Ukraine, Russia, the World and Us
I’m writing from Monet’s waterlily infinity room at the Orangerie museum in Paris. If you’ve never been here, there are two long elliptical rooms connected by curving arched passage ways, forming a perfect flowing figure 8. Soft natural light filters down through a layer of gauze from matching skylights. Each room has a long oval seat in the center, virtual islands in the lilypond at the Giverny gardens.
Monet painted these enormous canvasses to form surround screens, imagining and donating this space to the French nation at the end of WWI, the war to end war, as a meditation on peace. I find this especially moving because he accomplished all this as he was losing his sight. Aligned with the sun’s passage over Paris at the tip of the Tuileries gardens beside the Seine, on a plateau overlooking Concorde square, the Champs-Élysées and the Eiffel Tower, it’s a secular sanctuary, a place to resonate with forces above human concerns. I come here to breathe when the weight of the world feels crushing. Right now, it’s lunchtime, very few visitors, they’re quiet: rare serenity. I need some.
Since I woke up to headlines about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, my life has been flashing before my eyes, a jolting Nyet-Da, love-not-love, three-way tango with the Russian people and their leaders. The short version:
My father was a very young Navy medic during the Koran War. I have a snapshot of him posing in his MASH unit with a captured Russian machine gun. I’ll never know exactly what happened to him there because he never recovered and took his own life when I was too little to wonder, but it had something to do with enemy Reds. By chance, before his death, a family friend enrolled me in her experimental kindergarten where I started learning Russian (and French) at age 4. Then we moved and my only contact with alien cultures was scary Cold War TV news, but something had imprinted very deeply. When I took Russian just to complete a language requirement in college, my grades skyrocketed and I was offered a full National Defense Foreign Language Scholarship to study in what was then Leningrad. The DOD was grooming potential intelligence operatives.
My first encounter with real Russian people and their stories at age 18 was a shock and a revelation. I knew the facts and figures, but had never measured how much they had suffered in the 20th century and before, how many people there dreamed of peace. This was not an easy message to transmit home. While there, I spent time in Moscow and several major cities in the western Russian SFSR. I also visited the Estonian SSR on the Baltic, the Georgian SSR In the Caucasus and the Ukrainian SSR on the Dniepr, where Russian was the language we used to create friendships. I wanted to build bridges between our worlds, possibly through teaching or translating.
After graduation I declined invitations to join the intelligence community and instead accepted a Fulbright for research on an emigre writer in Paris, which led me to a distinguished literary family from pre-revolutionary Saint Petersburg that I lived with while working on my Masters at the Sorbonne. I traveled to Moscow twice during my studies, met dissidents and was interrogated at the border on my way back to Paris for smuggling forbidden samizdat poetry. The writer who had entrusted his manuscript to me was exiled to Solovki, north of Arkhangelsk. Clearly, I was no match for the Brezhnev regime. I gave up on the Soviet Union and escaped into music where I met my French husband and turned the Russian page forever, or so I thought.
Then Chernobyl. The USSR began to dissolve. The iron curtain parted. An interest in holistic psychology took me back to Moscow for a breathwork conference, where I found out about an upcoming Citizens’ Diplomacy Summit. My husband and I attended it with an American group led by fearless peace activist Rama Vernon (who negotiated the complex travel arrangements with grim Soviet bureaucrats while breast feeding her youngest child). My husband and I met people from all walks of life and were invited to dinner at the House of Poets by Ukrainian author Igor Shkliaryevsky, whose talent, warmth and love of France were unforgettable. He asked me to publicize his film about the plight of people in the exclusion zone with French media. I promised to do so and also put together a joint venture production to shoot a satirical music video on Red Square, “Life is Kife” (“The Good Life,” in English with a Russian accent).
Back in Paris, I introduced the Russian video producer to potential co-producers here. Future projects began to take shape. Then unexpected motherhood for me and violent rivalries following the coup in Russia made me back off again…until I found out there were a million children in Russian orphanages and my heart went out to a little boy near St Petersburg. My language background made the individual adoption possible and he is now our 18-year-old son. My dream of building bridges seemed to be finally coming true. We connected a network of friends from Russia to the US and back and have all been doing everything in our power, however awkwardly, to mediate and create lasting bonds that might somehow forestall confrontation. For a moment, partnerships and alliances seemed viable.
Scholars and politicians are debating the calculations and miscalculations that have brought us to where we are now, cut off again by this sickening invasion, an unspeakable tragedy for Ukraine, for Russia, for the world, for me and my family.
Some blood curdling thoughts: what if we hadn’t found our son and brought him home? What if this had happened during our adoption and put an end to the process all together? Would he be one of the young conscripts shelling Ukrainian civilians? What about all the families and children who are being kept apart now?
How is it possible that a people indelibly scarred by the 5+ month Battle of Stalingrad and the 900-day Siege of Leningrad can destroy and lay siege to cities in Ukraine? In the wake of the pandemic, a lot of theories about trauma are floating around right now, about past pain fragmenting memory and triggering irrational actions in the present. Heaven knows Russia, Ukraine and Europe have endured enough indescribable hardships to propel actions and reactions now. What about the US? Was 9–11 the trauma that sparked our recent 20 years of hostilities? Is this the meaning of Karma? Unresolved sufferings that self-perpetuate forever? Is there a way to break the cycle? Will peace ever be possible?
As separate realities polarize our country, I’ve seen articles about how to bridge gaps and break stalemates with adversaries in our own circle and wider population. Can these techniques be applied to international relations? Can there be empathy, study of the other’s history and values, actual listening?
Breathe… Follow the colors in the first room through the morning hours, reflecting in calm waters from sunrise to day, from yellows, oranges and browns to pinks, turquoises and greens. Immerse in the slightly different mood of the second room, a long soothing twilight…
Commentators predict Ukraine rising from the ashes, rebuilding shattered lives, Russia in decline, returning to deprivation and isolation. Will it democratize or disintegrate? Is it wise to wish for instability within a huge nuclear super power? Will Europe re-arm to the teeth and stall climate action? The Sierra Club predicts more fracking, coal burning, drilling, deforestation, giant containers of frozen US methane gas moving across the Atlantic to the European market. Will war with Russia really solve anything in the US?
All my life I’ve fought against despair and fatalism, distilling that rebellion into a song called “Da Tango” (in Russian with an American accent) and a book I’ve been writing about my search for peace with Russia. For my children, my family and friends from Ukraine, Russia, the US and around the world, I want to keep believing bridges can be built someday.
To be continued…
Originally published at http://thankyouparis.wordpress.com on March 16, 2022.
