Our troubles are nothing
My wife is a Russian National. Next month she will have been in the United States for one year. I grew up with visions of Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the podium of the United Nations yelling, "we will bury you." In order to better understand her and her daughter, I have been reading two books by Orlando Figes. The one I have finished is Natasha’s Dance, which is about Russian culture in the time of the czar. The book I am now half way through, is The Whisperers , About the private live of the Russian people during the time of Stalin, 1917-1954. I want to point out if you saw my wife and I, and if she didn’t open her mouth; yes I thought it, you would never know she wasn’t as red, white and blue, like most of us. I also want to say before I begin, I believe what this book says, because even though my wife will not talk about life in Russia, I have been there and from observation, it all fits. Actually, my wife not talking about it is part of the proof. I know very little of her family history with the exception of her parents and that she had a grandfather and an uncle killed at Stalingrad. The uncle was only 18 years old.
I got into this relationship with the Russians because first my wife was a newspaper editor; which we have in common and second, I wanted to know the truth about the cold war. My marriage in a sense is research and I have gone far deeper than I really expected.
To put it simply, the years of Stalin were terrible beyond American belief. It is like the 1956 movie based on George Orwell’s book 1984, where it was against the law even to fall in love. Stalin tried to destroy the basic family structure. It was a society where children were reward for denouncing their parents. People were arrested for any reason they could think of. If children were taken from their parents, they were often given a new name. Even siblings were separated.
Russians have never had much of a taste of freedom. Before the revolution of 1917, 85 percent of them were peasants. Meaning mostly they had no rights. Communism seemed like a dream come true. To many of them it was, to be fair, and after 1917 had opportunities they did not have before the revolution. But the problem rose being divisions among the revolution. First there were the "White Russians," who were those trying to stop the revolution and return to the czar. Then there were many figures battling for control. Then at last there was Hitler. Stalin was not so naive that he denied the coming war with Germany.
The next problem was there are many classes among the Russian culture. Those who were picked on first were the rich peasants. A second problem the young Russian people had was their belief in Stalin. They never believed he was behind any of this problems and they loved and trusted him; until the end and some still do. I know this can be true because this is how I felt as a boy; until Lyndon Johnson. To be fair Stalin did Russia a lot of good. One commentator said on television, "he enslaved his county to bring it out of third world status."
There are many more things I can say about this subject. I have only skimmed the surface and may at times tell you more. But what I really want to do is make this point. Americans really worry about the wrong things at times. We worry about the price of gasoline far more than we worry about the destruction of the America family. I think it is time Americans started to think about what is really important. Not to think about themselves or their race or their place in society. They need to start thinking how our country is sinking. How it needs to be propped up by faith and commitment to higher and spiritual values. This country is not the same as it was twenty years ago and that scares me. We have brought many of the problems we have on ourselves. There is no one to blame but us.
How long will it be before we have a leader like Joe Stalin? How long before we cannot sleep at night before the authorities come for us? How long before our children are sent away only for the reason they were our children? We must remember, our worst enemy on this planet is ourselves.
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