I noted that her class sounds great and that it is an advantage to have a professor who is close to multiple cultures...
...the Russian/Ukrainian of some forsaken cranny of Siberia laying it all out for you. My take on Russia is of the close outsider variety, citizen of the Near Abroad; there was a moment in my childhood when I thought well of Joseph Stalin, I still have a faint memory of how that felt, great moustache, and that twinkle, imagined perhaps. The Russians, the Soviets, in their fleshy forms, hardly ever appeared; I have memories, or again imaginings perhaps, of high ranking Soviet military at some event, bold, bright red stripes running down the sides of their blue pants, huge curvy hats, their broad breasts glistening with metal and fluttering with ribbon. Conveniently, grey canvass topped trucks, brimming with helmeted types in long heavy flapping overcoats with hobnails and automatic weapons who would pour out into our lives strutting, or perhaps lining up, suddenly, shoulder to shoulder, their fresh young faces all turned one way, a roar of piercing, vibrant voices…maybe not. But, these were our lads, not high-cheek-boned slightly-slanty-eyed Mongolian horde members at all. Sure, their gear looked a little strange to people used to Polish uniforms, wrong shape somehow, hats all weird, eagles missing their crowns, but they shrieked and cursed familiar words, and that was all the comfort we needed.
My take on Russia and her relationship to anyone, the US, Poland, Erehwon, is colored by an image of me, almost wearing the red neck scarf and shiny black capped hat of the Pioneers, but most likely not, and boldly walking in the front ranks of a large crowd in a parade, repeatedly chanting “Long live the friendship of the Polish and the Soviet nations!” though, it did not easily roll of the tongue, not in Polish even. I grasped for one of the vertical standards that held the sign* at the head of the parade, more in fervor than in any calculation to help carry the word. But the hands that held the post already were firmly clasped around it and could be tracked back, through wrist, arms and shoulders to a blazing icon of the revolution, a tractor-driving Socialist-Realist kind of bright blond girl with a Slav abundance of pleats and wearing the red neck scarf, her blouse with the pockets distorted by heroic thrusting breasts bristling with ribbon and medal deposits. She distractedly shot me a glance that sent me reeling back into the crowd, and forever ended my career as a public figure in Communist politics.
*The sign read “Long live the friendship of the Polish and the Soviet people” of course.
***
Despite all the severances and estrangements with places until recently interned inside the USSR, Russia still looks ridiculously large on the map, and it’s been like this for a very long time. I find it hard to imagine what the different parts of all this vastness mean to Russians, and I have known people from different parts. My impression, conditioned by an unfavorable view of the land where the Mishkas rage, that old Polish victim angle, is of a harsh vastness with broken vodka bottles glistening by the sides of rutted dirt roads. Grey walls topped with barbed wire rising out of the snow. On the horizon steam engines pull endless goods wagons crammed with dead dying and still alive exiles from the cozy everyday comforts of their bourgeois lives back west. On population maps there are clusters and clutters in Western parts but, in my imagination, looking east, the Urals and beyond, empty flatness, Northern gloom, frozen mists, sub-Arctic silence, commie blocks on ice. In the foreground Babushka’s small lumpy form topped with headscarf balanced by a bag of potatoes in each hand makes a wobbly retreat, slosh slosh in the melting snow, toward high grey walls; fair amount of graffiti, large broken elements of infrastructure, from far away long ago, lying broken, almost breaking up the monotonous rhythms of the Peoples housing. Most buildings grey but you catch glimpses here and there of moves toward blazing day-glow fluorescent Turquoise hatched with Chartreuse, just here and there. It is strangely warm, the air trembles with methane hissing through pores in not so perma frost. The End had to start somewhere.
Go South enough, and you will get all tangled in the lushness of the Tundra, keep going and you see, in the brief glimpses of summer, flat, grass covered Steppe, on and on and on, till you run into the freakin’ Haymarylayas or whatever lies at the Southern rim, if there is a Southern rim. But it is in either that or another Mordor in that area (but without the infrastructure, FX, and in B/W) that murky types oozed out of their yurts, yawning, scratching, stretching, and blinking in the first light of day. Everyone is wearing great hats and has shiny skin.
The guy with the best-by-far headgear, but sitting on a stupid looking, small, hairy horse, suddenly appears in the large empty space facing them.
“I say chaps, are you all” he paused, raised his eyebrows, peered, raised his voice, “ready?!”
(they didn’t really think about it, there was no time, but had they remembered they would have said to themselves: “…ah yes, empire…destroy civilizations, enslave or/and/both slaughter all their inhabitants, think global, eat a lot of Tartar Beefsteak, take things from people at the other end of Eurasia, yes!” they would have said. This would have given them additional motivation and perhaps produced even greater volume in their response, but, as you will note in the next paragraph, they actually did OK)
Without hesitation, though their voices still slightly harsh from sleep, they screamed (I think they repeated the last word he said, in a chorus. They all rode similar looking animals and shared an attitude. When at last they got what they wanted (world conquest), they turned out to be gifted administrators (left everyone to administer themselves, but just raped some of their daughters, took some of their sons for their armies and collected most of their money from them. The latter operation was always troublesome, an as the Tatars/Mongols/and all Others who came for the ride grew themselves the mandatory opulent and decadent ruling class someone trustworthy had to be appointed to do the dirty work. Here comes a spell of Russian History where Russian Historians wince, fume, wiggle, lash out murderously, or sigh in despair at the sniggering Western take: the honor of being the Tatars tax collectors fell on the subject and cute little principality of Moscow. They never looked back from there. Strange that I do. Or do I.)
I feel I need to make up for those people back then. Hug those spirits. They lived in this vast space, but most of them were probably confined for life to a small area, where they led a life of never fulfilled obligations (ever increasing degrees of serfdom) on top of everything else that life can throw at you. One morning at breakfast you glance through a gap in the lace curtains and the Golden Horde is passing by on their way to do their worst further west. Hmm, do they bring an opportunity to retrain from serfdom to slavery; that might perhaps bring chance to travel. Otherwise what, new administration, additional taxes, chickens all gone, WTF! They can’t even bring their own chickens? horseshit everywhere, that’s good for the soil.
t.b.c.
No comments:
Post a Comment