Dennis Prager book-interviewed with Gregory Fiefer, author of “The Russians”. Fiefer is from PBS or something similar and had spent time in Mother Russia on and off for eight years. He did not describe or indentify the origins of his conclusions which he shared with Dennis.
Dennis has always radiated about his own touches with the Soviets….Even though officially the Soviets were ‘ousted’ from Mother Russia about a quarter of a century ago, I have the same tendency as I sense in Dennis, that nothing has changed much between today and those post-Stalinist Soviet days, and so the word “Soviet” comes freely flowing from our lips when thinking and discussing things Russian.
There is something unusually special about Russia and Russian studies. Even the language itself appears to be repressive. The English “I” doesn’t really resonate…indeed, it hardly exists in the Russian language itself……(” ‘To me, it is liked’ pink roses”, rather than the announcement, “I like pink roses”.
(One wonders when the present Obama regime will introduce this repressive approach to language learnings in our elementary school curricula.)
Of the many interests I have developed in my envelope of life, besides my family, two dominate….one, the art of landscape gardening, and the other anything “Russian”.
I once spoke Russian fluently, and “beautifully”, I was told…in Sochi as a matter of fact, in August, 1966…about the time Dennis was graduating from high school. Upon my arrival, then staying beachside, there was a clamor on the stony beach of the eastern Black Sea where a lone Chevrolet was parked. Boys and young men were sizing up the scene arguing about the national origin of the obviously unSoviet made ‘craft’.
I joined the group, joined the argument assuring the guys the auto was American made….in my fluent Russian with an aristocratic Czarist beauty to it. I, by the way, had no clue to the matter. I spoke as I was taught, at the University of Minnesota, Middlebury College in Vermont, and at language schools at San Francisco State College and Indiana University. (Nearly all of my instructors were former aristocrats or relatives who had fled, first the Bolshevik Revolution itself, the ensuing Civil War, the flight to Manchuria, and then, during MaoTseDung’s conquering of China, fled to the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s, where they settled and lived out their days….A class forever gone….but one which I was enormously lucky to meet and admire. Even in their relative poverty, they were elegant, knowledgeable, sensitive human beings.)
I spoke the language I was taught, narrowly, cautiously. My first moment on Soviet territory….at a Moscow airport I chose to initiate a conversation with a “Boris” to practice wondering if I might be understood. No problem at all….He had no clue I wasn’t “Soviet”….He was flying home to Leningrad from Siberia…Bratsk where he had been stationed ‘on kommanderovka’, six months away from his family.
What a victory! It came that we were both awaiting the same flight to ‘Leninville’, and so made arrangements to meet again later in the day. (It was past midnight. Non-Soviets were transported at time when they would be least seen by the Russian population.)
But, back to Sochi. Eventually I confessed to the crowd that I was an American. Like a movie in black and white, suddenly everything ‘Russian’ seemed to enter super-color. Eventually, several hundred folk joined us…and where there ever was a crowd, the Soviets would send out the police.
The police came, broke up the group, told me to spend my time in my hotel instead of bothering people in the street….As we parted, two couples in their late twenties approached me…and asked if I would join them for some wine and talk at a bar, a walk ‘just around the corner’.
I was thrilled, of course. Both couples were Georgian…the Soviet kind, a national kind of couples living under USSR power. I recognized the accent, but had no trouble conversing for they all spoke clearly.
We drank and talked..mostly questions which I answered about my life, family, and America.
They were well educated….as all Soviets whom I met were…but only in the government designed areas….Pushkin, Marx, Soviet pride, World War II wins, manners, the expanding American involvement in Viet Nam.
Stalin was never mentioned, nor even ‘suggested’ …..However, in the more rural towns, I saw shops (all government owned) which displayed his notorious profile in their windows.
Suddenly, there was a pause in my being quizzed. I was waiting for the next array of questions….but suddenly none came. Pause, and then more pause. Then with beautiful eyes, a romantic smile, with spectacular pitch black hair, she asked “Say something”….
I answered in automatic American habit by repeating her word,’shtonyebudh’, (the Russian word for ‘something’…attempting my kind of humor, which didn’t work, by the way.) To call it ‘lame’ would be dishonest.
“What do you want me to say”…I asked …
“Anything, just talk…I have never heard Russian spoken so beautifully”…..I reddened. I spoke the only Russian I was taught. And forever since that compliment I think of and thank my Czarist teachers of the 1950s and 1960s the demands they made of me.
Russia, as the Soviet Union (or the USSR), likely cannot exist without a dictatorship of some sort or another. Moscow ‘governs’, no ‘rules’, a continent of nationalities from the Baltic to the Black Sea and eastward to the Pacific…. about the size of North America, all of it north of my beloved Minnesota traveling east-west, not north-south…..many communities of huge geographic size nearly isolated from the rest of the Earth.
I returned to the USSR October, 1990 when in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine (SSR) had slipped into a public rebellion against authority blossoming in the streets with stories of their generations of slaughter and suffering at the hands of Stalin and Lenin in the “old” days…..and the shock of it all…..the Soviets allowed them to do so without retribution…….
The old USSR was finished. I knew it the very moment I heard the whistles blow starting the uprising, the crowds gathering by the tens of thousands, and the tanks…. 100s easily in view blocks from the protestors, never made a move……Yeltsin and Gorbuchov came shortly thereafter, and the light of New Russia was lit…..
and extinguished by secret police autocrat Putin a decade later.
Gregory Fiefer emphasized the criminal nature of Russian autocracy….a culture based on corruption….think Obama, the thug nurturing dishonesty and deceit, corruption using instruments at his disposal to frighten individuals and opposing groups some secretly, others openly and flagrantly….the lies to the press….the press lying to its public….a new wave of Chicago Mobster life reminiscent of Al Capone gangster time where politics and thuggish enterprise ran the city…..or the New York-city officials mafia dancing together to corrupt all in site.
Christianity was banned throughout the Lenin-Stalin 70 years of the Soviet Union dictatorship….religion being replaced by religious Marxism….(Obama’s favorite spiritual institution to defend and develop next to Islam)…..Marxism the religion which now dominates our own America taught at its universities and schools as the religion of Obama America’s future.
It has become obvious to today’s Obamalings, that corruption is the best way to win elections and manipulate the legal system….after all, in religious Marxism, including the foreigner Obama crowd, there is neither good nor bad….only corruption makes both so.
Filed under: American Culture, Barack Obama, Crime, Education, Foreign Affairs and News, History, Marxism, Religion, Russia, The Press | 3 Comments »
MN Prager Discussion Group 
You must be logged in to post a comment.