Category Archives: Eastern Europe

by | 11 July 2005 · 8:59 pm

Some Fire and Brimstone on Srebrenica

The Wall Street Journal has a harsh editorial today.

Ten years ago today, Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic entered the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica, then being defended by Dutch peacekeepers. General Mladic made three demands: that the townsmen surrender their weapons; that all males between the ages of 12 and 77 be separated out for “questioning”; and that the rest of the population be expelled to Muslim areas. Within two days, 23,000 women and children had been deported. Another 5,000 Muslim men and boys who had taken refuge on a nearby Dutch base were also delivered to the Mladic forces.

As we now know, most of the people surrendered by the Dutch to the Serbs were slaughtered, as were more than 2,000 others, bringing the estimated tally of the Srebrenica massacre to 7,200. Yet the scale of the atrocity alone is not why we remember it. We remember because the men of Srebrenica were betrayed by their ostensible protectors, and that carries some lessons for today.

But Christopher Hitchens is far more brutal.

We still have to endure the disgrace (and the victims and survivors have to endure the humiliation) of knowing that Mladic and his psychopathic political boss Radovan Karadzic are still cheerfully at large. They are not hiding in some dingy cave in the unmapped hinterlands of Waziristan. They are in mainland Europe. Last Friday, when the New York Times covered both the London atrocities and the coming anniversary of Srebrenica, it ran an editorial that smugly inquired “why the wealthy nations have not done enough about the root causes of terrorism and why Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden continue to function after almost four years of the so-called war on terrorism. Many will wonder why the United States is mired in Iraq while Al Qaeda’s leader still roams free.”

Prettily phrased, you have to admit. Others might wonder why the wealthy nations took so long to address the “root cause” of Serbian terrorism-­-the root cause being Serbian fascism and irredentism­–and why it is that Mladic and Karadzic are still gloatingly free after 10 years, not four. The “hunt” for the latter two gentlemen began during the Clinton administration, and on the turf of the sophisticated and multilateral Europeans, as the writer of the above words might have had the grace to admit.

Aljazeera.com also weighs in–and attracts a lot of reader comments.

People in the West who lazily look back on the 1990s as the good old days fail to realize just how much diplomatic, economic, military, and moral credibility the West–the UN, EU, US, NATO–squandered during that halcyon decade before the end of history reversed itself so abruptly at the end of the millennium.

In the summer of 1984, I remember the great relief of returning to normalcy, to the tolerably functional societies of the West after spending a year in Ceausescu’s Romania, the bleakest and most dysfunctional society I have yet encountered. (I know there are, have been, and will be worse.) We could easily endure Romania because we knew that we would eventually escape to a better place. The Romanians, however, remained trapped in their hell, whose brimstone has taken a long time to lose its potency even after the fall of Ceausescu.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, one safe area after another has been attacked from either the inside or the outside, until normalcy has come to include the possibility of yet another outbreak of savage barbarism any place, any time. As last week’s attacks in London reminded us yet again, there is nowhere left to hide. We can only meet those threats head on, anywhere and everywhere, with violent warnings where necessary, as we should have done in Bosnia and Rwanda, while steadily destroying the attraction of the noxious ideologies that feed the barbarism.

Here’s more from David Aaronovitch in The Times Online: ‘If we don’t provoke them, maybe they will leave us alone.’ You reckon so?

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by | 20 June 2005 · 6:35 am

Reporting on the Kosovo War

Why did the [Kosovo] war end when it did? If you believe Nato or any of the alliance governments it ended because the bombing campaign had succeeded. The high-tech weapons performed largely as advertised and Milosevic and the Serb people no longer had the stomach to see their country being destroyed around them. If you believe some of the correspondents, the war ended because during peace talks on June 3 the Russians urged Milosevic to do a deal, threatening to cut gas supplies to Serbia.

It took the BBC’s documentary division to reveal why Russia, which had steadfastly supported their fellow Slavs throughout the war, brought this pressure to bear on Serbia. The second BBC programme on Kosovo called “An Audit of War” broadcast on October 18 said, “Shortly after Serbia accepted the peace deal the International Monetary Fund provided Russia with nearly three billion pounds to payoff the interest on its foreign debts.”

This leaves us with the most intriguing question of all–what was the war really all about? The Spectator doubted if it was actually about the ethnic cleansing of the Kosovars. “In the three years leading up to 25 March 1999, between two and three thousand people had died in Yugoslavia’s latest ethnic conflict,” wrote Mark Steyn, the magazine’s American correspondent. “Not a pretty sight. But let’s say it was the upper number, 3,000. That still gives it a lower murder rate per capita than New Orleans or New York … Washington, Oakland, Houston, Las Vegas, Dallas.

“Sitting in Belgrade browsing through the homicide statistics Slobo must have thought that the Americans of all people would appreciate how some societies can tolerate a level of slaughter others might find excessive.” But, said Steyn, Milosevic failed to understand a crucial distinction–if you kill people in drive-by shootings, liquor store hold-ups and child custody disputes, that was the sign of healthy mature democracy. But if you killed people because of an ongoing blood feud rooted in centuries of history, that was barbaric.

Perhaps President Clinton gave the game away when early into the bombing campaign he tried to ease America’s doubts. “Had we not acted,” he said, “the Serb offensive would have been carried out with impunity.” The bombing, therefore, was to punish the Serbs. Punishment is an established part of U.S. foreign policy [and not that of every country outside of late 20th-century Europe?]. Gary Sick, who was then in charge of Gulf policy at the National Security Council, said after Iran took American hostages in Teheran in 1979, “There was a strong view … that Iran should be punished from all sides.”

But what was Serbia being punished for? “For the humiliation we suffered at their hands in Bosnia,” according to Robert Fisk. “For daring to resist the project of establishing the West’s hegemony” said the celebrated Russian dissident Alexander Zinoviev in Le Monde.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 517-518

Interesting that, when it comes to the Kosovo War, the Telegraph/Spectator’s Mark Steyn appears to have kept company with the Guardian/Observer’s John Pilger and the Independent’s Robert Fisk.

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by | 19 June 2005 · 3:19 pm

Romania’s Role in Freeing Hostages in Iraq

Jim Hoagland’s column in last Thursday’s Washington Post exposed an unusual angle on the hostage-taking business in Iraq.

Three haggard Romanian journalists appeared on al-Jazeera television April 22, in handcuffs and with guns pointed at their heads, to beg for their lives. They would be killed if Romania did not immediately withdraw its 860 troops from Iraq, their captors announced to the world….

There is a happy ending to this particular story: The Romanian government, which rejected any troop withdrawals, managed to win the journalists’ freedom a month after their suffering was exploited on al-Jazeera. With the help of Iraq’s besieged authorities, Bucharest has also unraveled many details of the kidnapping plot.

That investigation in turn contributed to the freeing Sunday of French journalist Florence Aubenas and her Iraqi translator, Hussein Hanoun Saadi. They and the Romanians were held on a “hostage farm” north of Baghdad by one of the local networks that traffic in foreign and Iraqi hostages. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin publicly thanked Romania on Tuesday for its help.

Criminality became ingrained in Iraqi society during the long and brutal rule of Saddam Hussein, and it did not disappear with the U.S. invasion. Many of those who finance or commit the bombings and other atrocities that flash nightly on American television screens, where the violence is interpreted uniformly as a political phenomenon, fight to be able to return to crime-as-usual in Iraq.

The Romanian case also casts new light on the strong connections that united the Iraqi dictator — and other Arab leaders — with the intelligence services and political establishments of the Soviet bloc for three decades. As they made cause against the United States together, they also made money together.

The U.N. oil-for-food scandal is in many ways only a small strand in the vast web of international corruption and violence spun around the Middle East’s oil riches….

The [Romanian] election last December of a democratic government headed by President Traian Basescu [who ran as an anticorruption candidate] has finally opened the files of the Romanian Intelligence Service …

O să fie foarte interesant, cred eu.

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by | 6 June 2005 · 9:32 pm

Ultimului Strajer al Capitalei, 1916

Halfway Down the Danube shares a telling snapshot of the monument To the Last Defender of Bucharest against the Germans in 1916.

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by | 21 May 2005 · 9:05 am

Polish Diaspora from the Gulag

On July 30, 1941, a month after the launch of [Hitler’s Operation] Barbarossa, General Sikorski, the leader of the Polish government-in-exile in London, and Ambassador Maisky, the Soviet envoy to Great Britain, signed a truce. The Sikorski-Maisky Pact, as the treaty was called, re-established a Polish state–its borders still to be determined–and granted an amnesty to “all [1,500,000 or more!] Polish citizens who are at present deprived of their freedom on the territory of the USSR.”

Both Gulag prisoners and deported exiles were officially freed, and allowed to join a new division of the Polish army, to be formed on Soviet soil. In Moscow, General Wladyslaw Anders, a Polish officer who had been imprisoned in Lubyanka for the previous twenty months, learned that he had been named commander of the new army during a surprise meeting with [NKVD Chief Lavrenty] Beria himself. After the meeting, General Anders left the prison in a chauffeured NKVD car, wearing a shirt and trousers, but no shoes….

Other Polish prisoners were released from camps or exile settlements but not given any money or told where to go. One ex-prisoner recalled that “The Soviet authorities in Omsk didn’t want to help us, explaining that they knew nothing about any Polish army, and instead proposed that we find work near Omsk.” An NKVD officer gave Herling a list of places where he could get a residence permit, but denied all knowledge of a Polish army. Following rumors, the released Polish prisoners hitchhiked and rode trains around the Soviet Union, looking for the Polish army.

Stefan Waydenfeld’s family, exiled to northern Russia, were not told of the existence of the Polish army at all, nor offered any means of transport whatsoever: they were simply told they could go. In order to get away from their remote exile village, they built a raft, and floated down their local river toward “civilization”–a town which had a railway station. Months later, they were finally rescued from their wanderings when, in a cafe in the town of Chimkent, southern Kazakhstan, Stefan recognized a classmate from his school in Poland. She told them, finally, where to find the Polish army….

Employees of the Polish Embassy, deployed around the country, were still subject to unexplained arrest. Fearing the situation might worsen, General Anders changed his plan in March 1942. Instead of marching his army west, toward the front line, he won permission to evacuate his troops out of the Soviet Union altogether. It was a vast operation: 74,000 Polish troops, and another 41,000 civilians, including many children, were put on trains and sent to Iran.

In his haste to leave, General Anders left thousands more Poles behind, along with their Jewish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian former fellow citizens. Some eventually joined the Kosciuszko division, a Polish division of the Red Army. Others had to wait for the war to end to be repatriated. Still others never left at all. To this day, some of their descendants still live in ethnic Polish communities in Kazakhstan and northern Russia.

Those who left kept fighting. After recovering in Iran, Anders’s army did manage to join the Allied forces in Europe. Traveling via Palestine–and in some cases via South Africa–they later fought for the liberation of Italy at the Battle of Montecassino. While the war continued, the Polish civilians were parceled out to various parts of the British Empire. Polish children wound up in orphanages in India, Palestine, even east Africa. Most would never return to Soviet-occupied, postwar Poland. The Polish clubs, Polish historical societies, and Polish restaurants still found in West London are testimony to their postwar exile.

After they had left the USSR, the departed Poles performed an invaluable service for their less fortunate ex-fellow inmates. In Iran and Palestine, the army and the Polish government-in-exile conducted several surveys of the soldiers and their families in order to determine exactly what had happened to the Poles deported to the Soviet Union. Because the Anders evacuation was the only large group of prisoners ever allowed to leave the USSR, the material produced by these questionnaires and somewhat rushed historical inquiries remained the only substantial evidence of the Gulag’s existence for half a century. And, within limits, it was surprisingly accurate: although they had no real understanding of the Gulag’s history, the Polish prisoners did manage to convey the camp system’s staggering size, its geographical extent–all they had to do was list the wide variety of places they had been sent–and its horrific wartime living conditions.

After the war, the Poles’ descriptions of their experiences formed the basis for reports on Soviet forced-labor camps produced by the Library of Congress and the American Federation of Labor. Their straightforward accounts of the Soviet slave-labor system came as a shock to many Americans, whose awareness of the camps had dimmed since the days of the Soviet timber boycotts in the 1920s. These reports circulated widely, and in 1949, in an attempt to persuade the United Nations to investigate the practice of forced labor in its member states, the AFL presented the UN with a thick body of evidence of its existence in the Soviet Union…. The Cold War had begun.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 451-454

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by | 18 May 2005 · 8:09 pm

Role of New Media in an Earlier Era of Dissidents

To put the Soviet human rights movement in context, it is important to note that Soviet dissidents never started a mass organization, as did their Polish counterparts, and they cannot receive full credit for bringing down the Soviet regime: the arms race, the war in Afghanistan, and the economic disaster wrought by Soviet central planning must receive equal credit. Nor did they ever manage more than a handful of public demonstrations. One of the most famous–staged on August 25, 1968, to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia–involved only seven people. At noon, the seven gathered in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square, and unrolled Czech flags and banners marked with slogans: “Long live free and independent Czechoslovakia,” “Hands off Czechoslovakia, for your freedom and ours.” Within minutes, a whistle blew and plainclothes KGB rushed at the demonstrators, whom they seem to have been expecting, shouting, “They’re all Jews!” and “Beat the anti-Sovietists!” They tore down the banners, beat up the demonstrators, and took all but one–she was with her three-month-old son–straight to prison.

But small though they were, these efforts caused a great deal of trouble for the Soviet leadership, particularly given its continued commitment to spreading world revolution and its consequent, obsessive concern about the USSR’s international image. In Stalin’s era, repression on a massive scale could be kept secret even from a visiting American Vice President [the hopelessly naive Henry Wallace]. In the 1960s and 1970s, news of a single arrest could travel around the world overnight.

In part, this was thanks to improvements in mass communication, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and television. In part, it was also because Soviet citizens found new ways to transmit news as well. For 1966 also marked another milestone: the birth of the term samizdat. An acronym which deliberately echoed the term Gosizdat, or “State Publishing House,” samizdat literally means “self-publishing house,” and figuratively refers to the underground press. The concept was not new. In Russia, samizdat was nearly as old as the written word. Pushkin himself had privately distributed manuscripts of his more politically charged poetry in the 1820s. Even in Stalin’s time, the circulation of stories and poems among friends was not entirely unknown.

But after 1966, samizdat grew into a national pastime. The Thaw [after the death of Stalin] had given many Soviet citizens a taste for a freer sort of literature, and at first samizdat was a largely literary phenomenon. Very quickly, samizdat came to have a more political character. A KGB report which circulated among Central Committee members in January 1971 analyzed the changes over the previous five years, noting that it had discovered

more than 400 studies and articles on economic, political, and philosophical questions, which criticize from various angles the historical experience of socialist construction in the Soviet Union, revise the internal and external politics of the Communist Party, and advance various programs of opposition activity.

The report concluded that the KGB would have to work on the “neutralization and denunciation of the anti-Soviet tendencies presented in samizdat.” But it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle, and samizdat continued to expand, taking many forms: typed poems, passed from “friend to friend and retyped at every opportunity; handwritten newslettersand bulletins; transcripts of Voice of America broadcasts; and, much later, books and journals professionally produced on underground typesetting machines, more often than not located in communist Poland. Poetry, and poem-songs composed by Russian bards–Alexander Galich, Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Vysotsky–also spread quickly through the use of what was then a new form of technology, the cassette tape recorder.

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, one of the most important themes of samizdat was the history of Stalinism–including the history of the Gulag. Samizdat networks continued to print and distribute copies of the works of Solzhenitsyn, which were by now banned in the USSR. Varlam Shalamov’s poems and stories also began circulating in the underground, as did Evgeniya Ginzburg’s memoirs. Both writers began to attract large groups of admirers. Ginzburg became the center of a circle of Gulag survivors and literary figures in Moscow.

The other important theme of samizdat was the persecution of the dissidents. Indeed, it was thanks to samizdat–and particularly to its distribution abroad–that the human rights advocates would gain, in the 1970s, a far wider international forum. In particular, the dissidents learned to use samizdat not only to underline the inconsistencies between the USSR’s legal system and the KGB’s methods, but also to point out, loudly and frequently, the gap between the human rights treaties that the USSR had signed, and actual Soviet practice. Their preferred texts were the UN Declaration on Human Rights, and the Helsinki Final Act. The former was signed by the USSR in 1948 and contained, among other things, a clause known as Article 19:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 534-536

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by | 12 May 2005 · 6:27 pm

Timothy Garton Ash on Europe’s Memory Wars

Timothy Garton Ash writes from Warsaw in the 12 May Guardian about the fractures in Europe’s memories of VE Day.

After a continent-wide round of commemorations to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe, it’s clear that the peoples of Europe have a shared past, but not a common one.

Sixty years on, the memory of war here in Warsaw is still irreconcilable with that in Moscow. But it’s also utterly different from London’s low-key festival of “We’ll meet again” nostalgia. Only in the recollections of former inmates of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps does British memory approach the horrors of daily degradation that are the stuff of everyday Polish or Russian memory.

For Russians, the war began in 1941; for Poles and Brits, it began in 1939. For Vladimir Putin, May 9 1945 marked the end of the Great Patriotic War, when the Red Army almost single-handedly liberated – yes, liberated – most of Europe from fascism. For most Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians, it marked the transition from one totalitarian occupation to another, Nazi to Soviet….

The Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili – leader of his country’s “rose revolution” in 2003 – has said we are witnessing a “second wave” of liberation, inside the former Soviet Union, starting with Georgia and Ukraine. Speaking on CNN the other day, he corrected himself, suggesting it was really a “third wave”. I make it the fourth. The first wave rolled over western and northern Europe in 1944-45; the second swept through southern Europe, starting in Portugal in 1974; the third liberated central Europe, starting in Poland in 1980 and reaching the Baltic states in 1991; now the fourth wave, if wave it is, may be building in eastern Europe.

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by | 9 May 2005 · 9:23 pm

A Ukrainian Sign Language Broadcast Hero

Last week, Language Hat blogged a report by Nora Boustany of the Washington Post about a heroic sign language interpreter whose signed truths reached deaf ears:

During the tense days of Ukraine’s presidential elections last year, [Natalia] Dmytruk staged a silent but bold protest, informing deaf Ukrainians that official results from the Nov. 21 runoff were fraudulent…

On Nov. 25, she walked into her studio for the 11 a.m. broadcast. “I was sure I would tell people the truth that day,” she said. “I just felt this was the moment to do it.”

The newscaster read the officially scripted text about the results of the election, and Dmytruk signed along. But then, “I was not listening anymore,” she said.

In her own daring protest, she signed: “I am addressing everybody who is deaf in the Ukraine. Our president is Victor Yushchenko. Do not trust the results of the central election committee. They are all lies…. And I am very ashamed to translate such lies to you. Maybe you will see me again,” she concluded, hinting at what fate might await her. She then continued signing the rest of officially scripted news.

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by | 7 May 2005 · 8:01 am

Edirne (Adrianople) after the Balkan Wars

Much has been published on the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) in general, and on the siege of Edirne (Adrianople) in particular, by journalists, diarists, historians, and others. The Balkan Wars, it will be recalled, had the distinction of being the first twentieth-century international conflict on European soil, complete with the use of aircraft. The siege of Edirne by the Bulgarian and Serb armies, which lasted more than five months, was one of the war’s most dramatic events, and it elicited much public interest in Europe and elsewhere….

By the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman Empire had been in a state of disintegration for some time. However, the Balkan Wars, which resulted in the Ottoman Empire’s loss of most of its European territories and the concomitant rise of victorious and strong Balkan national states that laid claim to the loyalties of the empire’s Christian minorities, delivered the final blow to the possibility of Ottoman plural coexistence and foreshadowed the empire’s complete demise. Indeed, within one decade from the end of the Balkan Wars, the remnants of the empire would be transformed into a national state in which the great majority of its population would follow one religion (Islam) and speak one language (Turkish). And these processes were fully reflected in the fate of Edirne.

According to Turkey’s official census of 1935, Edirne’s total population was 36,121, including 31,731 Muslims, or Turks (88 percent of the total), 4,020 Jews (11 percent), and 368 Christians (1 percent). What is striking about these figures is the almost total disappearance of the Christians (who were more than 30 percent of the population in 1912) due to migration and population exchange and the decline of the Jews (17-18 percent in 1912) in both absolute numbers and relative terms. But perhaps even more surprising is the numerical decline of the Muslims (55,000 in 1912). In fact, between 1912 and the post-World War I era, Edirne lost about two-thirds of its population and did not begin to recover until the 1960s.

The reason for Edirne’s decline is well known. The city that until the Balkan Wars had been a major administrative, military, economic, and commercial center had essentially become an isolated border town, but off from its commercial and economic hinterland. The Balkan Wars … also caused extensive destruction throughout eastern Thrace, further undermining Edirne’s economy. The outcome was a rapid flight of population and commercial and economic enterprises from Edirne.

SOURCE: “The Siege of Edirne (1912-1913) as Seen by a Jewish Eyewitness: Social, Political, and Cultural Perspectives,” by Avigdor Levy, in Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century, ed. by Avigdor Levy (Syracuse U. Press, 2002), pp. 153, 191-192

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by | 1 May 2005 · 2:59 pm

German and Chinese Classmates in My "Curs de Perfecţionare"

My year of linguistic research in Romania in 1983–84 was pretty much a bust. Having done fieldwork in a kind of New Guinea Sprachbund, I intended to study the Romanian literature on the Balkan Sprachbund. But my advisor, an Albanian specialist, wasn’t interested in much but a Daco-Thraco-Illyrian substrate. And no one wanted to talk about any Slavic substrate or superstrate. I came away much less impressed by the Balkan Sprachbund than by the Western European one, with all those preposed articles, a stronger tendency to render subordinate clauses in the infinitive rather than the subjunctive, and a clearly discernible Latin superstrate.

But one of the many peripheral bright spots was the chance to sit in on a Romanian “curs de perfecţionare” with classmates from China, East Germany, and the U.S. What made the class interesting was not the sometimes stupifyingly dull lectures, but rather the need to use Romanian to communicate with our classmates, not all of whom were stupifyingly dull.

The four young German girls were all Russian majors (at the University of Leipzig, I believe) picking up a second language to enhance their translator/interpreter career prospects. Two of them were very reliable members of the Party; the other two were not. I ran into one of the latter, a chunky little red-head, at an art exhibit and reception in the West German embassy. She panicked and begged me not to tell anyone I had seen her there. I didn’t and, as far as I know, she didn’t get in any trouble.

When it came time to give oral presentations in one of our classes, they all chose safe and boring presentations on such topics as sports terminology and shipping terminology. The latter talk, by a girl from the Baltic seaport of Rostock, is where I first heard the term “roll-on/roll-off” (also roro) for a type of ship.

During the second term, I got permission to attend their course introducing Bulgarian, but I couldn’t keep up since the class assumed prior knowledge of Russian.

The two Chinese women in the class were broadcasters for Radio Beijing’s Romanian broadcast service. In fact, they still are! One was very reserved, and I never got to know her very well, but the other was quite outgoing and I found her not only far more interesting, but much less frustrating to talk with than the only other American linguist among my classmates. (That’ll have to be another post.)

At one point during the long, lean winter, with markets usually barren of fresh meat and vegetables, she managed to supply us with a chunk of meat from the Chinese embassy. Just before we left, we passed on to her the cassette player/shortwave radio we had brought with us.

Her class presentation was the most interesting one of all. A group from the Chinese embassy had taken a holiday trip through Yugoslavia and Hungary, but she focused mostly on Janos Kadar, less about his economic reforms than about his anti-personality cult. He was so modest, according to her sources, that he would not cut to the head of a line waiting to get into some place–at least not until someone noticed and then everyone deferred to him. As she was talking, I would occasionally glance up at the portrait of Mr. Personality Cult himself that hung in every Romanian classroom. Our professor, the most pleasant and sensitive of our lot, did a good job of taking it all in stride. I thought, if any of us could trash a personality cult, it was someone who had lived through the last years of Mao Zedong. (I learned only recently about the long relationship between Janos Kadar and the Chinese Communist Party.)

Four years later, on a trip to Beijing after a year teaching English in a small town in Guangdong, we had a chance to meet again. I called Radio Beijing and managed in my barely adequate Chinese to get someone to call her to the phone. But then when she answered and I tried to switch to my somewhat faded Romanian, I had trouble keeping Chinese out of it. She brought her six-year-old son and her husband to our small hotel near the Temple of Heaven and spent a few hours chatting in the courtyard garden during a blackout with my wife and me and our two-year-old daughter. Fortunately, her husband spoke a fair bit of English, having worked as an Italian translator/interpreter for a travel agency, so we didn’t have to depend entirely on my rusty Romanian befreckled with dots of Chinese.

Next installment: the three weird Americans in my class.

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