Bringing Russian and American citizens together in Peace since 1983.
Dear CCI Followers,
Former St. Petersburg U.S. Consul General John Evans (and former Ambassador to Armenia), has written the most insightful assessment of Vladimir Putin in print to date.
Let’s hope that John Evans’ going public will encourage others in VIP positions to share their experiences to offset the demonizing of Russia and Putin that has occurred in both political parties over the past decade.
Our September CCI traveler, Michael Metz, gives Russians’ view of Communism today. His assessment is pretty typical of what one hears across Russia.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
What About Communism?
By Michael Metz
I’ve often wondered what Russians thought about the Communist system that ruled their country for 70 years. Generally they don’t talk about it, like most people they’re focused on the present and the future, not on the past, but I’m curious, so I ask. Here’s a random sample of answers.
Dear Friends of CCI,
Our September 2019 mega-delegation of American citizens were dazzled by the beauty of current day Russia and also horrified to learn what today’s grandparents and great-grandparents endured in the Gulag work across the USSR. It is reported that over 17,000,000 persons, mostly men, were worked to death in frigid camps throughout the USSR from the 1920 to the 1950s.
Much of this history had been closed off to Russian society. However, the new Moscow Gulag Museum makes the history abundantly clear. The FotoJournal below is but a tiny sample of what is housed within the Gulag Museum.
How could a vast country like Russia become normal again after such tragedy and loss for 30 years … knowing their own leaders turned on millions of them? Those decades had a mass effect on the entire population. They never knew when a knock at the door would come … and their loved ones would be taken away. When we arrived in the USSR in 1983, people on sidewalks carried a silent blank look on their faces like they were registering no one. There were no smiles, the buses were silent, metros were silent. Nearly everyone had a small book to read in their hands, usually the front and back covered neatly with a newspaper wrapping. No one looked to the left or right. Russian people, I learned at that time, had very few friends and didn’t make new friends … they couldn’t trust strangers for fear of being informed on. It then became obvious that most Soviets seemed to have small, tight inner circles. They invited us in, we suspected because we wouldn’t inform on them and would soon be gone. They loved practicing English. I began to think of these small groups as pods, “pea pods” …their insides were surrounded by a tough outer covering that was difficult to penetrate.
American opponents of readmitting Moscow to the former G8 fail to understand the consequences.
The Nation
By Stephen F. Cohen
September 18, 2019
(Underlines by ST)
(Audio from the John Batchelor show 1 of 2 is available here. Audio from the John Batchelor show 2 of 2 is available here.)
Two years ago, I asked, “Will Russia Leave the West?” The world’s largest territorial country—sprawling from its major European city St. Petersburg to its vast Far Eastern territories and long border with China—Russia cannot, of course, depart the West geographically. But it can do so politically, economically, and strategically. Indeed, where Russia belongs, where it should seek its identity, security, and future—in the East or in the West—has divided the nation’s policymakers and intellectual elites for centuries.
In our times, as I also pointed out two years ago, a Russia departed, or driven, from the West would likely mean “a Russia—with its vast territories, immense natural resources, world-class sciences, formidable military and nuclear power, and UN Security Council veto—allied solidly with all the other emerging powers that are not part the US-NATO Western ‘world order’ and even opposed to it. And, of course, it would drive Russia increasingly afar from the West’s liberalizing influences, back toward its more authoritarian traditions.
Fifty American citizens investigated more than 20 Russian cities and peoples between September 1 – 17. Thus giving all of us “eyes and ears” into the life and the thinking of Russian people from Moscow to Yakutia in the Far East and from St.Petersburg south to Krasnodar and Simferopol, Yalta and Sebastopol in Crimea. Other cities visited were Perm, Kungur, Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Irkutsk, Orenburg, Ufa, Torzhok, Sergiev Posad, Kaliningrad, Petrozavodsk, Tver, Kazan & Nizhny Novgorod. We sent our U.S. delegates in one’s, two’s and three’s out to these 21 cities with a list of 24 questions to be delved into while in these far-from Moscow cities and towns.
What did they find?