Dear CCI Friends and Colleagues,
I have been stunned and speechless over the past few days.
This has all felt like a bad nightmare. I’ve holed up in my fourth floor condo overlooking a lake surrounded by redwoods and greenery. Not a sound other than an occasional duckling below. I deeply needed this solitude to make sense of what’s going on since returning from Russia on February 16.
Emails have come and gone, the facts have registered, egregious hatred and empathy noted, the former responses as Americans, Russians and Europeans spewed out feelings to justify their rage and concern; only a couple of whom have had personal experience with Vladimir Putin.
Strangely I remember well the day in the early 1990s when I met a diminutive man in a slender brown suit, in a small brown office in Leningrad. I remember quiet sincerity as he examined my proposal to start a new CCI program never before contemplated by Russian bureaucrats. Other such official persons in the office were “getting rich” on their seats from bribes from such proposals.
