Author Archives: lecocqblog

Fiji

It is evening in Helena. After watching the McNeil-Lehrer’s Report and having dinner with Sheri, I went upstairs and sit in the sunroom with our Siamese cat, Fiji.  Looking from my second floor sun porch, I could see a thin layer of light pink sky above the nearby Elkhorn Mountains.  White cirrus clouds floated away in the higher sky, stretching thin in a wispy pattern.

As I watched, twilight crept in.  Figi was sleeping, curled up on my lap. This was our evening time together, alone on the sun porch. Fiji was used to me talking to her.

“Gigi, It’s swell to have a cat for a pal.”  It sounded too much like Hemingway.

Fiji opened her blue Siamese eyes in a squint, looking up at me, slowly closing them again.

“You and I have been pals for a long time, since Charles brought you home as a kitten, when he lived with us in Washington, before he moved to Texas.”

Fiji didn’t stir. She had heard my monologue before.

“When we visited a year later in El Paso, Charles was amazed how you still remembered me, following me around his house, staying near me, talking to me in your froggy Siamese voice.”

Fjii shifted position, stretching out across my legs, continuing to purr.

“I remember the day Charles called me in Helena after his divorce, concerned about you.  His mom was keeping you, but her cats chased you and forced you to live under her floor. You were dirty, and alarmingly thin. When I heard that, I packed the car.“

Liking the soft sound of my narrative with her name interspersed in it, Figi stretched out one arm, most of it now hanging off my leg in thin air.

“What Charles didn’t know was that I had been keeping a picture of you on my refrigerator. I hadn’t forgotten you.”

Figi was purring, her eyes closed.

“When I picked you up in New Mexico, you were scared and hardly noticed me. Your eyes were glued on the other cats as I put you in the travel cage. You didn’t calm down for a hundred miles, and I finally let you ride outside the cage. That’s when you relaxed, riding on my lap as I drove. You rode like that, two days on my leg.”

Fjii was still purring at the sound of my voice.

“That night in the Santa Fe, you were purring on the bed, and following me around the motel room like a shadow, like in the past.  I went out to PETCO, and came back with a red collar and nametag with your new address in Montana.  You were the happiest girl with your new collar, sitting on my lap as we drove north, me petting you all the way.”

A cold breeze came through a slight opening in the sunroom windows. I adjusted my legs, and Fiji opened her eyes and hopped gingerly down to the floor.  Her tail brushed against me on the way out, and I realized I was the lucky one.

Looking out from my perch, I saw people coming home from work in dirt-covered cars and pickups with the lights on. In the distance, I could hear the vibrating rumble of a train.   Helena Valley was becoming dark, lit with amber, green, blue, and red dots

Sitting there, I realized nothing has changed with the night, only our perspective. Night is an illusion, a disappearing trick, as the earth merely rotates one part away from the sun for a while.  Everything on the surface of Earth, although unseen, is still the same.  It will always be the same, lit and unlit, again and again, forever.

 

 

A Change of Heart

Krebs went to the Foreign Service from the Southwest. He learned a lot, and he had thrown himself into the cauldron, handling Cold War issues in some of the best bureaus in the State Department. He took initial assignments in Europe.

He had sacrificed his health in the process, and lost a marriage, too, and found himself a long distance from his three-year-old son. Along the way, he had learned his limitations. He was not good at handling stress. For some time, even as early as his first tour, he had begun to feel that he was in the wrong field. His talents were not those of a successful diplomat. He had good intuition, coming from a good knowledge of history, and was a good contact person, but lacked communications and foreign language skills.

His mind, he began to understand, was fuzzy, and his temperament artistic, centered on nuances and aesthetics. He would attend meetings with senior officers, focusing on their manner and how they dressed, rather than the substance of what they were explaining. He was not a good staffer, and hated crisis situations.

Gradually, Krebs began to change. First, he lost some of his ambition, seeing the cost success took on one’s private life. The setback to his health, his more realistic self-appraisal, and the cost to his marriage, had contributed to a new attitude. He began to choose easier, less glamorous, assignments. The loss of excessive ambition was a good thing.

The second change was that he learned to restrain the emotional side of his nature. His mother’s stroke, coming on top of his divorce, seemed to throw everything into overload. Working on Ethiopian famine that claimed two million lives, also had a great effect on him. Merely retelling the stories of children walking to feeding camps led him to tears. The only way he could cope with his mother’s illness, divorce, and the job was to push his feelings into the background. It was a case of denial. Except for his son, he pushed things out of his mind.

The problem was that he over-reacted, and turned off his emotions almost altogether. He lost empathy and avoided relationships. He let friendships lapse. It bothered him, not being able to feel. But, it was better than the anxiety before.

On the positive side, he had regained self-confidence working on Ethiopia, where he had distinguished himself. This was followed by a study tour at Berkeley, a reward. He became more self-contained and less ambitious, with a better sense of himself and what he believed.

In the early days of his subsequent tour in central Africa, he had gotten along well at first with the Ambassador, who had mentored him. But, Krebs’ new self-awareness began to change him. In the past, he had gone along with policies that bothered him, but here he rebelled, opposing U.S. support for a dictator who was our ally. During a discussion of the annual human rights report, Krebs argued we should not in good faith certify, as Congress required, that improved freedom exists in the country. As the Embassy’s Political-Military Officer, Krebs objected to U.S. military cooperation with the local government.

The Ambassador called Krebs in for a private meeting, asking “for his full support,” saying we can not always choose which governments to back, that we gain more by engaging this particular dictator, and, moreover, that we have strategic interests in the country which the local government protects, and these are not a trifle. Krebs countered, by saying “our long term interests in staying in country are actually undermined by supporting the local government.”  By starting to kill rather than imprison his opponents, the dictator has “crossed the Rubicon,” and would bring himself down. We will have been seen as collaborators.  What we need to do, Krebs argued, was show the people that there was hope for the democratic opposition, and that someone was on the people’s side.

The Ambassador agreed with Krebs on the dictator, whom we had to move to a better direction. We would continue to fight him on democracy and human rights matters. But Krebs was underestimating the need for stability.  Closing the argument, the Ambassador referred to “high-level support at all levels” for our policy, which the Embassy was only implementing. “The issue had already been decided in Washington.”

Out of personal loyalty, the Ambassador did not send Krebs home for inability to support his policy, which he could have. But, Krebs was cut out of the loop for the rest of his tour. He no longer saw intelligence reports or held the political-military portfolio. Krebs, for his part, continued to respect the Ambassador. It was simply a matter of balancing idealism and realism in American foreign policy. He and the Ambassador had different ways of attaining that balance.

Krebs received a lukewarm annual evaluation, ensuring no promotion, perhaps for five years. Those were the costs of dissent at a time when you could be thrown out for lack of promotions. But, for Krebs, this was an important step in his life. He had stood up for something.  He had grown in the process and discovered himself. He would live his life, not making big issues, but would calmly go about his life in a rational way, but would not be afraid of taking consequential decisions. He would not be afraid in general.

He found it suddenly easier to make decisions. Things became clearer; he had a more rational outlook.  He would no longer agonize over his son, but would spend vacations with him, and give him financial security and expand their time together over time. He would not worry about his own health problems. He would develop his side interests and moderate his career. Life was not about vertical development up the success ladder, but about horizontal development as a person with hobbies and family. The British understood that.  He would no longer just drift and allow decisions to be made for him. He would live for acquiring knowledge and writing and perhaps teaching someday.

Suddenly, his emotions came back as well, perhaps as a result of his fighting for the human rights. He had been rejuvenated. He had put aside ambition and fought the system, and had still survived with his honor intact. There would be good tours and advancement before him.

During his home leave, Krebs stopped over in Brussels, where he spent time at the Royal Museum. Looking at the Sumerian cuneiform scrolls, he launched into a new hobby, the study of ancient civilizations and humanities.  He would use future vacations to tour the museums of Europe. He was consumed by a desire for knowledge.

From this point on, Krebs’ career was divided between his work and his private interests, as the latter began to occupy more of his thinking.  He enjoyed the Foreign Service for the travel and the contact with foreign cultures.  But, international relations, which had occupied him since his worked in Germany as a college sophomore, and even before, as a boy in Mexico, was now taking second place to his original loves in college, the humanities, history, and American literature.

He found himself going through the motions in his assignments, making the most of them, learning about Africa and Russia, and advancing U.S. interests, but he was increasingly interested in time off and reading.  He would live for retirement, where he would reorient himself to the humanities. He would write or teach, starting a new chapter, and stay close to his son. That would come soon. He saw himself like Dick Diver, in Tender is the Night. How did Fitzgerald put it?  He was “like Grant at Galena, biding his time.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Film Review: “The Fog of War”

I watched the Errol Morris documentary again entitled “The Fog of War.”  The subtitle is “Eleven Lessons in the Life of Robert McNamara.” My wife claims I have watched this dozens of times. It won an Oscar in 2003.

McNamara, at age 85 when the documentary was filmed, has some good lessons. He participated in planning for Curtis LeMay’s 1945 fire bombings of Japan, the Vietnam War, and “three crises that took us to the brink with the Russians”: the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Kosigyn’s threat, which I hadn’t heard before, made during the 1967 Six Day (Middle East) War, “if you want war, you’ll get war,” apparently related to reports that America was involved in Israel’s air victories.  I assume the third crisis was Berlin 1961.

McNamara cited the failure of our Vietnam policy, saying the lesson was that the United States should never act unilaterally.  If we couldn’t persuade the Brits, Europeans, Japanese and other allies at the time who share our values of the worthiness of the cause, we should not have gone it alone.

On the Cuban Missile Crisis, McNamara’s lesson was that you must empathize with your adversary.  Kennedy said we would never get the missiles out (of Cuba) by negotiation. Ambassador Tommy (Llewellyn) Thompson had the guts to disagree with Kennedy in EXCOM meetings, as we heard on tape, saying there was a way out, and that Kennedy could work with Khrushchev, who was not necessarily under the control of his military hard liners.  We could offer a quid, no invasion of Cuba, which would be sufficient for Khrushchev’s own political purposes.  Khrushchev had gotten himself in a bind, but he could get out of it by saying to the Presidium, “Kennedy was going to invade, and I saved Cuba.” In Vietnam, by contrast, McNamara charges that we did not empathize with our enemy.  We saw the war from our own Cold War perspective and never understood North Vietnam’s view of the struggle as one for independence.

Also, in fighting wars, we have to ensure in the future that we apply the principle of proportionality.  No matter what Curtis LeMay felt, it was not right to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with fire-bombings and two atomic bombs in order to spare the lives of American soldiers who would have to invade Japan.  We were, McNamara claimed, war criminals.

McNamara claims to have been privately arguing with President Johnson to get the U.S. out of Vietnam while publicly supporting the war.  I’m not sure that this stands up, given what other historians have said about McNamara and what I remember.  Perhaps the most compelling message of the film related to Vietnam and the Quaker protester, Morrison, who burnt himself to death at the Pentagon beneath McNamara’s window, throwing his infant daughter to safety just in time.  Morrison’s wife, McNamara recounts, sadly said the lesson was simply that people must stop killing each other.

McNamara says we are bound to make mistakes, but should try to learn from them.  It became clear to me, watching LBJ’s pondering the War in Vietnam, that President George W. Bush made the same mistakes in Iraq, forty years later, getting mixed up in a civil war and posturing it in larger geo-strategic terms, seeing it as a fight for freedom, relying on faulty intelligence, and believing in military might.

McNamara’s lessons are valuable. It should be the primary objective of any President to keep the nation out of war.  We should never get involved unilaterally in military conflict, except for direct danger to the U.S. mainland. Most important, given the danger of nuclear weapons, it is inevitable that nations will be destroyed someday.  We need to rethink our attitudes on killing and war before it is to late. This is a problem with human nature that we need to correct, the need for weapons and aggression. We have to change our mind set, now with nuclear weapons.  Kennedy and Khrushchev and Castro were all rational men, and yet came close to destroying the world in 1962.

McNamara asked Castro thirty years after the crisis, in 1992, if he would have recommended to Moscow that they launch the IRBMs at the United States had we invaded, and Castro said yes, even if Cuba were destroyed.  That was pure madness.

The film itself is magical, with Philip Glass’ music and beautiful slow motion scenes of Japanese walking the streets of modern Tokyo, interspersed with McNamara’s voiceover talking about the devastation of Japan in 1945, with terrible statistics turned into images of numbers falling from the sky like bombs, and with clips of sailors on U.S. ships imposing the quarantine on Cuba in 1962 and on the Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1965, and recordings of LBJ’s talking to McNamara on the phone, demanding escalation in Vietnam, and slow motion sequences of Vietnamese on bicycles in the streets of Saigon while talking about “Rolling Thunder.” All this is done with the haunting, retrospective music in the background, with three rising scale flute notes breaking through at times, suggesting peril and momentous events.

 

Thinking About Hemingway

I am thinking about Hemingway, planning a course on his novels, once we finish his short stories.  I would enjoy this, being able to read prose passages from For Whom the Bell Tolls (“Nay Rabbit, I won’t be going to Madrid with you”); Islands in the Stream (“He was happy on the flying bridge”); A Farewell to Arms (“She can’t die, but what if she does”); Hemingway’s walk with Bill Gorton through the streets of Paris, starting at the Left Bank, in A Moveable Feast; N”Cola’s laughing at the hyena in Green Hills of Africa; and Brett and Jake in the horse taxi at the Madrid Palace hotel in The Sun Also Rises.  Maybe add Belmonte’s scorning of the crowd in Death in the Afternoon and Cantrell’s handling of the surly guide in duck hunting in Across the River and Into the Trees.

Teaching Hemingway, like teaching Frank Lloyd Wright, has helped me see the forest for the trees, gaining understanding.  At first, I was just carried forward by my passion and the detail, only now discovering what Hemingway was all about.  I started with a few simple themes, elaborated during the initial lectures on short stories: survival in a violent world; the use of courage and dignity to persevere; the importance of ritual and routines and simple pleasures; the recuperative power of nature; and the disillusionment, psychic shock, and Existentialism of the Lost Generation.  I began to understand heroes like Nick in “Big Two Hearted River” and the Major in “In Another Country,” the haunting prose, the impressionistic descriptions framing laconic dialogue, the clear glass descriptions of nature, the irony and pathos.  Mainly I love the beautiful slices of life: World War I Italy, 1920s Paris’ and its Luxembourg Gardens, races at Auteil, and the Velidrome,  the Madrid of “A Clean Well Lighted Place,” and Madrid in the Spanish Civil War.

Hemingway brings World War I and the Spanish Civil War alive like no other writing.  He brings post war Paris alive like Fitzgerald does in Tender is the Night.  I began to piece themes together.  The Sun Also Rises was about people coping, Brett and Michael, and Robert failing, and Jake coping and enduring, and Bill Gorton and alcohol.  It is the same for the short stories– a tough world and you learn to endure by various means.  The world gets everyone; there’s no escaping.

Then Hemingway begins to change a bit in the 1930s, new wife, new setting in the U.S., new world and themes of the great sportsman.   He is reengaged, no longer expatriated or disillusioned.  His themes in Spain’s conflict are the search for truth by all means, and the dangers of ideology, and the tragedy of wasteful death.  In the outdoor sports arena of marlin, lion, and Miura bulls, there are codes to live and play by. That is how you get through life, more than just with dignity as in his World War I convalescent stories.  You play by the rules and have professional competence to get through.  Hemingway is a bit more macho, less Separate Peace.  Man tests himself against brutal nature, and qualities like courage and honor are still important.  This is the era of Hemingway on the Pilar, the Nordquist Ranch, and Philip Percival in Tanganyika.  It is also Hemingway’s era of non-fiction, and of reduced output due to drink at Sloppy Joes in Key West and at the Finca Vigia in Cuba.  It is the era when Hemingway’s ego, Papa Hemingway, starts injecting itself into his writings.  But, it is still man in nature and against nature, a man confronting violence through a personal code, looking for true values found in the primitive, lasting truths seen in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

These are masterful stories with beautiful prose on hunting, fishing, and bullfighting elsewhere.  It is no longer the apprenticeship of Nick Adams.  The theme is professionalism, courage, endurance, and rules of the game.  The heroes are a bit less heroic tutors suffering psychic scars, despairing.  They are tough men.  They don’t persevere with dignity alone, albeit shattered. They persevere through skill and courage, and make the transition to men, like Macomber.   It is more of a man’s world, less shell shock and disillusionment and the careless lifestyle of the expatriates.

Finally, we get to the third phase, Cuba and Martha Gelhorn and Mary Welsh, and the weakness of Across the River, his World War II stories, parts of Islands in the Stream The Garden of Eden, and A Dangerous Summer, but also the good:  The Old Man and the Sea and the Gulf Stream Esquire Articles and A Moveable Feast and the first part of Islands in the Stream.

The rules of the game, of the Hemingway “Code Hero,” I finally understood, were a metaphor for life.  They represent belief in honor and courage and professional skill.  Jake Barnes believed in them, as did Mendoza in Pamploma.  This extended beyond the etiquette of the ring, treating the bull with dignity, displaying bravery by killing over the horns, “reciebiendo,” not using too many banderillas to lower the bull’s head, working close, respectful of danger and having an obligation to the sport in your personal as well as in the corrida behavior, as Romero has and Garcia in “The Undefeated” has.  You do things well, like in baseball, hit the cut off man, lay down sacrifice bunts, run out fly balls, hustle, no grandstanding, that honors the sport.

The rules of the game, the code, extends to dying well in life, like Catherine Barclay, Richard Cantrell, and Harry in “Snows.”  Stoic characters, like Garcia and Robert Jordan as well, die quickly and violently, but are not afraid.  And, it applies to facing death and danger well, like Macomber and Belmonte, and the pudgy Lieutenant Colonel in the “Retreat from Caporetto” scene in Farewell, and the French soldier in “Under the Ridge,” and possibly Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, and it includes how to face psychological and other scarring like Jake Barnes in Sun and the Major of in Another Country, and in other short stories,  including Nick in “Big Two Hearted River,” “Now I Lay Me,” and “A Way You’ll Never Be,” and facing old age in “A Clean Well Lighted Place.”

Thank you Hemingway, first and foremost, for the slices of life, or the world around World War I, the romantic world, for the Madrid well lit cafe, the Milan hospital in 1918, the Hotel Florida in Madrid in 1937, the Apartment on Rue Cardinal Lemoine, the Cafe des Lillas in 1925 Paris. Thanks for the great nature stories, the Venetian marshes and duck hunting, the wonderful blue and sliver marlin of the Gulf Stream, the wounded lion in Macomber, the trout in the pools.  Thanks for Hadley, Brett, Pilar, Kid Sister (Hare), Catherine.  Thanks for the terrible, wonderful endings, the French soldier lying stretched out under the ridge, the man who came closest to victory; the Italian Major who stares at the wall looking straight ahead while using the hand therapy machine, Jake Barnes, who says “isn’t it pretty to think so,” sitting next to Brett in the cab in Madrid, the old man at the bridge whose only luck is the fact that his cat can take care of itself, for Garcia in the infirmary in the corrida, for Santiago dreaming of lions on the beach, for Frederick Henry walking out of the hospital in Switzerland, for Nick deciding he can fish the swamp some other day, for the maid bringing the tortoise shell cat to the door in “Cat in the Rain,” for the praying mantis on the hook in “Now I Lay Me,” and the silk handkerchief, and blast furnace door opening, and for the two men on bicycles, and especially for Harry’s dream that he is riding in the plane as it turns left towards Nairobi and there is the flat topped Kilimanjaro, where he knows he is going.  Thanks mainly for your cats, F Puss and Boise.

 

Back in the World of Lightness and Brightness

There is a collection of light images, elegant works of man and nature, scattered like treasures along the course of civilization, brightening our lives like lampposts along the way.

They string along in our consciousness, a collection of delicate forms, having subliminal influence on our lives, a string of light colored motifs, like a pearl necklace, stringing through time.

One can skip from stone to stone along their path, along the high notes of a piano register, light and sharp and crisp, like ice cubes on crystal, or crystal itself.

It is 21 ballerinas in white, pizzicato notes on a violin, Ravel’s airy flute.

It is the beauty of Greek columns and sculpture, of Bernini’s ivory and Cellini’s silver, of Monet’s dresses, and Louis XV chairs, and Women in White, and glass skyscrapers

There is an elegant journey in our minds, a Wagon Lits ride from Minoan Greece through the Renaissance, Hapsburg Austria, Impressionist France, and Art Nouveau.

It is about art making us feel lighter: Sisley’s light yellow impressions, Overcamp and Brueghel’s snowy landscapes, Chenenceau on the Loire, Swan Lake and white tutus, and Van Eyck’s delicate veiled ladies in white.

There is nature’s list: birch and aspen, white amber, and opal.  There are flute solos, soprano arias, and Mozart.  St. Exupery, T.S. Eliot, and Beloit’s monoplane, and DiMaggio in his home uniform.  It is sails and clouds, and birds singing.

 

 

 

The Dark Forest Drive

I was most fortunate to have spent time in places like Russia, Belarus, Cuba, Mozambique, and Ethiopia, where I saw the tragedy of communism up close, the gray world it created and its effect on human beings.  The lasting impression was of a society devoid of religion, and thus of morality which is based on religion, leaving a materialistic world of eating, sleeping, and working.  It was a strange place, centered around an unreal view of things based on economic determinism and means of production.

It was a world where the individual (soul) was not important, and man was a cog in a supposed worldwide worker’s revolution, in the fight against worldwide “capitalism.”  In this revolution, the end justified the means, which has meant that everyone, without exception, must believe in the ideology of communism. Those who protest are removed.  Religion has no place; art is important only as a means to advance this revolution.  Man’s sole allegiance is to the state.

Being a materialistic world, and one that is poor, it was a world on Dickens and Darwin, and of the Industrial Revolution’s mill worker.  Marx was a product of this milieu.  But, the communist world I experienced was not quite Dickens or Orwell.  Dickens was not quite materialistic enough.  The worst part was not the shabbiness or the industrial aesthetic, but the strange ethics accompanying a world seen through a revolutionary or utopian prism.  Right and wrong were somehow reversed in the need to justify the end.  This was illustrated best by the purges of the 1930s, with executions in the name of progress to weed out possible skeptics.  Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, and Milosz described this best, as did Orwell.  All aspects of daily life were entwined around ideology.  Thus, reality was twisted.  Friends and parents were enemies and suspects.  God and religion were bad.  History could be reinvented.  The central reality was the struggle between classes.  The central reality was that “capitalism” was in its last stages, and using nationalism to manipulate the workers in a desperate attempt to hold on to power.   Aesthetics were not important.  The spiritual-material dualism in man, so central to Western tradition, was broken for the first time in the name of science.  In retrospect, it is amazing that this distorted system held on until 1991.

The worst part of the system was that it was dehumanizing.  It created something called the new Soviet man, who was to be devoid of emotions and human weakness, which could thwart sacrifices need for the revolution.  Westerners could not really communicate with the Soviet (dogmatic) man, as we found out in trying to reason with Molotov and Gromyko.  Words meant different things.  There was no common language.   In their vocabulary, “peaceful coexistence” meant a bilateral truce while they went ahead with their support of revolutions.  “Democracy” meant a Poland under a communist government, where people lacked individual freedom but had economic egalitarianism.  When pressed at Potsdam on Poland, Stalin said, “If it is not fascist, it is democratic.” What the Russians were doing in Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany in 1945 was, to them, “democratic,” despite the fact that one-party states were established without any legitimate opposition parties or “bill of rights” freedoms for individuals, to attend church, read a free press, say what he or she wants, believe what he or she wants, and have meetings on political issue with whom one pleases, etc.

The Soviets scoffed at this “illusion” of democracy, which was, to them, exploitive of the masses and a smokescreen for upper class control of all means of production under the guise of liberalism.  This is what the Soviets really believed.  Soviet man saw no need for international news or travel abroad.  Paradise was at home, despite its temporary shortcomings.  Foreign Peace Corps volunteers, businessmen, and diplomats were obviously spies.  Foreign magazines were banned, as were foreign radio broadcasts.  Foreign novels and books were censored.

Brutality was admired for being “tough minded.”  In the civil war and purges, this meant killing priests, intellectuals, and the propertied classes, starving the middle class farmers, and even killing family members.  Lenin said you had to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Unfortunately, this meant you had to have a police state, and as Barbara Tuchman has pointed out, whenever you have a strong security service, it eventually takes over the control of the political figureheads at the top.  The KGB was the real power behind the throne, not the Communist Party.  It was the state within the state.

When I was in Moscow from 1979-81 during the communist era, everyone was the same except for a few dissidents.   All were loyal Soviets, proud of their state and genuinely critical of the “bourgeois” West.  Apparently, however, a lot had reservations beneath the surface, and grew tired of communism after the glow of World War II wore off in the 1970s and 1980s and their idealism faded amid consumer shortages and party corruption.  Along came Afghanistan, Solidarity, and Chernobyl and Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

When I returned in 1991, after Yeltsin took power, it actually became easier to lift the veil, and see things in Russia as they really were.  The new changes exposed the old system.  You could juxtapose modern Russians of 1991, who wanted freedom, with those who could not initially make the mental transition to a new world.  The latter included the pensioners who, mentally, still lived in the 1940s and 1950s; the “orthodox” Party intellectuals, ideologues, professors, and writers, who taught and lived the communist ideology; and the KGB and military, hard liners who were front line soldiers of the Cold War.  These were the elites, or “halves”, of the old system.

A lot of Western observers during the 1991-94 era felt the struggle for reform was not really over ideology, but over pragmatic control over resources and power.  They felt the old communists had really been cynics all along.  Various state enterprises were fighting economic reform because they were trying to maintain their market share in the face of Western competition.  But, I felt I knew better, perhaps better than my colleagues in Moscow and St. Petersburg, because I had more direct contact with Russians, out in the provinces.  The old system died hard in the minds of the people. The socialistic mentality had not changed.

I saw a split among the elites. The newly appointed “reform” governors, put in office by Yeltsin, had the right feelings about capitalism and democracy, mixed with some concerns for maintaining some sort of social net. But, they ran up against the local military and security chiefs, former Communist Party district and regional officials, major newspaper editors, local legislative leaders, and state factory and enterprise directors.  Yeltsin and reform were surprisingly supported by a majority of average citizens in the big cities, including factory workers, bureaucrats, enlisted ranks, fishermen, etc.  But, they were up against the old power structure working behind the scenes to block any reforms towards a market economy, those who were still communists and fighting Yeltsin.  The rural areas were more conservative.

This was not open revolt, except for one attempt in Moscow, but they were putting the brakes on legally, using their influence in state parliaments, city councils, associations of factory directors, and so forth.  The Director of the Lenin Shipyards was a virtual Czar in Komsomolsk-na-Amur, a city of 500,000, and fought change there.  The Dalzavod Ship Repair and Construction plant in Vladivostok, the largest defense factory in the Russian Far East, had similar influence and power. Only one of the nine defense plants in Vladivostok was moving quickly to privatize

The former governors (Communist Party First Secretaries) had been removed, but remained shadowy figures still running in the informal “old boy” networks consisting of former Komsomol youth leaders, the natural leaders, long ago identified for key roles, who now controlled the levers of power and employment in the regions.

I would see the former communist era governors, all powerful in their day, still mingling at state and city receptions, now as private citizens, standing in a close circle with the current deputy governors and district administrators, plus some key enterprise leaders in fishing, ports, defense industries, etc. Some of the deputy governors seemed to have local mafia connections. A lot had worked for the former communist governor and believed he might be back in control again in the near future.  The former, communist era, governor in Vladivsotok was the “eminence grise” and I was his enemy.  As a Western diplomat, I could never approach his group. They would turn their backs, or walk away.  They were bitter, and the new reform governors had to fight to take them on.

When I arrived in Vladivostok in late 1991, the new reformist governor was in a losing battle with the local state legislature, which shared power with him. He was forced out after a year, and replaced by a mining company director who was willing to support Yeltsin, but slowed reforms.  In Khabarovsk, the governor and state legislature were more openly communist and hard-line. The Governor was pragmatic, but had to move reforms very slowly in that conservative city, which was previously the bureaucratic and administrative center for the Soviet Far East region until 1991.

In Sakhalin, a very reform-minded governor made some changes, before being forced out and replaced by a communist mayor who pretended to be pragmatic.  Reforms generally slid backward until the late Nineties, when a reformist deputy governor associated with the oil industry took over.  In Magadan, the democratic-minded governor was supported by a number of local reformers, in a city influenced by the Gulag experience and proximity to Alaska.  The state monopoly, the North East Gold Co., which controlled the town, was privatized and broken up, but future governors had to go slowly since the economy was hurting.  In Kamchatka, the governor was hard line and reform never took off.  Blagoveshchensk and Amur Province, like Sakhalin, was schizophrenic, with a healthy market oriented sector versus a Siberian old style group.  Amur had China across the border, liberalizing, and they had Archer Daniels Midland, and for a while a democrat was elected, then removed later as times got tougher.

The strength of democratic governors depended on how well President Yeltsin was faring in Moscow against the hard liners, Zyugannov, Khasbulatov, Rutskoy, etc.  Despite the setbacks to reform and democracy, the system did reform itself from below, with small entrepreneurs gradually taking over more of the economy and obtaining slightly more latitude.  Reform did not come from above, except for the fact that Yeltsin represented the state official ideology, despite his weakness in securing necessary legislation on taxes, ownership, investment laws, banking, etc.

Ultimately, the hard-liners and those sitting on the fence saw the people wanted a more Western-style government and economy despite the hardships.  That is what carried the day in Moscow and the provinces.  That is why the tanks did not run over Yeltsin in 1991, and why the military and KGB did not intervene in 1993.  Each year, as Westerners poured in and Russia joined the world, the generals and admirals saw more clearly how bankrupt the old communist system had been both spiritually and economically.  They had begun to shed the old Soviet lenses of class struggle, and began to recognize the world as it really was.  They began to want it for their kids.

I was never sympathetic with the hard-line communists, even the older people.  I had seen too much of the worst aspects of totalitarianism as it had been manifested in practice in Nazi Germany and communist Russia.

The Holocaust, a Nazi rather than Soviet crime, was one manifestation of totalitarianism. Near the end of my tour in Minsk, I was invited by my friend Marty, the Brooklyn-born Israeli Ambassador in Belarus, to attend a ceremony at a downtown theater hosted by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, to honor a Belarusan lady who had sheltered a Jewish girl during the Holocaust. The honoree was an eighty-five year old Belorussian grandmother, a typical “babushka,” wearing peasant clothes and with a scarf tied over her head. She was given a plaque and had a tree planted in her name in the row of the “righteous” at Yad Vashem.

The Israel officials present, having flown in from Jerusalem, read her plaque stating the relevant facts. In 1942, the righteous woman, a non Jew, had been handed an infant Jewish girl by the child’s mother in their village when the German SS arrived in their small village and were hauling away all the Jews.  The mother of the child was taken away and never seen again.  The Belorussian lady being honored had taken the child, and had hidden it in her house, even from her neighbors, fearing all the time that the baby’s cries would give her away, leading someone to tell the authorities who would then execute both her and the baby.

At the conclusion of the ceremony, the infant Jewish girl, who had been saved and reunited after the war with relatives, now in her early 60s, came up on the stage and hugged the elderly woman who had hid her for two years.  The elderly woman being honored came forward, embarrassed by the fanfare, saying in Russian that she only did what any woman would have done in that situation.  Marty looked over at me, knowingly.

On another occasion, he and I had traveled as part of the diplomatic corps in Minsk to a killing site in northwest Belarus, in order to honor victims of the Holocaust.  The visit, organized by the Belarusan government, included visiting delegates from four European nations.  We were taken to a hillside clearing in the forest, near a small village of about 50 wooden houses, where Jews from the village were shot. I was at first surprised that the killings took place within sight of the village, probably three hundred yards away, meaning the locals had to have seen what was happening.

The second surprising thing I learned that day was that a group of Italian soldiers, who were allies of Germany at the time, refused to do any shooting, and some of them were allegedly killed for not following orders.  It is a matter of pride for the Italian government, which is why the Italian Ambassador always comes along, that their soldiers risked death and were in fact shot because they refused to go along with the massacre.

The European delegates included a middle aged French woman and an elderly Belorussian man, who were two of the survivors.  These two, along with a third man, made a run for it and escaped into the woods.  They made it to the partisans in the forest, but one of the men had not been believed and had been shot by the partisans.

On another occasion, I went with my boss, Ambassador Speckhard, to Grodno, a city on the Polish-Belarus border, where we met with the sole Jewish survivor of the Holocaust from that town.   This man, twenty years old then, told us over coffee about how he jumped from a train carrying all 2000 of Grodno’s Jews to the Treblinka death camp in the Ukraine.  He later did some research, and learned he was the only person on that train who escaped death.  The others on the train were marched directly from the railhead to the gas chambers.   On a separate visit to Vilnius Lithuania, I saw the streetcar stop downtown where the Jews had to assemble on orders of the German occupiers, from which they were taken outside of town to Ponary Forest and shot.

Then, there were the Soviet crimes, Stalin’s crimes. Outside Minsk in the Kuropaty Forest are the buried remains of perhaps 150.000 victims of Soviet purges.  It appears that a lot of Baltic and Polish soldiers and intelligentsia were rounded up by the Red Army and NKVD in World War II, and taken to the forest where they were shot.

Near Smolensk Russia on the Belarus border is Katyn Forest, where up to four thousand Polish POW officers were shot by the Russian NKVD in 1940, a crime the Soviets tried to pin it on the Nazis.

There are Stalin’s 1936-38 purges.  In addition to the killing fields in the Kuropaty forest outside Minsk, I saw a similar site where 30,000 victims of the Stalin’s terror were buried outside Khabarovsk Russia near the city cemetery.   A “Memorial” plaque marks the site.   I saw the building in Minsk, now the Army Navy Club, where convicted enemies of the state were reportedly shot in 1938. In Vladivostok, it was the basement of the NKVD Headquarters building downtown, now the Far Eastern State University Law School.  In Magadan, it was a small concrete blockhouse with no windows just outside the grounds of the Intourist hotel.  In Vilnius, Lithuania, it was the KGB Headquarters Building, now a museum, whose basement was a prison with isolation cells, water cells, etc.  The inner courtyard was the execution site for political prisoners. There was a tennis court size area with a cement wall on one side where the condemned where shot within eyesight of prisoner’s windows.  Prisoners were also shot In the arched driveway leading into the prison. Truck motors were revved up to muffle the sound of the shots.

I also saw a killing site in Minsk from an earlier period when the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, academics, and priests were eliminated shortly after the 1917 revolution and during the Russian Civil War on Lenin’s orders.  This site in question is now the Interior Ministry hospital in downtown Minsk, primarily a geriatric hospital for retired MVD police officers.  The grounds around the hospital are surrounded by a cement fence, and include a radio tower.

I also encountered the disbanded camps from the notorious “Gulag” prison system that we read about in Solzhenitsyn.  I visited one camp outside of Magadan, where prisoners had been marched from the trains over the ice to the bay where the camp was located.  All that was left was some low, grass roofed dilapidated barracks, some guard towers and barbed wire fences.  I also saw the notorious Gulag Transit station in Vladivostok, although no one ever showed it to me or spoke of it during my three years in Vladivostok.  I recognized it from photographs of similar Gulag transit buildings on the rail lines in my studies.  The dissident poet Osip Mandelstam died in this one.

This was all part of the terrible milieu that I visited in the dark forest.  Most of these things I learned from Russian contacts, who were local businessmen or democrats, and who whispered to me what to look for in a particular building as we drove past.  It recalled my trips with taxi drivers in Moscow in 1980, when we would drive through Manenge Square, passing the Lubyianka KGB Headquarters Building, where so many were executed.  I would casually, as a tourist, ask the driver what building that was.  All would profess not to know what building that was. Of course, I never let them off the hook.

 

Katya

With breakfast over, I walk up the stairs to the second floor study to write for a couple of hours, my study being the only place I have been able to write consistently, looking out to the nearby hills, Mount Ascension to the southeast, and Mt. Helena to the west.  My cork bulletin board on the bookcase next to my desk displays postcards from a few of my favorite places: the Grand Tetons; the Madison River in Montana; and Canyon de Chelly. There is also a postcard from the Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, showing Hemingway with his favorite cat on his lap, a black cat with some white markings, named “Boise,” a stray he found at the Ambose Mundos Hotel in Havana and took home to the Finca. He named Boise after the US Navy cruiser.

Seeing that postcard reminds me suddenly of my own cat, Katya, who is outside. I quickly go downstairs to check on her, and find her, as usual, yelling at the back door to get in. From the time we took her in off the street in Belarus, eight years ago, she has been high maintenance, bossy and vocal.

I open the back door, and she comes in fast, her tail up, and her raspy voice going non-stop.  I have been especially nice to her lately, since she is recovering from lymphoma. She is on prednisone, and in remission, but there is no telling how long she will be okay.

Sheri and I got Katya in 1999 in Minsk, while serving in the U.S. Embassy where I was the acting Ambassador. We first noticed her in the Embassy courtyard in April, as Belarus was emerging from a long winter.  She appeared one day on the compound, like a lot of other stray cats. One of our guards claimed she jumped over the wall from the Russian Embassy next door.

But this stray was special. She was the femme fatale of cats, a European shorthair, the typical Russian cat with snowy white fur and patches of gray. But, she was the ultimate model, not enough gray to take away from the overall white impression, like a birch tree on the snowy Russian steppes.  Seeing birch trees would remind me of her.

She was thin and had a kind of Natalie Wood cat face, with slightly oriental eyes, pure white, distinct lips turned up at the corners, a beauty mark near her nose, and those famous bright Russian eyes.  Hers were jade, and laser-like, locking on you with great intensity when she wanted something.  It was like the world stopped still, no sound, no movement anywhere, noting but her, frozen, communicating a most important message directly to your eyes. She was the most determined animal I had ever seen.  She was determined to get food and wouldn’t stop bothering people until she got it. And need food she did.  We discovered later that she was pregnant.

She walked with beautiful, quick ballerina movements, almost like dancing, making those fast short steps as if on the ballet stage, almost on tip toes like Anna Pavlova playing “Giselle,” the beautiful country girl.  When she walked slowly, she sashayed.  She had a beautiful voice, raspy when most serious, and otherwise very loud and soprano.  And, it didn’t stop.  It went on and on, sometimes almost like a siren.  A local newspaper at the time had an article about several performing cats that had disappeared from the Minsk Animal Circus, which was located near the Embassy, leading me to wonder if she could be one of those?  She certainly acted like a prima dona.

I first heard about our new stray at my desk in the front office, when one of the staff said to me, by the way, “have you seen the new cat on campus?”

“No, but there are always strays around.”

“No, this one is unique.  She accompanies people along the sidewalks, talking to them loudly as they go along, walking beside them and looking up, begging. There is something interesting about her.  Maybe it’s her determination to get fed.  Half the Marines and your secretary, too, are feeding her.  Look behind Post One, you’ll see open cans of cat food on the floor.”

“This is the first time anyone has mentioned a particular cat.  Usually the Marines are quick to drive them off.”

“Not this one, this is their first defeat.”

The next day, I got the treatment when I left the chancery building to walk across the annex.  With her walking beside me, I could tell she was a real survivor.  There was something about her that got to me. On the second day of her following me around the compound, I called my driver and asked him to pick up the cat and take her to my apartment. My secretary was happy the entire day, on the phone, telling everyone.

Sheri didn’t know about our new cat, our first pet, until she got home. We named her Katya. She was Sheri’s first pet, and a few months later Sheri nursed her to health, using vodka to clean her stitches after a bad spaying operation at the local clinic. Thereafter, Katya became devoted to Sheri. Each morning, I would wake up to see Sheri at the bedroom desk in Minsk, doing paperwork, and Katya would be sitting on her lap, facing Sheri, eyes in a trance, kneading on her.

Katya loved anything from the table, but she also ate crusts of hard bread and even old potato skins, revealing her background in the alleys during Russian winter. She was a bit wary of people, probably having been chased.  For some reason, she didn’t like closed doors in the house. We would learn over time she was fearless with other cats, even toms, never giving up her territory her yard.  Screaming at them with her loud voice, the sound always stopped them.  She had no doubt relied on that scream on the streets. She was serious and didn’t play with cat toys.  We gave her a ball, but she stood on it with her back feet, looking confused.  Life had been serious. I admired her for that.

As she got older, and I began to take her to the vet for her regular check ups and vaccines, surprised to find she would give me love bites on my knuckles when we got home, knowing I was helping her.  At some point, I started taking her on walks down the street. She loved these walks, without a leash, and would start across the yard towards the sidewalk when I called out to her, “pa shli,” or “lets go” in Russian. As a show of appreciation, she would rub against my leg as she passed me, leading the way. I always spoke to her in Russian.

It was shortly after we moved to Montana, that Katya came down with lymphoma, falling off a table one day, unable to get up, gasping for air.  I carried her to the vet, who cut her open to explore, finding swollen lymph glands.  She was dying, and I devoted my full attention to her, being home and not working.  Sheri and I force fed her after her chemotherapy, after she had stopped eating. That went on for seven weeks, but she finally started eating on her own.

Sitting at the dining room table now, after finishing my work upstairs in the study, I see through the hallways that Katya is lying in her donut-shaped cat bed on the library floor near the bay windows. She has lost weight.  I walk over quietly and look down at her as she lies on her side, eyes closed, sleeping.  Her legs are extended over the side of the donut, and are crossed. The white fur on her side is ruffled, what is called “rough coat.”  And, there are bare patches of skin on her forelegs where the fur has been shaved to place i.v.s, and on her stomach where she had been cut open.  The sun catches her face.  She has throwing up a lot lately. I can see her sides moving, breathing deeply, but, at least, her nose and nostrils are not flaring. I have to watch for that because the doctor said if she started having breathing problems we would have to put her down to avoid her having breathing panics.

I walk back to the dining room, proud of my little girl from the streets. Hemingway must have felt the same way about Boise.    (October 2007)

 

 

 

Tweaks

I awoke slowly, sleeping until nine. Through the bedroom window, I could see the golden hills of Mount Helena.  The night before, we had watched a doe and her two fawns eating the crab apples that had fallen on our lawn.  I could hear children on the playground of the elementary school across the street, a lot of yelling that sounded good and reminded one of humanity and society and civilization.  Sheri had gotten around and left for work an hour before.

I walked down the stairs, and crossed to the library where I found our two cats, Tweaks and Katya. Tweaks lay on the floor vent. Her mom, Katya, was sitting on the windowsill above her, looking out through the large bay windows to the street outside.  I petted each in turn, saying hello, walking to the kitchen, where I fixed a cup of Prince of Wales tea, scanning the local paper while waiting for the water to boil.

Upstairs, Anne Morrow Lindberg’s Steep Ascent was waiting on the nightstand.  I would read a bit later this morning, enjoying my retirement.   Sheri had left the local paper on the dining room table, and I scanned the front section.  Most of the news was about the welfare of bears in Montana and Idaho, about disputes over land in Helena Valley between developers and environmentalists.

I tossed the front section aside and turned more carefully to the sports page, to the American league half of the baseball page.  How did the White Sox do last night?

After scanning the local paper, I fixed myself a soft-boiled egg, reminding myself what our friend Timothy from Billings always said, that there are two things worth living for, breakfasts and weekends.  I grilled three slices of thick cut bacon, not too crisp, while boiling water for soft-boiled eggs.  I used an egg holder to eat the eggs, reminding me of hotel breakfasts in Europe. I would sacrifice lunch, limiting myself to two meals a day.

On certain days, especially in winter, I would walk downtown to the No Sweat Cafe for eggs, hash browns, and sourdough toast, taking breakfast in a compact wooden booth and enjoying the banter of locals, or else go to The Fire Tower coffee shop across the street for scrambled eggs and toast and Columbian coffee, in either case picking up a Wall Street Journal from the newspaper rack near the Irish Bar, enjoying real news as I ate.  It was nice being downtown on cold days when customers opening the door would create steam on the windows.

Once a week, I would drive to The Filling Station, a local creperie, for country sausage and egg crepes and cup of expresso, the best meal in town, the sausage coming from a friend’s ranch in Montana. Jeff, the creperie owner, was a caterer and personal chef for a wealthy patron in town, and traveled a lot to Latin America and Eastern Europe.  He would return with good stories about Rio and Prague. On warm days, you could sit outside at metal tables on Ray Eames chairs, and enjoy the sunny skies and the view of Mt. Helena, rising up only a few blocks away.  Occasionally, I would go with my close friend, Herb, to Starbucks for coffee.  Small towns are all about routines.

Gathering the breakfast plates from the dining room table, I said to the cats, “Okay girls, ’tanned’ food, which meant canned food in cat baby talk.  They got Fancy Feast liver and beef in the purple label can. They quickly gobbled it down. Katya then went outside after her doorman had opened the kitchen door, exiting rapidly, licking her lips, with no thank you goodbye look.  I went back to the dining room and my paper.

Tweaks followed me back to the table and jumped up, lying directly on the section I was reading.  We both knew it was our special time together.

Tweaks and Katya were the typical shorthair Belorussian cats, mostly all white fur, except for occasional gray patches on their sides and foreheads, with white fur creating a part in the gray on the foreheads, giving them a Don Ameche look. Tweaks had slightly slanted, oval Tartar eyes.

Tweaks and I went through our routine of many years, which I called the “palster walster,” a three part movement, which meant my touching her nose with my right index finger, then her elbow, then back up to scratch her under the chin with the same finger.  She would always anticipate the third movement, beating me to the punch, moving her head down to catch the index finger on the way up to her chin, pushing her chin under the finger. She would purr all the while and make her short, almost silent, “cak” noise at me.  Tweaks was easy to train, and knew lots of tricks.  With Tweaks, there was lots of eye contact and “cak”s.  I bent down and kissed the top of her head.

“I love you Tweaks.”  She responded by looking up with her intense amber eyes and “cak”ing. We had communicated like this since she was a kitten in Belarus, with her retrieving a small piece of Styrofoam, or “peanut,” which I would flip from the bed, or a rubber band I would shoot across the room, saying “bring me that pea-nut,” or “bring me that rubber band.”   She would dart off and bring them back to me.  Thus, she was my “rubber band” or “rubber band girl.”  Anytime I said, “you are my rubber band girl,” or “how is my pea-nut girl?” she would respond with a “cak.”  She loved being rubber band girl above all else.  No matter how tired, or even half asleep, she would respond with a chirp, even if she didn’t open her eyes.

“Tweaks, do you mind if I read my newspaper?”  Tweaks looked at me, gazing up to see whether I would tolerate her not moving.  She pushed her head into my hand as I reached out to slide the newspaper from under her.  She looked down sharply at the paper as I tugged at it.  If only I could get the sports section out.  She moved her paw to block this effort, slapping it down on the newspaper where I was tugging.

“Why do you always have to lie on the dining room table, anyway?”  Tweaks readjusted on the paper, curling around so she could face me straight on and look in my eyes, talking to me with her “cak” answers.  Touching her nose and ears to see if she was okay, I felt under her collar for lumps on the back of her neck.  I knew her illness signs, the hot ear, neck lumps, and wet nose.  She was okay.

“Don’t think that slightly wet nose will get you treats.”

But, all she wanted was her morning attention.  She was my cat and was reinforcing it.  I was her guy, from long ago, since she was a kitten, well before the third cat, the Siamese “Fiji,” arrived.  Katya was Sheri’s cat, Tweaks was mine. We all knew that.

I got up and walked to the kitchen and came back with the red, steel bristled brush she loved.  She jumped down and followed me to the living room floor. As I brushed her back and sides, she stretched out on the carpet in contentment, her paws making a kneading motion. She lifted her head if I stopped, looking me straight in the eyes with a quiet “cak.” for “get on with it.”  I brushed her around the collar and on the shoulders and around the ears, her favorite places.  She pushed her wet nose against my wrist as my hand passed by with the brush.  Her eyes said, “We are pals.”  She began purring more loudly now.  She never wanted to stop the brushing.

“Are you my palster walster”?

“Cak,” she answers

“Are you my rubber band”?

“Cak”

“Are you my pea-nut”?

“Cak”

“Stre-e-e-t- c-h,” I said

On cue, she rolled onto her back and stretched out, exposing her soft furry white belly, which I rubbed.

She looked up, as if in heaven, having her belly rubbed, closing her eyes.

She rolled back over, and I rubbed the back of her black ears.  She pushed the side of her face against my hand in a show of affection.

“Are you my ‘med-sester’, Tweaks”?

“Med-sestre” is “nurse” in Russian, a nickname we gave her as a kitten, for watching over her mother Katya, who was sick in the bathroom, lying on the floor under the sink, after a botched spaying operation. Tweaks refused to be shooed or pushed away. Later, she stuck by me as well, once, when I was recovering from food poisoning in Belarus, and again when I was down with rheumatoid arthritis in Arlington and had the shingles in Albuquerque.  Some cats are born nurses at heart.  Even now, I notice, Tweaks is constantly checking out Katya, who is taking prednisone for lymphoma.

While brushing her, I noticed Tweaks’ fur sticking to my face.  She is shedding.

“Of course, you are my med-sester. How many times have you been there, on my bed when I was bed ridden, all day, purring under my extended arm, barely moving, not leaving the room all day.”  I felt like Bogart talking to Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca”: “Then why didn’t you leave me in Lille when I was sick and the Germans were nearby.’

I started “Paws on Paws,” another of our routines, placing my finger gently on her white front leg.  She was not crazy about this, but tolerated it.

She slowly pulled her leg out.  She stretched out her neck, and pushed her wet nose against my hand, maneuvering her head down a bit to get it under my palm for a head pat.  Her right ear, I noticed, was a bit warm. She wanted it scratched, and angled her head.

“Do I get a head butt?”  I lowered my head and she obliged with a neck extension into a slight head butt with me.  She knew that made me happy, and was looking for eye contact.  She stretched out long on her side, her paws reaching out forward, beyond her head.  Her eyes were closed and back legs crossed.  I petted her, running my hand from her head down her side,

“Excuse me Tir.”  “Tir” means “Sir” in cat baby talk.

“Purr.”

 

 

The Consultation

It was freezing cold outside on Moscow’s inner ring road. The American diplomat, Richard Harris, crunched along on the sidewalk, watching steam rising from the chimneys of nondescript five story apartments, office buildings, and stores lining the streets. The few Muscovites on the streets were wearing heavy coats and fur hats, walking with purpose with their heads down. The sky was November gray. The blackbirds had flown away already, and frost had formed into frozen crystal patterns on the sidewalks where puddles had been. He came to the Embassy.

Two Russian security guards stood at the entrance, blocking the arched driveway leading into the courtyard, walking back and forth to keep warm.  They were wearing the heavy medium blue felt overcoats of the KGB Border Guards, complete with leather Sam Brown belts, and blue-gray felt hats with the ear flaps going up along the sides, tied together at the top. Their official job was to protect the Embassy. The real job was to monitor comings and goings, and report on ordinary Russians entering for visas and other purposes. Of course, it was now late 1991, and Russia had thrown off the communist regime, so who knew. The guards were somewhat relaxed and spoke to each other during lulls.

Harris passed by, flashing his diplomatic passport. The guards recognized him as the new American Consul in Vladivostok. Probably back in Moscow for consultations. One of the guards went to his booth and made a call.

Inside the Embassy, in the secure conference room, Eric Gordon, the Chief of Station sat behind a thin wooden desk, actually just a table without drawers. He was reading a manila folder with a red diagonal stripe across the front and the word “classified” in black across the top. Behind him on the wall was a map of Moscow.

The Chief was thin, in his early 40s, and had prematurely gray hair cut rather short. He wore wire rimmed metal glasses and had gray blue eyes. His overall appearance was intellectual, but also athletic, perhaps a marathon runner. He had a Texas accent, and his tone of voice was soft and yet serious. He closed the folder as Harris entered the room, stood up, excused the escort, and closed the pneumatic door behind them and locked it.

The outer office which Harris and his Station escort had passed through was vacant, the staff temporarily out, probably to protect identities. The Station was the CIA headquarters within the Embassy.

Harris and Gordon shook hands and Harris took a seat, only then noticing a younger man in civilian clothes, a bit hefty like a linebacker, perhaps a former Marine officer, seated in a wooden chair in the corner.

Harris had met Eric Gordon only a couple of times. But, they had close mutual friends in Washington, and that gave Harris a benefit which other State Department officers didn’t always have with the Agency. Gordon relaxed behind his desk, pushing his chair back as far as he could, a couple of feet, taking off his suit coat, and draping it over the back of his chair.

“Richard, you know my Deputy, Steve McNair?” Gordon said, pointing to the man in the corner.

“Nice to meet you Steve,” Harris said. Steve stood up to shake hands, and sat back down without a word.

The phone rang on Gordon’s desk. He picked it up and said, “Yes,” then listened. He put up his index finger to indicate to Harris that his would just take a minute. He made a few simple, one word responses into the receiver, mainly “yes” and “no,” and said to the caller that he would make an appointment with the Ambassador and get back. With that, he hung up, took a yellow sheet of paper and wrote a note on the paper on top of the glass sheet covering his desk. He passed the note to his deputy, who read it, got up, and left the room.  Gordon picked up the phone again, dialed four digits and placed the receiver to his ear. He was speaking to the Ambassador’s secretary in a very polite manner, requesting an appointment sometime that day, just a couple of minutes, a “drop by” on an important matter. He listened and Harris could hear tinny undistinguishable words from the other party. When Gordon hung up, he looked at his watch.

“I’m sorry Richard, I’m afraid I have to see the Ambassador at 10:00, but that gives us fifteen minutes, if that is okay?”

At that point, the door opened with a “whoosh” and the deputy rejoined them, closing the door behind him and taking his seat quietly.

“We have a ten o’clock with the Amb,” Gordon said to Steve, who nodded.

“Richard, we appreciate your coming in to give us a brief on your work in Vladivostok,” Gordon said. “I read your latest reporting cable. Sounds a bit cold out there.”

They both laughed.

The Chief continued, “How would you describe your relationship with the Governor? What do you think of him?

“As you know,” Harris said, “he’ s a reformer who was appointed by Yeltsin. Not a Russian Far Easterner, but a Moscow academic, and a good guy who wants democracy and closer ties to the West. He is Yeltsin’s man, but word is that he is on the way out. He’s encountered heavy resistance from the local parliament, which is mainly communist, and the factory directors. Apparently, Yeltsin has agreed to remove him in favor of a plant manager.”

Gordon nodded as if he had also heard this.

“As you saw from my report,” Harris went on, “there are seven large defense plants which employ about one-third of the city’s workers and take orders not from the governor, but from the Ministry of Defense in Moscow. These directors have the real power in Vladivostok, along with the Russian Pacific Fleet, headquartered there. The local parliament gives the hard liners a constitutional tool to block decrees put forth by Yeltsin. An example of how little power the current Governor has, is our temporary Consulate building. We had supposedly been given a floor in a former Communist Party office building.

“Right.”

“The building director,” Harris continued, “is a real terror who objected to his giving us a floor. She took her case to the communist dominated legislature. She is reportedly a KGB Colonel, and is using those ties as well. Anyway, we had to appeal to the Governor, and this got him into a big local fight. We had to ultimately go the Foreign Ministry in Moscow. We got the building, but the Governor asked us not to put him in this position again.”

“What about the new Governor, Andrei Borisov? Is he on board with reform?”

“He is hard to read. Has a bullying style of the old communists, but supposedly wants foreign business. My guess is that he will support Yeltsin on allowing reform in general, and he will have power, but he will tread carefully to avoid antagonizing the local hard liners. We have to remember that the Russian Far East is still a bit conservative and has been sitting on the fence watching how things go in Moscow. When Yeltsin is strong, so are democrats in Vladivostok. When Yeltsin is buckling before the Duma in Moscow, the democrats in Vladivostok keep their heads down.

Gordon nodded.

Harris continued. “Borisov, when he takes over, will compromise and remain pragmatic, allowing some foreign ties but also showing his independence from Yeltsin and the Western influence. He has asked to pay a call on me, and that seems good. But, I don’t think he understands democracy or has democratic instincts like the current governor. He is an enterprise director type, a man of action, and not a politician or democrat. He will tend to rely on the old apparat. But, he says he likes the U.S. If he wanted, he might have the power to push through democratic reforms.”

“Which way is the wind blowing there, do you think, democratic or hard line?” Gordon asked.

“The Russians like to support their President, no matter who, even if they have concerns over the policy. So, that is a big push for reform in the long run. The older people and former Party types are opposed to reforms, but, interestingly, Vladivostok, unlike Khabarovsk and some other cities in the region, seems to have an outward orientation, being a port city. Its citizens are used to contact with the outside world, Australia, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, and even San Diego, through their work in the Far Eastern Shipping Company, Navy, and fishing fleet. They feel particularly close to the U.S. Pacific Coast and Alaska. I don’t think they’re going back to the old Marxist days. No one seems to want that, and they fear the unspoken words, “civil war.” But, its hard to shake off old thinking. It takes time.”

Harris glanced over at Steve, who was looking up at the ceiling. Harris asked Gordon, “What is your read on the situation?”

Gordon spoke deliberately after thinking a few seconds: “I fear that policy makers in Washington may overestimate the amount of change that has taken place under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The old Soviet cadres are still strong and not entirely out of the picture. We can’t afford to let our guard down. Things in the security services are pretty much the same, and they still control a lot more than people realize. I think the old corrupt Marxist system has been discredited enough that we don’t have to worry about it coming back. That doesn’t mean that we could not end up with a dictatorship, however, and it may not be pro-West.”

Gordon looked at his watch and apologized again, saying they would have to get together again for a longer discussion after Harris’s next trip.

As Harris started to leave, Steve, the deputy, had a word of departure for him, “Enjoy your trip to Vladivostok,” he said, “I hear you have a lot of good KGB friends out there.” There was nothing to indicate what he meant by it, or that he was joking. It was just a flat statement. Harris assumed they sympathized with his situation as Consul General in the hinterland, knowing he had to work closely with people in the local government who were probably KGB. He was nagged by the tone, however.

As the door opened, Harris said to Gordon, “that reminds me, it would be useful for me to have a briefing on ‘who’s-who’ out there?” Gordon changed the subject, but offered to walk with Harris to the elevator.

As Harris left the Embassy into the cold sunlit courtyard, passing through the arches to the street outside, he saw the two beefy Russian guards blocking the entrance to an older Russian couple, examining their passports. The elderly grandmother was angry, scolding the guard, saying, “Don’t you know, the Cold War is over!”  The guard’s look said that things had not changed.

 

 

Russia, 1979-81, “The Bad Old Days”

I was stationed in the Moscow Embassy, but had come to Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, to do some sightseeing over Thanksgiving, arriving aboard the maroon-colored overnight “Red Arrow” train, checking in at the Astoria Hotel, a former Czarist palace which had served as German army headquarters during the World War II siege of Leningrad. The Astoria was fully restored, but not one of the more expensive hotels near the Kirov Ballet used by foreign visitors.

From the hotel, I set out on foot for St. Isaac’s cathedral, passing along the way a four story apartment building with a metal historical marker attached to the outside wall denoting the site of Tchaikovsky’s final residence, in 1897, where he composed his “Pathetique” Symphony. I finally came to St. Isaacs cathedral, with its large golden dome, copper statues, and beautiful gray marble columns which Tolstoy described in War and Peace.

After lunch back at the hotel, I walked over to Nevsky Prospect, the main city boulevard, where I caught a taxi to Peter and Paul Fortress with its twin red brick spires, touring the cells where Dostoyevsky had been imprisoned and Lenin’s older brother executed. There were names carved into the walls by political prisoners from Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. Back outside, it was bitter cold, well below zero, and the afternoon sun was low on the distant horizon. There were only few people on the streets, and those were bundled up in long wool overcoats and fur hats. I could see thin trails of steam in the clear blue sky, drifting horizontally from buildings across the bay.

Keeping my head down to avoid the wind, I forced myself to make it one block to the museum ship “Aurora,” docked on the Neva River across from the Hermitage Museum, formerly the Winter Palace. The Aurora’s guns had fired the opening shots of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was warm inside the ship museum, or at least seemed warm out of the wind. There were two Russian couples besides me aboard, as I drifted around the decks examining photographs of the Revolution and street crowds gathering in 1917.

After an hour or so, as I was leaving the ship, a group of about ten young men appeared on board, milling around and then deciding to depart when I departed, each one shoving a bit as he passed me on the narrow walkway leading from the ship to the street below. They weren’t trying to push me into the icy water below, just providing some welcome to Leningrad. I assumed they were KGB or Naval recruits. Such harassment was not accidental in 1979.

As American diplomats, we knew we were not as well protected when traveling outside Moscow. Leningrad, in particular, was known as a city with an overzealous local KGB, a fact I had discovered during an earlier visit, when I arrived at the US consulate for consultations. One of the Russian security guards in front had stepped out of his guard shack and snapped a photo of me as I passed through the gates. In Moscow, they would not have been so brazen. There was still the semblance of detente.

It was “the bad old days,” before the fall of communism and the Soviet Union. I was on only my second tour, in Moscow, during a low point of the Cold War, with the Soviet military incursion into Afghanistan and US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. It looked like Russia might intervene militarily in Poland to crush the “Solidarity” movement. Reagan came in and later called Russia “the evil empire.” Things would get even worse, culminating in the shoot down of the Korean KAL 007 airliner.

We had very little contact in Moscow with Russians, other than conversations with a taxi driver or sales clerk, and we lived in diplomatic buildings isolated from the population, taking shuttle vans together to and from work. We did get to know the Russians staff working at the Embassy, but had to assume they were reporting to the KGB. We also had some social interaction with Russian intellectuals, artists, and dissidents who were friendly with foreigners, either being allowed to be so, or taking chances.

Our official contacts lived in a different world than we knew. Words like democracy and freedom had different meanings. The average Russian on the street seemingly believed what he read in the newspaper about American imperialism, class separation, and Pentagon aggression. He had little desire to travel outside Russia and touted communism. Russia, itself, in those days was poor, with few items in stores beyond a few staples, and everyone wore cheap clothing and lived in three room apartments. There were no smiles on the streets, and no foreign magazines or books.

We were followed, but could rarely spot our followers. Nor was it uncommon to have a Russian citizen approach you on the street, seeing you were an American, and ask you to take a message to the Ambassador. Occasionally, they would push a package in our hands, saying it was “samizdat,” or unauthorized writings, which they wanted you to take out of Russia. We knew the approach could be a KGB provocation, with the handover being photographed. I was approached one time near the Taganka Theater. We were not hard to spot. Our world was a narrow one: the theaters, the Bolshoi, the museums, our Embassy dacha at Zaviedovo, the diplomatic grocery store or “gastronom,” Red Square, a Georgian restaurant, and perhaps a Volga cruise.

Things could get rough. We had human rights officers and military attaches provoked or attacked by so called “hooligans.” A group of our Marine security guards, including my cousin, were jumped one night on Red Square by a dozen men, presumably KGB, as they were leaving to walk back to the Embassy. They made it back, with only one injured, after fighting their way to the Embassy, a couple of miles.

Work in the Embassy Political Section was demanding, with long hours and time pressure. Each morning, I would arrive at my desk at 8 a.m., scan the Russian newspapers, translating as I read, reading between the lines, then writing a five page cable to Washington. My portfolio was Russian relations with the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, and I was expected to do at least one cable per day. I covered visits to Moscow by PLO leader Arafat, Syrian President Assad, and Jordanian President Hussein, plus a visit by an African National Congress (ANC) delegation asking for support against South Africa, and by Raul Castro, the number two after Fidel, who spent a lot of time in Moscow.

To supplement my reading of Pravda and Izvestiya, I would do some contact work as well, visiting the Latin America Institute, and meeting with experts like Sergo Mikoyan, son of the Foreign Minister under Khrushchev. I might request a luncheon appointment with a Russian journalist, attend a public lecture downtown, take trips to the Baltic States and Russian provinces, and meet Russian analysts at the various African and Middle Eastern think tanks. The meetings we had at the Foreign Ministry were frustrating since relations were tense and formal.

I remember one cable vividly, reporting on the visit by the Algerian President to Moscow. I sent out my usual cable on the event, analyzing the arrival speeches and the joint communique at the end of the visit, proud of some nuances I had unearthed on Russia’s changing policies on the Middle East. That night the phones started ringing with calls from the State Department in Washington, saying the international media had picked up on a Russian political toast during the Algerian visit blasting the US and calling President Reagan a “cowboy.” The seventh floor Chief of Staff called on behalf of the Secretary to chew out the Embassy. How had we not spotted this? I had indeed missed the forest for the trees, reporting the long-winded Russian speeches but missing the reference to Reagan in a dinner toast, and causing the Administration to be blindsided on a major development.

The Ambassador, on instructions from Washington, summoned the entire Political Section into the conference room where he and his Deputy sat stone faced. He said any Foreign Service Officer who didn’t catch a derogatory comment on the President of the United States should consider whether he is suited for this career. I think the word “resignation” was floated. I felt bad because Washington and the Ambassador were right, and because I had caused the entire section to be criticized, whereas I bore sole responsibility. There was silence around the table. I started to apologize, but my boss, Ed Djerejian, the Political Counselor, and my mentor on Russian-Middle East relations, stopped me.

Ed stood up for me, saying he was the head of the Political Section and responsible for anything which came out of it. He, therefore, bore full responsibility, and if the Ambassador and DCM have any beef, they should take it up with him in private. That ended the meeting. That’s the kind of guy Ed Djerejian was.

A week later, things were fine again with the Ambassador, whom I highly respected, and who was helping me report on Russian-Cuban relations. Nonetheless, when I flew out of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in 1981 at the end of my tour, I told myself I would not return. I didn’t want to spend my life in the Soviet Union. And, I didn’t return for ten years, until communism fell and I was called back. When you are called, you don’t say no.