, Hungary and Austria, back through West Germany to Ostend and the United Kingdom, was fairly uneventful. We didn’t go down to Bucharest, but stayed in the foothills of the Carpathians, where we were treated almost like royalty by the staff of the local tourist office in Suceava, the first town over the border, which didn’t appear to have seen many British tourists in a long while. We tried on local national costumes, let the tourist office director’s twelve year-old cowherd son drive our right-hand drive Morris Minor round a field, much to the boy’s delight, experimented with speaking Romanian, had our photographs taken, drank fruit cordial, had our palms read by the local gypsies, ate in a really nice restaurant, and in general had a pleasant time. It all seemed light years away from the Soviet Union – more like being in France or Italy. Moving on westward the landscape soon become rather more industrial and sombre, and when we entered Hungary there was something of the Soviet ‘feel’ again, especially along the shore of Lake Balaton, with its organized groups of vacationers and their mostly Soviet-made cars. In Budapest I remember the blackness of the uncleaned buildings, and the bullet scars from 1956, which still lay everywhere on the street facades and masonry. Also the incredibly dense and tall barbed-wire fortifications on the Hungarian-Austrian border, just after Sopron….

In January, I had an interview in London with the British Council, in connection with the Moscow visit I was planning to make. The British Council’s offices on Davies Street seemed quite unassuming, and very British, with cups of tea and copies of the Times. One was therefore slightly unprepared for the rather East European nature of the interviewing panel, which consisted of a row of dark-suited personnel, some academic but others very definitely from the Foreign Office, who fired questions at one about one’s plans, intentions and reasons for visiting the Soviet Union. Some weeks later, I received a letter telling me that I’d been accepted as a postgraduate exchange student. Later, there was a briefing session, where all the accepted candidates were gathered together in a room at Davies Street. We were given demonstrations of bugging devices that had been found in university, diplomatic and business premises in the Soviet Union, and then received an illustrated lecture on the workings of two-way mirrors, with a real “live” two-way mirror. We were sworn to secrecy, and told that we must not on any account divulge anything of what we’d seen and heard to the press, or in writing of any kind. Somewhat taken aback, and slightly amused, at the end of the session we emerged on to the street, wondering if this had been a rehearsal for some spy drama.

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by | 7 February 2005 · 6:49 am

Free to Protest, and Nobody Cares

In 1997, Robert Kaplan found the boundary that divides Cascadia into two nations to be a fading anachronism.

YET WHEN I went to dinner at the Portland home of an Iranian immigrant, Jim (Jamsheed) Ameri, it was as if Sousa’s patriotic march music had jumped in volume, as if mid century Industrial Age America had never receded. Jim is a real estate developer and lives with his wife, Goli, in Tigard, on the southwestern fringe of Portland, in an opulent home at the head of the Willamette Valley. From their impeccable lawn, punctuated with majestic Douglas firs in a fine, pellucid mist, the valley, its homes and its gardens, unfurled. This was the bountiful Pacific Northwest as seen by the first pioneers, now savored by this latest migration of Oregon settlers. Jim and Goli had invited a number of their Iranian friends to dinner to discuss their experiences as very successful immigrants in America.

Sipping drinks on the porch in the sunset, Farsheed Shomloo, an immigration lawyer, pointed to a book on the patio table and told Jim, “You should read this new book about Iran, it’s really interesting.” Jim replied:

“I don’t want to read it. I know the outcome already. In Iran, there is beautiful poetry and everything turns out a disaster. Here the poetry is not so beautiful, but people are free to discover the best in themselves; that’s why America has happy endings. Here it’s a negative system: there is no entrenched depotism, no will to dominate. We immigrants can remake the whole country if we want to. It’s ours for the taking, as if there is a perpetual clean slate where nobody is ever owed anything. I’ll tell you, the Iranian revolution was a disaster for Iran and a success for America, because it brought a lot of talented, ambitious Iranians here. Every time there is a disaster in the Third World, it’s a good thing for America, since the best of the middle class finds its way here.”

Farsheed agreed. “What is this country that sucks you up and draws out the best in you, and allows you for the first time to be yourself?” he asked passionately. “Periodically I reread the Constitution. I am amazed. What is this incredible system built by pessimists, yet built so as to unleash the human spirit? You know why I chose to live in Oregon? I looked in a book and saw that there was no sales tax here. In Iran I was oppressed by taxes and everything else. At the University of Oregon in Eugene I used to participate in protests against the shah [in the 1970s]. Then I realized that nobody in Oregon gave a damn about the shah or about me protesting. I was free to criticize U.S. government policy, and nobody cared! You cannot imagine what a revelation that was for somebody from Iran. That’s when I stopped focusing on Iran and truly became an American.”

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 336-337

But look at it from the point of view of someone whose principal involvement in politics is to participate in protest demonstrations and political fund-raising. How discouraging is it to stage more demonstrations and raise more money and still lose elections? Free to protest, and nobody cares!

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by | 7 February 2005 · 6:19 am

Sleepless in Garden City, Kansas

Quang Nguyen owns the Garden City Specialty Cleaners. At night, he prepares federal tax returns for Vietnamese and Mexicans who do not know English well. He files the returns electronically on his laptop computer. I met him for breakfast at a franchise restaurant. In a part of America where people dress informally, he wore a pin-striped shirt and tie and had a collection of newspapers under his arm.

Nguyen was born in 1959 in South Vietnam, the son of a businessman. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he escaped with hundreds of others on a rickety fishing boat. They drifted with little food or water for three days in the open sea before an American vessel rescued them. Nguyen and the others were sent to a refugee camp in Thailand. In 1981, after years of delay, he arrived in Oakland, California, then flew to Wichita, Kansas, where he knew a Vietnamese family. He soon learned that the new pig-raising plant in Garden City had jobs to offer. “So I came here and never left.

“I came with a friend, another Vietnamese I had met in Wichita. I was young, thin, and short. I was one of the first Vietnamese to come here. The people at the plant wouldn’t hire me. They said I was too small to hack pig meat all day with a knife. My friend and I slept in an old car we had–we had no money to rent a room. We slept all winter of 1981-1982 in the car, by the highway and in the park. We came back to the plant every few days, begging for work. Finally, one of the foremen felt sorry for us. I started working nights at the pig plant and immediately registered for school during the day. I had studied electrical engineering in Vietnam. but I knew that I was not in a position to continue that here: I had to learn proper English.

“I saved money to sponsor my sister to come, and I always studied. I tried never to sleep. I got together with some other Vietnamese to start a restaurant. and I worked there for two years after quitting the job at the feeding plant. But the restaurant was not really a success. So I read manuals about fixing cars and in 1985 opened a body shop. In 1987, I sold my share in the body shop and bought the Rainbow Laundry, then the Specialty Cleaners. After I became a citizen. I studied the U.S. tax system and started preparing tax returns for the other Vietnamese. In 1991, I married a Vietnamese. My wife and I met at a bowling alley.

“My youth was all work and struggle and cold and heat and lonely with a strange language. In this country, if you don’t work hard you either sink or stand in place, which is just as bad. You always have to calculate to get ahead. You know, I have to pay $250 each month for health insurance, and then there are the mortgage payments. I have four children; two are in Head Start programs. If I didn’t have to sleep, I could make more money, though.” He smiled.

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 259-260

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