From my Notion template

This Book – in 3 Sentences

I somehow stumbled across this book in my kindle recommendations, or perhaps it was a blog (Kevin Kelly perhaps?) somewhere but I’m glad I read it. The author is a Polish journalist from the Iron curtain era who traveled quite widely in the Soviet Union at it’s peak and decline, in particular the outer republics, not so much in Russia proper. It’s a pure travelogue, mostly of the “I went here and saw this” variety (i.e. the good kind). The highlights do a much better job of summarizing it than I would. A few notable thoughts after reading this book (mostly vibe based, my observations, not the author’s).

1. It occurred to me that both Russia and it’s former imperial territories and the United States are outliers in how people view nationality. Russia assumes that everything is a natural empire and anything that isn’t currently an empire will become part of one at some point . America thinks that America is at the forefront of the natural progression of things and everything will be America at some point. The world becomes one eventual empire vs becoming one eventual country. I now think that a comparison of views of nationality involving either country is of limited value due to the viewpoints being such outliers. That is my observation, not the author’s.
2. Scott Alexander’s definition of communism as mostly “taking every bad idea in the world and doing them all at once” seems much more accurate to the real Soviet world result than anything involving Marxism seems very apt.

Highlights

How many victims, how much blood and suffering, are connected with this business of borders! There is no end to the cemeteries of those who have been killed the world over in the defense of borders. Equally boundless are the cemeteries of the audacious who attempted to expand their borders. It is safe to assume that half of those who have ever walked upon our planet and lost their lives in the field of glory gave up the ghost in battles begun over a question of borders.

In short, the total surveillance clearly plays the same persuasive role as those one-story-high, thick billows of barbed wire: it is simply a silent but emphatic warning, lest some preposterous idea accidentally enter your head!

Worst of all are the books. What a curse to be traveling with a book! You could be carrying a suitcase of cocaine and keep a book on top of it. The cocaine wouldn’t arouse the least bit of interest; all the customs inspectors would throw themselves upon the book. And what—God forbid!—if you’re carrying a book in English? Then the real running, checking, paging through, reading would begin.

The second group will observe the Soviet people and imitate their way of thinking and acting. The essence of this posture is resigning oneself to the existing reality, and even being able to derive from it a certain satisfaction. There is a saying that is very helpful in this, and which it behooves one to repeat to oneself and to others every evening, regardless of how terrible the day that has just ended: “Rejoice in this day, for things will never again be as good as they were today!”

It wasn’t really possible to imagine Siberia. One of my friends finally showed me a drawing in a book: in a heavy snowstorm walked a column of tattered and hunched-over men. Heavy chains with iron balls at the end were attached to their hands and legs, and they dragged these balls behind them over the ground. Siberia, in its sinister, cruel form, is a freezing, icy space…plus dictatorship.

And yet it doesn’t occur to anyone to frighten children with: “Wash your hands or they’ll send you to Canada!” Or “Play nicely with that little girl or they’ll deport you to America!” In those countries, quite simply, there is no dictatorship, nobody puts anyone in chains, nobody imprisons anyone in camps, dispatches him to work in hellish frost, to a certain death. In those frozen lands, man has one antagonist—the cold. Here, as many as three—the cold, hunger, and armed force.

Despite being transported in a wagon-coffin, the general is aware of being in a certain way privileged—they are driving him; others they force to march for years on foot.

This wandering of the deportee is not only a displacement in space and in time. It is accompanied by a process of dehumanization: the one who reaches the end (if he doesn’t die along the way) has already been stripped of everything that is human. He has no surname; he does not know where he is; he does not know what they will do with him. His language has been taken away: no one will speak with him. He is a consignment; he is a thing; he is a trifle.

Whiteness is often associated with finality, with the end, with death. In those cultures in which people live with the fear of death, mourners dress in black, to scare death away from themselves, isolate it, confine it to the deceased. But here, where death is regarded as another form, another shape of existence, mourners dress in white and dress the deceased in white: whiteness is here the color of acceptance, consent, of a surrender to fate.

It is Europe. European civilization is the only one that has ever had global ambitions and (almost) realized them. Other civilizations either couldn’t satisfy such ambitions for technical reasons (for instance, the Maya), or simply didn’t have such interests (for instance, China), convinced that they themselves were the entire world. Only European civilization proved capable of overcoming its ethnocentrism. Within it arose the desire to know other civilizations, as well as the theory (formulated by Bronislaw Malinowski) that global culture is created by a constellation of parallel cultures.

If there exists such a thing as the genius of a nation, then the genius of the Russian nation is expressed in, among other things, just this saying: “Well, that’s life!”

One of the pillars upon which the system rests is isolation from the world, and a foreigner, by the mere fact that he exists, undermines this pillar.

I read Bierdayev’s old book in which he reflected upon how the great expanses of the Imperium had influenced the Russian soul. What does a Russian think about, somewhere on the shore of the Yenisey, or deep in the Amur taiga? Every road that he takes seems to have no end. He can walk along it for days and months, and always Russia will surround him. The plains have no end, nor the forests, nor the rivers. To rule over such boundless expanses, says Bierdayev, one had to create a boundless state. And behold, the Russian fell into a contradiction—to maintain the great expanses, the Russian must maintain a great state; on the maintenance of this great state he expends his energy, of which not enough remains for anything else—for organization, for husbandry, and so on. He expends his energy on a state that then enthralls and oppresses him. Bierdayev believes that this immensity, this limitlessness of Russia, has a negative influence on its inhabitants’ way of thinking. For it does not demand of them concentration, tension, an intensification of energy, or the creation of a dynamic, vigorous culture. Everything falls apart, is diluted, drowned in this ungraspable formlessness. Russia—an expanse, on the one hand, endless, broad, and yet, on the other hand, so crushing that it takes one’s breath away, and there is nothing left to breathe.

And then I traveled to the non-Russian republics of what was then the Imperium. What caught my eye? That despite the stiff, rigorous corset of Soviet power, the local, small, yet very ancient, nations had succeeded in preserving something of their tradition, of their history, of their, albeit, concealed pride and dignity.

Painting did not bring him happiness. He had a girl called Margerita. No one knows what sort of girl she was. Niko loved her and painted her portrait. Margerita’s face is done according to the conventions of the great naives, by which everything is too big and out of proportion. Oversized lips, bulging eyeballs, enormous ears. Niko gave this portrait to Margerita. The girl shrieked in indignation. Enraged, full of hatred, she left him. His talent condemned him to solitude. From then on he lived in lonely abandonment.

A nation that does not have a state seeks salvation in symbols. The protection of the symbol is as important to it as the protection of borders is to other states. The cult of the symbol becomes a form of the cult of country. Protection of the symbol is an act of patriotism.

But there is also the matter of religion. In the year 301, during the reign of the emperor of the Armenians Tiridates III Arashakuni, Armenia adopts Christianity. It is the first country in the world in which Christianity attains the rank of a state religion.

way. Many works of ancient literature survived owing entirely to the fact that they were preserved in Armenian translations.

Baku always made a career of oil. As far back as the tenth century Arab writers refer to Baku as the place from which oil is brought.

We are standing over a relief map of Central Asia, and she wants to show me how great Azerbaijan once was (this is what she regards as a bit of nationalism). I tell her that her desire to present to me the Great Yesterday is a universal impulse in today’s world.

Today expansion is difficult and risky, as a rule broadening ends in narrowing, and that is why nations must satisfy the instinct for breadth with a feeling of depth, which means reaching into the depths of history to demonstrate their strength and significance.

After the Revolution, Valery tells me, they started giving girls’ names that celebrate the modern inventions now making their way to the countryside. So there are girls with the names Tractor, Chauffeur. One father, apparently counting on tax reductions, called his daughter Finotdiel, which is an abbreviation of the name of the Office of Finance (Finansovyj Otdiel).

The disciples of this martyr, the Hurufites—mystics of the numeral, cabalists, and diviners—believed that the origins of the universe could be comprehended in terms of the figures 28 and 32. Using these numerals one can explain the mystery of each thing. It was the Hurufites’ belief that God expressed himself through beauty: the more beautiful something was, the more God manifested himself in it. Beauty was their criterion for valuating the phenomenal world.

An underwater mountain range connects the eastern and western shores of the Caspian Sea. The mountains stretch from Baku to Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan.

The transition to a sedentary life was for the nomad always a last resort, a sign of failure in life, a degradation. One can settle a nomad only by force, by economic or political coercion. For him, the freedom that the desert gives has no price.

The people of the Uzboj worshiped sacred stones. This is typical of inhabitants of deserts, who revere everything they have at hand—stones, gorges, wells, and trees.

Particles of dust, these bits of near nothingness (they are stones ground to powder by wind and water), suspended in the air, grow warm in the sun, and thus comes into being a dry mist, the terror of all desert people, a dry and hot mist, clouds of powder as hot as burning coals; that is what the desert commands one to breathe in the hour of its fury.

During the feast they serve the guest the sheep’s boiled head on a plate. The guest must eat the brain. Then he must pluck out and eat one of the eyes. The host eats the other eye. In this way the knots of brotherhood are tied. It is an experience one does not quickly forget.

Erkin said that an Uzbek prefers to overpay and buy in the bazaar than to spend less in a store. The bazaar is tradition, the place of meetings and conversation, a second home.

He ordered his adversaries and opponents poisoned. He prepared the potions himself. He carried the standard of death, and this mission absorbed him for half the day. During the second half of the day, art absorbed him. Timur devoted himself to the dissemination of art with the same zeal he sustained for the spread of death.

Timur was sounding the limits of man’s possibilities. Timur demonstrated that which Dostoyevsky later described—that man is capable of everything.

Erkin showed me Timur’s grave in Samarkand, made of green nephrite. Before the entrance to the mausoleum there is an inscription, whose author is Timur: Happy Is He Who Renounced the World Before the World Renounced Him.

Just as Columbus lived in the epoch of great geographic discoveries, when every sailing expedition altered the picture of the world, so we live today in the epoch of great political discoveries in which ever newer and newer revelations continuously change the picture of our contemporaneity.

But doubts at once assailed me—was I really right to search for perestroika outside Moscow? I had just read a new book, published in early 1989, by the eminent historian Natan Eydelman, Revolution from the Top in Russia. The author regards perestroika as just one more in a series of turning points in Russian history and reminds us that all such turning points, revolutions, convulsions, and breakthroughs in this country came about because they were the will of the czar, the will of the secretary-general, or the will of the Kremlin (or of Petersburg). The energy of the Russian nation, says Eydelman, has always been spent not on independent grass-roots initiatives, but on carrying out the will of the ruling elite.

Nicholas I: “The Czar is surprised—the inhabitants of Petersburg tremble with fear, / The Czar is angry—his courtiers die of fear; armies are marching, whose God and faith / is the Czar. The Czar is angry: let us die, we will cheer up the Czar!”) The czar has been considered a god, literally, for centuries, for Russia’s entire history. Not until the nineteenth century was there a czarist decree to remove the portraits of the czar from the Orthodox churches. A czarist decree! Without it no one would have been so bold as to touch such a portrait, or rather, icon. Even Bakunin, that anarchist and subversive, Jacobin and dynamiter, calls the czar “the Russian Christ.” And just as the czars are the vicars of God, so Lenin and Stalin are the vicars of world communism. Only after Stalin’s death does the slow process of secularizing the rule of the Almighty begin. Secularization—and with it the gradual erosion of omnipotence.

This last notion was put forth in the sixteenth century by the Pskov sage and visionary, the monk Philotheus. “Two Romes have already fallen (Peter’s and Byzantium),” he writes in a letter to the contemporary Muscovite prince Vasily III. “The Third Rome (Moscow) stands. There will not be a fourth,” he categorically assures the prince. Moscow: it is the end of history, the end of mankind’s earthly wanderings, the open gateway to the heavens.

All dictators, irrespective of epoch or country, have one common trait: they know everything, are experts on everything. The thoughts of Qadaffi and Ceauşescu, Idi Amin and Alfredo Stroessner—there is no end to the profundities and wisdom. Stalin was expert on history, economics, poetry, and linguistics. As it turned out, he was also expert on architecture. In 1934—which means between one ghastly purge and the next, even more horrifying, one—he commissioned a plan for the rebuilding of Moscow. He devoted to it, as was piously written, much time and attention. The new Moscow was to manifest in its appearance the following traits of the epoch: triumph, power, monumentality, might, seriousness, massiveness, invincibility

In any case, the greatest ambition and fondest dream of Stalin was precisely the same as the greatest ambition and fondest dream of all Soviet leaders—namely, to catch up with and surpass the United States!

After all, there are countless churches in Moscow; there are even churches in the Kremlin, and yet the Leader’s finger came to rest on just this one place, where there towered the spectacular silhouette of the temple built by the czars of Greater Russia to thank God for forcing Napoleon to retreat and saving their Imperium.

Only he who maintains (and has somehow proven) that his authority has a human and divine nature can rule here, can lead the people and count on their obedience and devotion. Hence the preponderance in Russian history of pretender czars, false prophets, haunted and fanatical holy men—they claim the power to rule souls and that they are touched by the hand of God. The hand of God is in this case the sole legitimation of power.

In short, the background scenery changes, but the main principle of history, which continues to operate in the foreground, remains unchanged—the principle of the cult.

unaware that as he does so he becomes for a second time communism’s victim: the first time he was a victim by force, imprisoned by the system, and now he has become a victim voluntarily, for he has allowed himself to be imprisoned in the web of communism’s problems. For such is the demonic nature of great evil—that without our knowledge and consent, it manages to blind us and force us into its strait-jacket.

Armenians! They must be together. They search for one another the world over, and—the tragic paradox of their fate—the more their diaspora expands and dissipates away, the greater their mutual longing for one another, their desire and need to be together. Only

can one appreciate how painful a thorn for them is the matter of Nagorno-Karabakh—to live a dozen or so kilometers from one another and yet not to be able to be together! An eternal splinter, an eternal wound, an eternal stigma.

that we do not resolve difficulties, we only displace them. “The art of clarification,” says Cournot, “like the art of negotiation, is often simply the art of displacing difficulties. There is, one might say, a kind of untouchable reserve of incomprehensibility in certain things that the calculations of human intelligence are capable neither of removing nor of diminishing, but only of arranging this way or that, sometimes leaving everything in a half-light, at another time illuminating certain points at the expense of others, which are then submerged by a darkness even deeper than before.“

(They say “comrade” more and more infrequently here, but they also aren’t able to say “mister,” for that still sounds too bourgeois, and the form “you,” toward a person whom one doesn’t know well, is impolite. So they address each other as “woman,” “man.”)

Like peasants the world over who begin each conversation with reflections on the subject of crops, and Englishmen who start every exchange with a discussion of the weather, so in the Imperium the first step in establishing contact between people is a mutual determination of one’s nationality. For much will depend on this.

At the same time, behind these front lines, Beria directs the deportation of Poles and Greeks, Germans and Kalmuks, into the depths of the Caucasus and to Siberia. As a result, entire nations find themselves in lands foreign to them, in unfamiliar surroundings, in poverty and hunger. One of the goals of these operations is to create the uprooted man, wrenched from his culture, from his environment and landscape, and therefore more defenseless and obedient vis-à-vis the dictates of the regime.

A single czarist official drives an entire column of Tuvinians (a Siberian tribe) to a hard-labor camp, and not one of these unfortunate vassals will revolt. After all, they could easily kill this official and vanish into the forest. But no, they walk on obediently, meekly execute his commands, endure his verbal abuse in silence. The reason, Mickiewicz explains, is that, in the eyes of the enslaved Tuvinians, this official personifies the might of the all-powerful state, which arouses their fright, terror, dread. To raise a hand against the official is to raise a hand against the superpower, and none of them can bring himself to do that.

One need only see cities over which a wave of ethnic conflict has recently rolled—even Fergane or Osh. Among the burned and devastated houses of Uzbeks, Karakalpaks, or Tajiks are visible the untouched houses of Russians. For who stands behind a poor Karachi, attacked by an infuriated Turk? At most—another Karachi. And behind a Russian? A kalashnikov, a tank, a nuclear bomb.

Not everyone knows that the Turkish language is the second most dominant language of the Imperium. About sixty million people speak it. An Azerbaijani can communicate not only in Ankara, but also in Tashkent and Yakutsk. His Turkish-speaking brethren live everywhere. In a certain sense, the former USSR is a Slavic-Turkish superpower. Solzhenitsyn’s idea was to get rid of the Turkish element so that only a Slavic superpower would remain.

After seventy-three years of bolshevism, people do not know what freedom of thought is, and so in its place they practice freedom of action. And here freedom of action means freedom to kill.

They stole what they could. Stalin locked them up in boarding schools. There they learned hatred, and when they grew up, they were dressed in the uniforms of the NKVD. The NKVD held the nation in the grip of a bestial fear. And there’s communism for you.

I have flown maybe one hundred thousand kilometers in this country on airplanes. Two observations from those trips: The airplanes are always full—at each airport, for every destination, mobs of people are waiting, sometimes for weeks, so that finding an empty seat somewhere is quite out of the question. Second, during the entire flight there is complete silence in the cabin. The passengers sit motionless; no one speaks. If one hears a buzz somewhere, bursts of laughter, and the clink of glasses, it means that a group of Poles is on board: who knows why, but travel puts them into a state of boundless euphoria, into a near frenzy.

It is true that a bit of time has elapsed since the epoch of Stalinism, but its memory is alive, and the lessons, traditions, and habits of that period remain, are fixed in consciousness, and will long influence people’s behavior. How many of them (or their families, acquaintances, and so on) went to the camps because during a meeting, or even in a private conversation, they asked about this or that? How many in so doing ruined their careers? How many lost their jobs? How many lost their lives?

A wise sentence from Ecclesiastes: “Who gathers knowledge, gathers pain.” Developing this bitter thought, Karl Popper once wrote (I am quoting from memory) that ignorance is not a simple and passive lack of knowledge, but is an active stance; it is the refusal to accept knowledge, a reluctance to possess it; it is its rejection. (Or, in a word, antiknowledge.)

A civilization that does not ask questions, one that banishes from within its compass the entire world of anxiety, criticism, and exploration—the world that expresses itself precisely through questions—is a civilization standing in place, paralyzed, immobile. And that is what the people in the Kremlin were after, because it is easiest to reign over a motionless and mute world.

No Louvre, no castles on the Loire, can offer so many pleasant and unforgettable sensations as the gloomy and humble interior of the Hotel Vorkuta. At work here is the immemorial law of relativity. Entering the Louvre from the sidewalks of Paris is not a passage from earth to heaven, whereas entering the lobby of the Hotel Vorkuta from the street is. The lobby saves our life, for it is warm, and warmth in this town is the most priceless thing.

Genady Nikolayevich, a miner, just turned fifty and retired. Such an early retirement is one of the perks one receives for work in such dreadful, polar conditions. Although it is a rather dubious perk—only twenty percent of miners live to be fifty.

Genady Nikolayevich is rather inclined toward the opinion of Ivan Solonievich, one of the few inmates who in 1934 succeeded in escaping to the West: all of Russia is a camp.

In small and medium-sized countries there is no equivalent of this class of which we speak here. In such countries, the elite are busy with their own internal affairs, their local intrigues, their own closed backyard. But in the Imperium, the ruling class (and often the common people as well) are preoccupied with the imperial scale of thinking, and, even more, the global scale, the scale of large numbers, large spaces, of continents and oceans, of geographic meridians and parallels, of the atmosphere and the stratosphere, why, of the cosmos. In Western Europe they were surprised to see on television that poor old women in Moscow abandoned the breadlines they had been standing in, gave up buying bread, to march down the street shouting the slogan “We will not give back the Kuril Islands!” But why be surprised? The Kuril Islands are a part of the Imperium, and the Imperium was built at the cost of the feeding and clothing of these women, at the cost of their leaking shoes and cold apartments, and, what is most sad, at the cost of the blood and lives of their husbands and sons. And so they should give this back now? Never. Never ever.

Nationalism cannot exist in a conflict-free condition; it cannot exist as a thing devoid of grudges and claims. Wherever the nationalism of one group rears its head, immediately, as if from beneath the ground, this group’s enemies will spring up.

In Irkutsk I spot a poster advertising a theatrical production entitled A Word about Russia. I buy a ticket and go. The show takes place in a church that was formerly called the Museum of Atheism.

“Russia,” he calls, “must remain a great world power! They want us to become like the Indians on an American reservation. They are trying to make us drunk, they are trying to poison us. But we will not become Indians. We will not be a banana republic!”

Fiodorov speaks about terrible things. When criminals escaped, they would persuade one of the political prisoners—naive and unsavvy—to go with them. This they did as insurance against death from hunger, which was always a threat. At a certain point they would kill the victim and divide up his flesh.

So let us stop getting excited and thrashing about, let us stop tormenting the stewardesses with questions for which they have no answers, and, following the example of our brothers and sisters from the sleepy village of San Juan near Valdivia, from the settlements on the Gobi desert crushed by the heat, and from the littered outskirts of Shiraz, let us sit motionless, staring off into space, and every hour sinking deeper and deeper into a state of mental numbness.

“Caucasian mafia” was how the taxi driver characterized those detained. The word “mafia” is enjoying a tremendous popularity these days. It is increasingly replacing the word “nation.” Here where one hundred nations once lived “in harmony and brotherhood,” one hundred mafias have now appeared. The nations have vanished, have ceased to exist. Three large mafias have taken their place—the Russian mafia, the Caucasian mafia, and the Asiatic mafia. These large mafias are divided into an infinite number of smaller ones. There are Chechen and Georgian mafias, Tatar and Uzbek, Chelyabinsk and Odessian. The smaller mafias are divided into even smaller ones, and these in turn into utterly small ones.

In today’s post-Soviet society there exist not only individual criminals, not only criminal elements, but an entire criminal class possessing a genealogy and tradition different from the rest of society.

Magadan is the capital of the northeastern territory of Siberia called Kolyma, after the river that flows here.

In colloquial Russian, Kolyma was transformed, bizarrely, into a word denoting the consolation of relativism. That is, when things are truly bad, awful, frightful, one Russian consoles another: “Don’t despair, it was worse in Kolyma!”

There were 160 camps—or, as they are also called, Arctic death camps—in Magadan and Kolyma. The convicts changed over the years, but at any given moment there were around half a million residents. Of these, one-third died in the camps, and the rest, after serving years of hard labor, left as physical cripples or with permanent psychic injuries. Whoever survived Magadan and Kolyma was never again the person he or she once was.

Garanin shot several, a dozen, or sometimes several dozen people a day. Murdering, he laughed or sang cheerful ditties. Beria ordered him shot suddenly and for obscure reasons, ostensibly for being a Japanese spy.

Convinced that he is in an insane asylum, that he is in a ghastly land of madness and surreal paranoia, Weissberg does not break down; under the most horrifying conditions, in crowded, dirty prisons dripping with blood, his mind, the mind of a Western rationalist, works intensively—it searches for a rational, reasonable explanation for that which is happening around him. In each cell they throw him into, Weissberg strives to discuss, to question, to exchange opinions.

It is Shalamov’s mind that is rational and logical and Weissberg’s mind that is astray, lost in abstractions. “Each intervention in that which fate was bringing, in the will of the gods, was something unbecoming and contradictory to the code of camp conduct,” Shalamov recalls. And between the lines: whoever thinks that he can behave differently has never touched the true bottom of life; he has never had to breathe his last in “a world without heroes.”

That desire—for one’s voice to be heard somewhere—is characteristic of enslaved peoples, who cling to their belief in the possibility of justice in the world the way a drowning man clings to a plank, who are convinced that being heard is being understood and that by that means alone they can prove their argument and win the case.

He doesn’t want a conversation, but a declaration that you agree with him, admit that he is right, join the cause. Otherwise you have no significance in his eyes, you do not exist, for you count only if you are a tool, an instrument, a weapon. There are no people—there is only the cause.

Their world is small—several valleys and mountains. Their world is simple—on one side we, the good people, on the other they, our enemies. Their world is governed by an unambiguous law of exclusivity—us or them. And if another world exists nevertheless, what might they want of it? Only that it leave them in peace. They need to be left in peace so as to thrash each other all the more thoroughly.

We have a saying here: if you do not plant cotton, they will plant you [in prison], if

It Is a Known fact that a dozen or so meters below the surface of every desert lie large deposits of concentrated salt. If water is conducted to it, the salt, together with the moisture, will begin to rise to the surface. And that is exactly what happened now in Uzbekistan. The concealed, crushed, deeply secreted salt started to move upward, to regain its liberty. The golden land of Uzbekistan, which was first cloaked in the white of cotton, was now glazed over with a lustrous crust of white salt.

Siberia is called the largest prison on earth. The czar deported hundreds of thousands of his subjects here; here the Bolsheviks imprisoned millions of innocent people. But our Siberian, Claudia Mironova, considers Siberia a place of sanctuary, an island of liberty. The immeasurable distances, the enormous taiga, and the lack of roads facilitated isolation, provided refuge, enabled one to vanish from view. Entire communities of dissenters, says Claudia Mironova, were able to survive here. They survived the czar and the Bolsheviks—no one knew where they were.

And she herself, Claudia Mironova? When they were herding everyone into the kolkhoz, one night she and her husband, taking with them a cow and two pigs, fled deep into the taiga. They settled there, built a shed, and later even a little house with an enclosure. During the entire Stalinist era, she says with pride, they did not see a single stranger. She posits as the key to their survival her knack for canning lard. Lard—therein lies the secret of life. The secret of life and the prerequisite for liberty. If you do not have lard—meaning, if you do not possess this basic, elementary wealth—you will not be free. That is what Claudia Mironova says, sharing with us the most important lesson of her life.

The so-called Soviet man is first and foremost an utterly exhausted man, and one shouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t have the strength to rejoice in his newly won freedom. He is a long-distance runner who reached the finish line and collapsed, dead tired, incapable even of raising his arm in a gesture of victory.

Simplifying greatly, one can say that there are two Ukraines: the western and the eastern. The western (the former Galicia, territories that belonged to Poland before the war) is more “Ukrainian” than the eastern. Its inhabitants speak Ukrainian, feel themselves to be one hundred percent Ukrainian, and are proud of this. It is here that the soul of the nation survived, its personality, its culture. Things look different in the eastern Ukraine, which covers a territory larger than the western. Thirteen million native Russians live here and at least as many half Russians; here Russification was more intense and brutal; here Stalin murdered almost the entire intelligentsia. In 1932 and 1933, he had several million Ukrainian peasants starved to death and ordered tens of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals shot. Only those who fled abroad were saved. Ukrainian culture was better preserved in Toronto and Vancouver than in Donetsk or Kharkov.

And they were all talking about one thing—the fact that on January 21, on the anniversary of the proclamation of the short-lived Ukrainian independence of 1918, hundreds of thousands had joined hands and formed a chain stretching more than five hundred kilometers between Kiev, Lvov, and Ivano-Frankovsk.

the Parliament passes a declaration of the sovereignty of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The declaration proclaims the primacy of the laws of the Republic over those of the USSR and also the right of the Republic to possess its own army and to mint its own currency. The declaration states that the Ukraine will be a neutral and nonatomic state. (This has great importance, since enormous stocks of the weapons of mass destruction are located in the territories of the Republic.) Yet

Rudzkoy, Yeltsin’s deputy, and Sobchak, the mayor of Petersburg, depart at the head of the delegation. Both had played leading roles in the defeat of the neo-Stalinist putsch, but both are Russians and thus they understand what Russia is without the Ukraine. “Without the Ukraine,” the Polish historian J. Waswicz wrote back in the thirties, “Moscow is relegated to a northern wilderness.”

Ukrainian patriotism has a peasant quality: it is firmly rooted in the native soil.

Even the Pioneers were sent in to help, but were later pulled out, for these were children, and children died in the greatest numbers—not only from hunger, but also because cannibals carried them off.

Stalin’s goal was to save the Imperium: the Imperium cannot exist without the Ukraine. Yet the twenties witness a renascence of Ukrainian nationalistic ambition, which develops under the slogan “Far from Moscow!” The main repository of the Ukrainian spirit is the peasantry. To break that spirit, Stalin must destroy the peasantry. At the time, there were around thirty million Ukrainian peasants. Technically, one could have annihilated a significant portion of them by building a network of gas chambers. But that is an error Stalin did not commit. He who builds gas chambers bears all the blame, brings the disgrace of being a murderer down upon himself.

Novgorod was a famous city in the Middle Ages, something along the lines of a Florence or an Amsterdam of the north—a dynamic concentration of commerce and craftsmanship, a long-flowering center of various arts, especially of sacred architecture and icon painting. A unique political system existed here. For hundreds of years (from the eleventh to the fifteenth century) Novgorod was a kind of independent, self-governing feudal republic in which the highest authority rested with a council composed of different elements of the city’s population and the neighboring free peasantry. The people elected a prince who ruled in their name and could be recalled at any moment. For those times and in that part of the world, these were unheard-of practices. The symbol of the freedom and independence of this city-state was a great bell with which the residents were summoned to the council.

the local kremlin. (A kremlin is a type of ecclesiastical citadel, a gathering of churches, cloisters, and service buildings surrounded by walls and, once, the seat of princely power.)

Moscow was anxious that Belorussia be inhabited by a Russian-speaking population—not even necessarily ethnic Russians, just Russian speakers.

I am all ears as one of the delegates ponders: Which domination is more dangerous for Belorussia—the Russian or the Polish? And he concludes that it is the Polish, because Poland is more attractive.

History In this country is an active volcano, continually churning, and there is no sign of its wanting to calm down, to be dormant.

The Russian Writer Yurii Boriev compared the history of the USSR to a train in motion: The train is speeding into a luminous future. Lenin is at the controls. Suddenly—stop, the tracks come to an end. Lenin calls on the people for additional, Saturday work, tracks are laid down, and the train moves on. Now Stalin is driving it. Again the tracks end. Stalin orders half the conductors and passengers shot, and the rest he forces to lay down new tracks. The train starts again. Khrushchev replaces Stalin, and when the tracks come to an end, he orders that the ones over which the train has already passed be dismantled and laid down before the locomotive. Brezhnev takes Khrushchev’s place. When the tracks end again, Brezhnev decides to pull down the window blinds and rock the cars in such a way that the passengers will think the train is still moving forward.

The Third World was born and a great demographic explosion began—the population of poorly developed countries began to increase at a rate three times greater than that of wealthy countries. A dozen problems result from this, which will be the worry of the twenty-first century.

Gorbachev’s enemies claim that he assumed the leadership of a flourishing USSR and brought about its breakup. It was just the opposite—the USSR was disintegrating for a long time, and Gorbachev extended its life for as long as it was possible to do so.

It is interesting that today blood flows only where blind nationalism enters the fray, or zoological racism, or religious fundamentalism—in other words, the three black clouds that can darken the sky of the twenty-first century.

Despite these difficulties, one can assume that three processes will come to predominate in Russian life. The first is the battle between the forces of integration and disintegration. Nationalism. Russians will want to maintain a large and strong state, an imperial superpower, whereas various non-Russian minorities will pursue more and more explicitly their own, autonomous goals.

The Russian land, its characteristics and resources, favor the power of the state. The soil of native Russia is poor, the climate cold, the day, for the greater part of the year, short. Under such natural conditions, the earth yields meager harvests, there is recurrent famine, the peasant is poor, too poor to become independent. The master or the state has always had enormous power over him. The peasant, drowning in debts, has nothing to eat, is a slave. Simultaneously, it is a land rich in natural resources—in oil, in gas, in iron ore. But these are natural resources whose exploitation and profits are easy to monopolize, particularly by a strong bureaucratic-authoritarian state. In this way both the soil’s poverty and its riches undermine the people and bolster the regime. It is one of the great paradoxes of Russia.

From my notion template

The Book in 3 Sentences

A lovely relaxing memoir written by a good friend of mine. I’ve known the author for decades now and our personalities and tastes have always contrasted and complimented each other quite well. In the past I’ve mentioned to him that he is using his “singlehood” (for lack of a better term) the best of anyone I know. This is his memoir of leaving compressed modern life and walking the continent. He remains the friend who always has the best answer to “So, what have you been up to since we last saw each other?”

How I Discovered It

The author told me, more authors should do that.

Who Should Read It?

People who spend too much time contemplating their compressed modern lives and wonder what something different would look like.

Highlights

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” M. Aurelius.

Technically, this was a safer choice than biking solo across the country. But to call it safe would be a stretch. This is far more involved and tedious. Yeah, it was just a walk through nature, but it was still fraught with peril.

Ever consider how much time is actually invested in just owning shit?

One I surely would not survive if not for the Whippet. A hybrid trekking pole/ice axe that I carry. (a tool I recommend every hiker carry)

Named the “Lost Coast” after depopulation in the 1930s, its name remains due to its inaccessibility, sparse population and rugged geographical features. The first night we spent there was in a little town called Shelter Cove.

The Redwood Forest is an extraordinary place. Thousands of 350 ft trees towering over you, blocking out much of the daylight.

For the following hour and a half, I’d attempt, successfully, to capture this indescribable spectacle in a photograph.

Snow is just frozen water why not use that? Why? 1. Because it doesn’t melt as quickly as you’d think. Nor does it provide much water. What looks like a lot of snow, once melted produces very little water. You could use your stove to melt it but then you’re wasting gas. Good in an emergency but only as a last resort. 2. Snow is just frozen, naturally distilled; water and distilled water is bereft of the minerals needed to absorb said water. It’s better than nothing but melted snow alone does not hydrate you sufficiently.

At an average of 18 inches wide it is quite difficult to find once separated from it.

As matter of fact, after only 6 months of meeting Karen I was able to quit my job cooking and make a living off the band income alone.

Previously, as a musician, most of my life I just played the drums. Contributing very little in the creative process. It wasn’t till I had hiked 1000 miles that I had the confidence to do what I did with Karen and the others. I managed, directed, created, wrote music and played the drums. All these things I found came very naturally. This was the first time I voluntarily took the leadership role in a creative endeavor. Then for it turn out highly successful made losing it quite painful.

Megadens, was a television show that remodeled private residences for the DIY network. One I had the privilege of working on from 2011 till 2016.

My theory is this. We as humans were born with an inherent ability to perceive multiple dimensions. And over time lose it. Perhaps because of diet or vaccines, air pollution, chemicals in the water or even television programming. Maybe radio waves or radar waves, microwaves, LED lights, WIFI, Bluetooth, 4g, 5g. Take your pick. It’s well documented that many children seem to be able to see spirits, apparitions or they have invisible friends. Watch or read any true stories about the paranormal and see for yourself. Animals sense them as well. You can see this in countless videos and testimonies. Cats, dogs, horses, even deer.

We’re not necessarily gifted the virtue of patience only opportunities to practice it.

Within days she was gone. Sept 11th 2021. She experienced no pain or fear. Which I am thankful for. She didn’t suffer like dad. We were told it was C19.

Meditation is mandatory. Quiet the mind. And then creative ideas rise to the top. Like wax in a lava lamp.

“It is the creative potential itself, in human beings, that is the image of God” Mary Daly

I don’t believe in coincidences anymore. I believe in omens. I call such curious encounters “landmarks” on a spiritual journey.

It seems the more one sheds the need for material possessions and desires, the more life’s journey plays out more on a spiritual level and less a physical one. And often it is rife with oddly synchronistic events.

The higher you climb in elevation, the cooler the air gets. About 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit every 1000 ft of elevation. But the air also gets thinner (less oxygen). Effecting your pace negatively. So, there’s some give and take.

In early 2010, prior to my divorce, I came down with a thing called diverticulitis. A potentially lethal condition. Small pockets in the digestive tract called diverticula become enflamed when eating certain foods or too much food in my case. These can potentially burst, leading to sepsis and a slow torturous decoupling from this plane of existence.

Practically harmless to humans, there are a variety of species of tarantulas native to Arizona.

I’ve yet to encounter a place with forests so dense. As beautiful as it is here, it feels prehistoric. Almost supernatural. The forests seem to be a separate world from the surrounding area. Once you set foot in them, under their thick dense canopy, It’s like entering another dimension.

You could spend your life thinking it’s all just a series of problems and curses. Brought on to you by society or your mom or dad or religion, government, gen x, gen z, or boomers. But it is you who is responsible for how your life unfolds. The mainstream media will have you convinced otherwise. They are wrong.

After months of hiking through the mountains and desert I’m learning more and more to be present in the moment.

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. I actually finished this book ten or fifteen years ago – I was looking through my highlights trying to find some bits about his prodigious imagination and ability to visualize objects and concepts. I did not find that, I guess I did not highlight it. The book is interesting throughout. I will probably reread it at some point in the future – putting this review into existens for the sake of completeness. A good, honest autobiography, as these things go. These days he would totally be diagnosed with several spectrum disorders, probably accurately. His descriptions of his imagination and visualization is what stands out. I will probably reread purely for that part. It’s always interesting to hear genius describe itself.

How I Discovered It

The Kindle auto discover feature.

Who Should Read It?

People interested in that era. I think the original impetus was hearing The Handsome Families “Tesla’s Hotel Room” from their “Last Days of Wonder” album. I’ve always found the phrase captivating – such a pleasant way to hint at a since of an earlier time of insight and beauty. To “bask in the light of an older heaven” as Stapledon would say.

How the Book Changed Me

I suppose the bits about Tesla’s imagination had an impact – some people really have “spikey” talents in some or fashion and that is why we hear about them a century later. It’s also odd – he was all engineering, no science.

Highlights

Genius is its own passport, and has always been ready to change habitats until the natural one is found. Thus it is, perchance, that while some of our artists are impelled to set up their easels in Paris or Rome, many Europeans of mark in the fields of science and research are no less apt to adopt our nationality, of free choice. They are, indeed, Americans born in exile, and seek this country instinctively as their home, needing in reality no papers of naturalization.

give us, through ripening years, of many deep problems; but when a man springs from a people who have a hundred words for knife and only one for bread, it is a little unreasonable to urge him to be careful even of his own

Government Telegraph Engineering Department at BudaPest. His salary was small enough to please those who hold that the best endowment of genius is poverty,

Emerson has said that steam is half an Englishman; may we not, in view of what such men as Edison have done, add that electricity is half an American?

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs.

Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment, so much that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture. I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am,

for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.

Altho I must trace to my mother’s influence whatever inventiveness I possess, the training he gave me must have been helpful. It comprised all sorts of exercises–as, guessing one another’s thoughts, discovering the defects of some form or expression, repeating long sentences or performing mental calculations. These daily lessons were intended to strengthen memory and reason and especially to develop the critical sense, and were undoubtedly very beneficial.

and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations. I am convinced that this wonder can and will be accomplished in time to come; I may add that I have devoted much thought to the solution of the problem.

This I did constantly until I was about seventeen when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient. The moment one constructs a device to carry into practise a crude idea he finds himself unavoidably engrost with the details and defects of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. Results

at the sacrifice of quality. My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever, the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything.

During that period I contracted many strange likes, dislikes and habits, some of which I can trace to external impressions while others are unaccountable. I had a violent aversion against the earrings of women but other ornaments, as bracelets, pleased me more or less according to design. The sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit but I was fascinated with the glitter of crystals or objects with sharp edges and plane surfaces. I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort. Even now I am not insensible to some of these upsetting impulses. When I drop little squares of paper in a dish filled with liquid, I always sense a peculiar and awful taste in my mouth. I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food—otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I mist I felt impelled to do it all over again, even if it took hours. Up to the age of eight years, my character

knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways. Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves.

taken in as whiskey or produced in the stomach from sugar. But it should not be overlooked that all these are great eliminators assisting Nature, as they do, in upholding her stern but just law of the survival of the fittest. Eager reformers should also be mindful of the eternal perversity of mankind which makes the indifferent “laissez-faire” by far preferable to enforced restraint.

me. I was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused, and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls. I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and marveled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind.

I had a veritable rnania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties.

But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.

When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven-league boots. In

less than two months I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system which are now identified with my name. It

machines, I determined to try my fortunes in the Land of Golden Promise. But the chance was nearly mist. I liquefied my modest

“Is this America?” I asked myself in painful surprise. “It is a century behind Europe in civilization.” When I went abroad in 1889 – five years having elapsed since my arrival here – I became convinced that it was more than one hundred years AHEAD of Europe and nothing has happened to this day to change my opinion.

time. We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences. When

My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.

not less menacing than those born from want and suffering. If we were to release the energy of atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point of the globe this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind in giving rise to dissension and anarchy which would ultimately result in the enthronement of the hated regime of force. The greatest good will comes from technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such.

because of the directional character of the circuit. This was perfectly self-evident, but came as a revelation to some simple-minded wireless folks whose experience was confined to forms of apparatus that could have been improved with an axe, and they have been disposing of the bear’s skin before killing him. If

This invention is a logical outcome of observations begun in my boyhood and continued thruout my life. When

Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of races, and we are still far from this blissful realization.

As I view the world of today, in the light of the gigantic struggle we have witnest, I am filled with conviction that the interests of humanity would be best served if the United States remained true to its traditions and kept out of “entangling alliances.” Situated as it is, geographically, remote from the theaters of impending conflicts, without incentive to territorial aggrandizement, with inexhaustible resources and immense population thoroly imbued with the spirit of liberty and right, this country is placed in a unique and privileged position. It is thus able to exert, independently, its colossal strength and moral force to the benefit of all, more judiciously and effectively, than as member of a league.

The proposed League is not a remedy but on the contrary, in the opinion of a number of competent men, may bring about results just the opposite. It is particularly regrettable that a punitive policy was adopted in framing the terms of peace, because a few years hence it will be possible for nations to fight without armies, ships or guns, by weapons far more terrible, to the destructive action and range of which there is virtually no limit.