#The Colored National Labor Union which is really interesting and their union newspaper the New National Era is available online through | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ash · 7 years

Text

What I Learned about Russian Men

by Elizabeth Eagan

Coronet Magazine, June 1947, pp. 173-196

Before going to Moscow, I had a double-image idea of what Russian men looked like — the same idea, I imagine, that a lot of other American girls still cherish.

My Russian man was a brawny, muscled, six-foot Adonis of iron, with arm forever stretched challengingly before him, clutching a sickle (or was it a hammer?). Yet at the same time, muffled somehow in the background, was the vision of a tall, handsome, dark-haired Czarist prince, with booted legs, military jacket and lots of gold braid.

Today, my double-image dreams have vanished. I have seen plenty of Russian men. I have talked with them, learned to know them, gone to parties with them, even had “romances” with them. And for the benefit of other American girls, I would like to report that the romantic vision of Soviet supermen is plain bunk.

I have seen plenty of Russian men, but few of them measured six feet — or even close to that. Of those in overalls, few looked very exalted, and the only sickles I saw were in the hands of women. Most of the men were in uniform when I arrived, but only fat generals' jacket fitted snugly. And even if I had run across a “tall and handsome prince,” his charm could not have been for me, since Russian men live in a controlled State where romances with foreigners are snuffed out by rules and regulations.

For instance, I recall a Monday morning when I was coming into Moscow from my cottage in the country. I had ridden a commuters' train to the city's outskirts, then switched to the subway. The Metro cars were packed, so instead of finding a seat I hung onto a strap. Now aside from the merit of spotlessness, the Metro has on virtue that you don't find in crowded American transportation systems. There are no mashers in Moscow. The pretties girl in the entire city can ride the subway, and no matter how much she is shoved and mauled, she knows it was impersonal shove, an accidental maul, caused only by the incredible 24-hour crush.

On this Monday Morning, I suddenly become aware that someone was staring at me with greater intensity than the normal staring-at-foreigners. This man was actually flirting! I was more surprised than flattered when a second glance revealed that he was a passably handsome, black-eyed Red Army major.

I was surprised, first, because there aren't many passably handsome males to be found in the Soviet Union. Second, because Red Army majors should know their political catechism, which damns all foreigners. In today's Russia, no man, woman or child who fears the midnight knock of the secret police dares have much to do with a foreigner.

I forced my way through the crowed car to the handrail and got a good grip on it, along with a dozen other impersonal hands. In a moment my hand was “accidentally” covered by the major's. His glances might have been meaningless: this certainly wasn't. I moved my hand. So did he. I glanced sideways. He was looking at me almost with a smile.

I guessed that he took me for a Russian hussy. It was raw fall weather, and I was wearing a Russian scarf and an old raincoat. He couldn't see my shoes, standard office wear for Americans but a dead giveaway because Russian women's wartime footwear was in sad condition.

Anyway, it was fun flirting with a strange man in a strange city under strange rules — anonymously, with not even my nationality showing.

When I got off at my station, the major followed me up the stairs, through the crowd and across the square to the little street where I lived in the Finnish Legation, which was then rented to the Americans and constantly guarded by two State policemen.

As I neared my house, the major at my elbow, I turned to him with a smile and an unlit cigarette. “May I take a light?” I said in Russian. He broke into a self-satisfied grin, lit my cigarette, took my elbow and tried to lead his conquest down the street.

But I crossed the street, said good-morning to the staring guards, and tossed a farewell to the Russian major. I have yet to see a more shocked and startled face than his as he realized he had almost been caught flatfooted — guilty without question of being friendly with a foreigner! And especially, with a foreigner from that never-never land — America!

Now, that I am back in New York, I keep recalling that inconsequential adventure. I keep reminding myself that, as a citizen of the capitalistic United States, I can do pretty much as I please, when and where I please, and talk with whom I choose. Those are freedoms that life in the Soviet Union taught me to appreciate more than I had ever appreciated them before.

I arrived in Moscow on D-Day — June 6, 1944 — with a strong, positive faith in our ally, a classless nation of vigorous and diverse peoples who were fighting their way back across the devastated Ukraine. I came home in December, 1946, with a simmering disapproval of the caste system, the police spying, and the hatred of foreigners in the Soviet State.

In those two-and-a-half years, I made many friends in Russia. I learned things about Russians that may have escaped newspaper correspondents. I got to know much about Moscow women that even Americans married to them do not seem to know. And no man could properly be expected to match the data I accumulated about Moscow's males.

I am not anti-Russian. I am anti-misinformation, because I believe that our lives depends on getting along with the Soviet government, And when I say ”our lives,” I include the Russians. I am also convinced that “getting along” can best be furthered by learning more about each other.

As Moscow editor of Amerika, the OIC-State Department magazine published in Russian, I did my official best to tell the Russians about the United States. As the first American woman sent to work in the Moscow Embassy, I had unique unofficial opportunities to demonstrate what Americans are like and how we live.

Now, and also quite unofficially, I want to put down in detail some of the interesting, exiting, exasperating facts about Russia that one does not find emphasized in the newspapers.

I left New York for Russia in April, 1944, by ATC plane, bucket-seat by day and ridged metal floor at night. I am a moderately friendly soul, not a helpless female, but I have seldom felt more friendless or helpless than on my three-stop flight from Tehran to Moscow.

Accustomed to the easy comradeship of the ATC boys, I smiled and spoke to my Russian pilot as we disembarked at Baku for breakfast. Ge looked right past me, never so much as flicking an eyelash. I was, to be British about it, somehow taken aback.

At Astrakhan, our second stop, a husky Red Army girl traffic cop flagged us in from the landing strip. Ignoring the unresponsive male fliers, I approached her with what I hoped was a cheery greeting. I might gave spoken to a flaxen-haired automation. She literally didn't see me, though I stood an arm's length off. I wasn't abashed this time — I was crushed.

Moscow was not unlike what I had imagined except that it sprawled so widely over the plain on either banks of the Moscow River. Its outskirts were simply clots of villages, close-packed, weathered log cabins, each clot separated from the next by open fields. Within this circle of villages lay the city proper, a wide smear of low brick buildings which give the city a distinctive dark-red color from the air.

I was met at the Moscow airport by two American male friends. Because the knew the Russians would be shocked by my slacks, they spirited me off to the Embassy where they made me change into a wrinkled, unpressed suit before they would take me to my hotel. So, before actually settling down in Moscow, I had had two lessons in how to live with the Russians.

The first, of course, was that foreigners, even Allies, weren't accepted as friends. The second, was that ladies — in the Russian caste sense — do not wear pants. I had yet to learn just how rigid the class rules in Russia are, and how very difficult it is to make friends.

But I began to learn — and learn quickly. Perhaps my illusions about Russian men were naïve. For one thing, I had expected them to be tall. When I arrived in Moscow, almost all the men in the street were in uniform — Red Army, Navy and Air Force. But they were all short — far too short for me, with my five-feet-eight. Yet, I must confess, I found them quite exciting.

As I walked through the streets I stared at them with interest And they stared back but without a glimmer, not event a gleam of flirtatiousness on their grim visages. Any American girl knows how to look at a man on the street so that it is understood at once just what attitude she wishes to convey; and she knows, too, what the looks given in return mean. American men look hard at American girls — right into their faces and eyes — with often a half-smile, friendly or flirty. It's flattering and fun.

But I missed all that in Moscow. After a few attempts I gave up expecting Russian men to notice me and talk with their eyes, and soon I was glowering right back into their square, dark, dour faces.

My OWI job made me it possible for me to observe at rather close quarters the public behavior of Russian women, as well as the men. Generally speaking, there are three classes — Soviet classes — of women in Moscow. They can be distinguished at a glance by their clothes. Silver fox is the badge of the high official's or general's wife, or the successful actress. The secretaries and students, the white-collar women, favor mannish suits and silk prints. The working girls, unskilled and semi-skilled laborers at the bottom of the income scale (at best, about 500 rubles a month), wear square-cut, peasanty linen or cotton dresses with a turnover collar and cross-stitch embroidery.

Except for the ballerinas and some of the film and stage stars, few Russian women gave what we call good figures. The average Muskvitcha is BIG. Really big but not tall. Heavy-boned, broad, with thick, shapely legs.

In wartime, during the winter, the white-collar girls usually wore dark fabric coats with narrow fur collars and small fur muffs. Beneath the coats they commonly wore wool dresses or suits and a couple of sweaters and, under the dress, cotton flannel bloomers over heavy wool underwear.

The shawled women, the factory workers, the street cleaners, the hod-carriers, the snow shovelers, gave a second distinctive winter garment — a padded, quilted jacket which reaches just below their hips. This gives them a boxy look — ungainly and sexless — like walking pincushions. And to a woman, Muskvitchas wear valenki, mostly heavy gray felt boots that reach to the knee and double the size of their great calves.

Few Moscow women wear lipstick, except for dress-up occasions. All I saw was orange — or foreign loot. Orange is the only cosmetic color manufactured in the Soviet Union. Exceedingly few wore nail polish, also orange but light in tone, Their perfumes, again unless foreign, are heavy and sweet, almost barber-shop tonic scents, bearing such political names as Red Moscow and October Revolution.

About May 1, the ladies begin to peel for the summer. My first May Day was warm and sunny and I had gone for a walk around the Kremlin. Suddenly I was conscious of seeing again the normal outlines of the female figure. The girls had probably been shedding under layers for weeks before sloughing the outer padding of jackets and coats. But to me it was a startling and pleasant sight to see legs bare of valenki and bare arms swinging as the big girls came jostling and giggling four abreast down the sidewalk.

Despite all one hears about “free love and promiscuity” in Russia, I never knew a Russian who took marriage or divorce lightly. Quite the contrary, and for a very simple reason. We in America think we have a housing problem. But we can't hold a candle to the Muskovites, whose housing shortage has had a discouraging effect on marriage. There is no such ting as an empty apartment in Moscow. Every square foot of space is assigned to someone, though it is possible to “buy” a room illegally — and pay through the nose for it.

Suppose a women has a two-room flat — living room and bedroom. Her husband has been transferred to Kiev for two years. She cannot leave her job to join him, and she wants to buy a piano. So she decides to sell the bedroom and move into the living room. She sets the price at 20,000 rubles — a very stiff figure — because the “sale” is for life. The purchaser will be registered as her cousin, nephew or niece and will thereafter be the legal resident of that room. The seller is gambling that her husband will qualify for better apartment by virtue of his two-year hitch in Kiev. If he doesn't, they will be stuck with a one-room home.

News of the room for sale spreads discreetly by word of mouth. The woman is besieged by buyers. She likes best the young couple who want to get married. But they cannot meet her asking price. So she settles for 15,000 rubles, 10,000 down and the rest on terms. After that the room is theirs, and they are luckier than the most young couples.

Marriage almost always means doubling up in the home of whichever partner is less crowded. Often newlyweds move into a single room with parents, a brother or sister, or even another young couple. Whole families groan in unison when the bride announces she is going to have a baby. But the baby, on arrival, is not only adored, but absorbed — somehow.

One might think that such crowded conditions would not only discourage marriage, but make for divorce. They don't. One can divorce a man — though the process in expensive and long-dawn-out — but one can't get him out of the house.

For instance, Tatiana goes home from the courthouse, released at least from the brute, but there he sits in his regular chair, reading the Evening Moscow.

“Hey, we're divorced!” she cries.

“Yeah? So what? Where do you think I'm going to live? Under a tree in the Park of Culture and Rest?”

Of course, if Tatiana marries again, she can bring her new husband in to protect her against the insults of her ex-spouse. And if he remarries, he can bring his bride home, too. So... as an apparent result, marriages are pretty well stabilized in Moscow.

Before the war, of course, one could get a divorce for a post card. And one could have an abortion simply by applying for it and agreeing to pay 10 per cent of one month's salary. Today a divorce costs 2,000 rubles, and an abortion — an illicit abortion — costs up to 10,000. Naturally, at those prices, there are few abortions and the birth rate is rising.

Of course, more births make for ever more-crowded quarters, but then, only really crowded rooms were livably warm in the wartime winter. No matter how tightly squeezed they are, most Russians shun the outdoors in cold weather. In summer, however, they flock to the park, the river beaches, the outlying villages. Only men and wives with husbands can, with propriety, go to restaurants, but everybody can go picnicking and swimming, and go together. In the “all-together,” too, with qualifications.

Americans seem to have an almost insatiable curiosity about nude bathing in the Soviet Union. Here's what I saw of it.

I lived one summer with some other Americans on the banks of the Kliasma River, in which we — with other foreigners, the members of a Russian summer colony, scores of Red Army convalescents from a near-by hospital and about 100 neighborly cows — all took a daily dip. Except for the children under 10 or 12 and a group of young men who swam in the raw a hundred yards or so from the rest, there was no nude bathing. However, there were very few bathing suits — unless what I took to be bloomers, rayon undershirts and bras are a new style in bathing costumes.

One day when I had gone walking along the river unprepared for a swim, a group of young people asked me to join them. I merely peeled my cotton dress over my head and dived in, in panties and bra. There was no comments other than that my panties were much briefer than theirs. I was as covered up as I would have been in almost any suit in America, but I couldn't have appeared that way back home.

The only really nude swimming I saw was after the war, at Batumi, a Black Sea resort. The beach was devided into three sections — Ladies, Ladies and Gents and Gents. Elma Ferguson, one of the editors of British Ally, a Russian-language weekly magazine published in Moscow, joined me on the Ladies Only beach the first day.

We changed into our suits in little cabanas and afterward paraded out among the sprawling multitude of bronzed, naked Russian women. Our suits were more than cute — they were downright fetching. But after an hour of being stared at, we slunk back into the cabanas, stripped, and sauntered out again, feeling foolish but far less conspicuous.

A limp strand of barbed wire separated ours from the mixed beach. There, families sat around in odd bits of costume, eating pickles and buns and going for an occasional dip in the cold Black Sea. Up beyond them, another 50 or 75 yards, was the beginning of the men's beach where nude bachelors by the dozen were sunning themselves in absolute un-selfconsciousness.

Twice during our ten days there, newly arrived Red Army groups blundered — I'm sure by accident — onto our beach, clumping along in heavy boots. A shower of stones and a chorus of indignant feminine imprecations — “Louts! Lecherous ones!” — sent them running, with tunics flying, all holding their caps over the near side of their faces.

If it was difficult to meet Russian men at the beaches, it was quite the opposite in a Moscow night club. My first visit to one was withing few hours of my arrival. D-Day — the actual opening of the long-awaited second front — obviously called for celebration. I was invited to a restaurant for dinned and dancing by a group of young men — American sergeants in the military mission, boys who worked in the Embassy, a couple of engineers from the wilds of Siberia and a French sergeant.

We went about 10 o'clock. Earlier the place would have been empty. Just off Gorki Street we entered the Astoria, pushing by two Red Army men standing in the entryway with mounted bayonets. I got used to seeing these M.P.'s in all restaurant lobbies, and learned they were there to squelch fights that inevitably broke out among the hearty guests, most of them soldiers on leave.

They boys checked their caps with two bearded old men behind a coat counter, and we went up six steps into a brilliantly lit hall. I caught my breath, both at the gayety and the decor. The room was large and long, its ceiling held up by great columns ornamented with voluptuous stone beauties.

Along the right side of the room stretched a row of little cubicles made private by dark red draperies — and at the rear a mixed male and female orchestra was playing very bad jazz.

Almost none of us could speak more than a few words of Russian, but we managed to get served with enormous quantities of food and drink, simply by leaving the matter up to the waiters, who brought what the same number of Russians could put away. And that's a lot.

First we were supplied with two plates, one on top of the other, an array of silver and a myriad of glasses — vodka glasses, champagne glasses, wine glasses for red and white, and liqueur glasses. We started out with zakuski, which consisted of several huge plates of lettuce, lamb, chicken and potato salad, onions and cucumbers, all arranged in towering pyramids. Plus a big bowl of caviar, a little dish of chopped onions and great piles of white bread with little squares of butter.

With the zakuski came carafés half-filled with vodka. This — unlike the Russian who tend to dash it back against their tonsils — we sipped while we nibbled at the salad.

Such behavior! Every Russian eye in the room was on us. I could see that surrounding parties had stopped eating to watch us. Someone walked casually by our table. Other, bolder, simply walked over and stood near us, getting a good eyeful of the inostranki (foreigners).

After our zakuski the waiters brought steaming cabbage soup. Then big, thick, juicy steaks — each with a fried egg on top. On the side, fried potatoes, fried carrots and dry, red Russian wine. For dessert there was ice cream with canned fruit on it, with which we drank Soviet champagne in tall Russian champagne glasses. We finished, three hours after we began eating, with demitasse of thick, black ersatz coffee. Even in a commercial restaurant like the Astoria, you couldn't get real coffee. But that was about all you couldn't get.

During all this time, between courses, and even between bites, I had been dancing with the Americans. Whenever we danced, the Russians withdrew to the side lines to watch and applaud after each number. Word spread that it was, without question, a nastoyashaya Amerikanka — a real American girl — who was dancing. Tgat brought more onlookers and finally, probably as a result of a bet, a Red Army lieutenant came smiling to our table and inquired of my escorts if they had any objections to asking the Amerikanka for a dance.

The boys all agreed that he might ask me, and I was enchanted. So we danced. He got a firm grip around my middle, stretched toward the far end of the dance floor, his shiny black leather boots sometimes coming down hard — and there's nothing harder — on my feet. But he loved it and so did I.

When the music ended, my beau gallantly took my right hand in both of his and tenderly kissed it, looking me straight in the eye. Then he guided me back to my table, kissed my hand again, thanked the whole table for the pleasure, and disappeared.

That started it. My friends quickly made a rule that I might dance only every other dance with the Red Army stag line which swarmed about our table. Each Russian cavorted as ebulliently as the first, and each kissed my hand at the end of the performance.

Red Army officers far outnumbered civilians that night at the Astoria — and generally in Moscow night clubs, I was to learn. Many had their wives with them, bulging, drably dressed women, who were as energetic in the dance as their husbands. Some had their girl friends, and some had tramps — who looked just about like tramps anywhere, except that these had more than their share of shiny gold teeth and stiff-braced bosoms. They wore more of the orange lipstick than nice girls would — and, anyhow, nice girls did not go to restaurants unchaperoned.

Being the only American girl free to go where I wished, I had numerous opportunities to learn about Moscow's night life. There were scarcely more than three restaurants open when I arrived. The Moskva was the hot spot during the war and afterward. It was the largest restaurant — with the largest dance floor and the biggest, noisiest crowds. It was rowdy and expensive and promised a skandal (fight or furious argument) at any moment.

During the war there was a 1 A.M. curfew. And strict. It meant that the Metro, all street traffic, everything but military movements stopped at that hour. The result was that the night clubs stayed roaring full all night long. The orchestras quit at 3, but the waiters kept on bringing drinks, and the celebrants guzzled themselves sleepy, quarrelsome or amorous until the curfew lifted at 5 A.M., when those who still could, made their way home.

Foreigners could get away after 1, often just by showing their identification cards, very impressive with big red seals. We Americans could argue that we lived just across the square. Once outside, we generally were able to talk the bayonet teams into passing us.

Though D-Day night was a special exception, I seldom went to a night club where Russian fighting men did not dance with me. Always, and punctiliously, they asked me my escort's permission first, and generally they left me afterward. But on a few occasions, vodka-emboldened warriors heavy with medals braved the foreigner taboo and remained at our table to talk, and sometimes hopefully offered to take me home.

One cold blustery night, an American who lived next to me in the Hotel National knocked on the wall. He had some extra rubles, no desire to sleep and a craving for a midnight steak. Would I go to the Moskva with him?

We took a table rear, far from the crowded dance floor, and attacked our beef. But in the middle of it, a stocky, black-haired Red Air Force pilot came over to our table and asked for a light. Then he sat down and helped us finish our bottle of wine.

By the time the NKVD* (secret service) spotters caught up with him — all waiters were required to shoo Russians away from foreigners — we had decided to hell with it! We were a threesome and so we would remain.

For some reason, perhaps because the little pilot had about 20 medals jingling on his chest, we got away with it. He ordered a steak and vodka, scorning our wine, and talked about his friends in the French Normandie Squadron fighting in the north, and his dream of flying an American four-motored plane.

At 2 A.M., after we had eaten and danced till we were tired — the Russian pilot insisting that only he and American tovarisch should dance with me — he said he had a friend we should call on. We left the restaurant, persuading him that it would be unwise to wake up a friend at that hour, particularly with two foreigners. He agreed, but insisted it was much too early to go to bed. Besides, his bed was about 13 miles outside Moscow at an Air Force barracks and his only chance getting there now was to hitch-hike. Couldn't he please come home with us?

So we let him. When we reached the hotel we again tried to send our pilot on his way, but he was just tight enough to be tearful, and he painted such a grim picture of icy roads and unfriendly patrols that finally my escort said: “Okay, tell him to come up and sleep on my couch. But it's on his head if he gets into trouble.”

I translated and the weepy pilot swore that nothing could be worse than going home. “Besides,” he added ingenuously, “if they get tough with me, I'll just tell them I was drunk and don't remember anything.”

We walked past the policeman at the door as if we didn't know each other and the pilot followed us upstairs, all of us tiptoeing past the little old man on night duty whose inquisitive, terrier-like face was buried in his arms; he was asleep.

Fingers on lips, constantly shushing our talkative guest, we made t unchallenged up the four flights to our floor, where we hid the Russian pilot around a corner while we awoke the old woman who served as floor clerk to get our keys. Barely waking, she handed over the keys and resumed snoring. I went into my escort's room, where I helped him fix covers and a pillow for the hard little couch. As I left, the pilot was already out of his boots and stripping off his blouse. We never leaned just how he manged to get out of the hotel undetected next morning, but he made it. Two weeks late I met him again at the Moskva. He was still on furlough and having fine time. He danced once with me, but he didn't ask again if he could see me home.

* In 1946, the NKVD was succeeded by the MVD, the Ministry of Home Affairs

Because Moscow's young lades cannot be seen in night clubs without loss of reputation, home parties are a big social item. But they are likely to be crowded. Even a small guest list packs a two-room apartment. At that, it's safer for an American new to Moscow attend a party where guests sprawl on the floor than a more formal sit-down party, for Russians take an unholy delight in ganging up on strangers at such affairs — just as Stalin's aides are reported to do at the big shindigs in the Kremlin.

My friends, Alexander and Olga (nicknames Sasha and Olia) once staged a party for six Americans and six Russians. We Americans parked a block away and arrived in pairs so as not to attract attention. The main room, about 12 by 16 feet, was crowded with furniture and guests. A dozen chairs and stools were drawn up around a big table and a small phonograph was squeaking out Russian jazz from a warped record. There were plates full of appetizers and black bread and, at every third place, a bottle of vodka and one of wine.

As soon as the last guest arrived, we were seated. Apparently the was no formal seating plan, but it happened that every American found a Russian on either side.

Then the toasts — and the fun — began. I knew what to expect. I saved my concern for an American major opposite me, a man who had just arrived in Moscow and obviously had not been told the facts of Moscow night life. He was flaked by two cute, chubby, ex-Red Army girl officers who saw their duty — and did it.

For once I was first with a toast — to Olia's mother. That started things. I had the woman's prerogative of toasting in wine and refused to be drawn into a vodka drinking bout with blond Sasha on my left or Misha, a dark, gay, big-eyed Red Army tank man, on my right. Instead, I kept my eye on the major.

First one of his pretty companions tapped him on the wrist and proposed a toast: “To the American Army and the Red Army.” The major, being a man, had to drink the toast in vodka. Moreover, being a member of one of the organizations toasted, he had to drink it do dna — to the bottom.

Meantime, the girl who had wisely ignored the first toast had been stowing away zakuski, including a stable drinking-base of black bread. Three minutes after the first toast, she proposed a toast to Victory over the Fascists. The major drank another one — do dna.

He turned now to the pickled fish on his heaping plate. Meanwhile the first girl had practically polished off her first full plate of everything. Now, she returned to the contest and, engaging the major in casual conversation, discovered he was the father of four children.

“Ah,” she exclaimed, “in all the world there is no better toast that one to children. I drink to your children and to all children.”

The beaming major agreed, and downed his third straight vodka in less than 15 minutes. He had scarcely touched his food, but his two companions were already at work on their second helpings. Now the other girl tried him out again.

“TO DROOOOZHBA!” she cried with a flourish, holing out her small glass of wine. “To friendship between our two great peoples!“

By now the major was cocky. He winked at me. “Say — this is the way to drink. I could go on like this for a long time.”

He did. The girls kept thinking up toasts that no gentleman could ignore — to Stalin and Roosevelt, to peace, even ti health. The major was quite a man, but. . . .

The rest of us, knowing what our partners were up to, managed to drink in wine or not to drink do dna. The Russians were a little piqued, but when the party broke up at 2 A.M., the major was our only casualty. We got him out, with a helper under each arm and a silk scarf stuffed into his mouth to muffle the wailing baritone in which he begged the world to “bury me not on the lo-oone prairie-eeee!“

I was able to give a number of parties myself when I was at last assigned to an apartment outside the Embassy. My three-room apartment in a Russian apartment house — with no police guard at the door — was a magnet for the curious.

All my simple furnishing were American. Being used to quarters stiff settees, monstrous tables and hip-high beds, my guests were fascinated by the ”emptiness” of my home. Best of all, there was room to dance. Other attractions were American jazz records and home movies.

My practice was to invite one Russian whom I knew and have him or her invite the rest of the party. That way there was no danger of Russians bumping into others they didn't know or couldn't trust. On one typical occasion, the entire party of five Russian men and four girls arrived half and hour early, just as I had smeared my face with cream after preparing the drinks — grapefruit juice and bourbon — which had less authority but more zing than Soviet Koktail of straight vodka which orange peel has soaked for 24 hours.

I shooed the men into the living room and the girls all flocked into my bedroom while I finished dressing. In five minutes they had tried on my hats and shoes, tested the bed by bouncing on it, gone through my jewelry box and experimented with my makeup, then rubbed it off and replaced it with their own orange glow. They giggled over everything, especially my quaint practice of wearing my slip outside my pink snuggies. I giggled too when they flipped up their skirts to show me how they tucked their white cotton slips inside knee-length gray boomers.

I finally got them away from the dressing table and into the living room, only to discover that the five men were crowded into my tiny kitchen. One had pulled the refrigerator away from the wall and was examining the motor on top; another had the door open and was extracting an ice tray. Two others had discovered the pop-up toaster, and the fifth sat on the window still taking it all in.

I held the ice tray under the tap, put the cubes in a bowl and refilled the tray with water. (Later I noticed that a first-time guest named Sergei went several times to the kitchen, pulled out the tray and tested the process of freezing with his finger. Thereafter, at my parties, Sergei was official iceman and no one else could remove the cubes.) For the toaster addicts I demonstrated with a slice of bread. They goggled with gadget worship and insisted that I take the marvel into the living room to show it to the girls.

Eating was always a problem at my parties because uncorrupted Russians eat and drink simultaneously and copiously. But I served only koktails before the movie with a plate of hors d'oeuvres, usually dainty round bits of white bread with a smear of cheese or a slice of Spam. Strange Russians would be aghast at this queer cup of tea. Drinks but no food except these piddling tidbits? But one of the regulars would usually take them aside and spell it out for them.

After the movie, I would serve an American buffet supper. This, too, stumped the uninitiated. The food would be put on the table — meat pie, biscuits, pumpkin pie, apple pie — and the chairs placed around the walls. One of my older friends would explain that, since Lisa had such a small table and so few chairs, each was to help himself, then sit down where he could. The consternation never lasted long. Russians are good picnickers and mostly ended up cross-legged on the floor. The more sophisticated of my guests liked to smoke my cigarettes — one of them always requested a “Looky Strooky” — but incautious first attempts to handle our cigarettes ended in confusion. The Russian cigarettes are called papirosi, and are mostly paper. Each has a two-inch cardboard mundstuck, an individual holder, attached to an inch-and-a-half of cigarette. Russians, consequently are “wet” smokers. When they smoke our cigarettes for the first time, they wind up with their teeth full of paper and soggy tobacco shreds.

Most of the Russians I got to know in Moscow didn't go to work until 10:30 or 11, and this always constituted another party problem. They never wanted to go home. At about 1 A.M., therefore, I would give the high sign to one of my friends and word would spread that Lizotchka had to get up at the ungodly hour of 8 and be at work the unheard hour of 9, so it was time to go home.

They would finally go, noisily shushing each other, down the stairs and out into the blackout. Some would return at the next invitation. Others never came back. Still others would risk three or four parties before, their curious satisfied, they would decide they had better swear off foreigners before they got into trouble with the NKVD.

As I made friends among the Russians, I came to be invited to nice, small, spontaneous evenings out. Someone I knew would call up and say that a friend was in unexpectedly, from Odessa or Leningrad or Omsk, and wanted to meet a real live American girl.

And often I'd be asked not to wear “that drab brown dress” — which I valued because it made me relatively inconspicuous among my shabby Russian friends. “Come looking like an American,” they would say. “Put your hair on top of your head, put on a lot of makeup and wear your red suit with the pale blue blouse.”

So I would dress as directed and go. Feeling a trifle silly, like something from the zoo, I would meet the visitor from Omsk and eye him as covertly as he did me. But usually, the problems of language broke down our embarrassment and we were able to accept each other as friends of a friend. We would talk of rationing, of German atrocities, of differences between our two great countries. But we never got much beyond that.

For a young Amerikanka traveling about Moscow, a car is a luxury, so I welcomed the use of office machine. But I never drove more than 80 miles outside Moscow. Russian roads do not arouse the tourist urge, even if you have permission to travel. Plane and train are the only conveyances for long distances and, until the summer of 1946, even these were restricted to priority travelers.

A year after the war, however, a formal announcement from the Kremlin lifted travel restrictions, so Elma Ferguson and I decided on a Black Sea vacation and set off by train. All went well at first. All would have continued to go well, no doubt, if we had not decided to test the amount of actual freedom given a foreigner by leaving the Intourist route. Moreover, we decided to see how far we could get without using our foreign diplomatic-identity cards.

In Tiflis, where we had given ourselves 24 hours for sight-seeing, we men a pleasant young Georgian woman who suggested we take a picnic lunch next day to Gori, a three-hour train ride, and visit the birthplace of Stalin. We did. We saw the works, including the humble cabin where Joseph Vissarionovitch Djugashvili was born and which is now enclosed in a fancy Greek temple.

We walked, viewed and picnicked our fill and, with a couple of hours to kill before our 6 o'clock return train to Tiflis (which would give us just ten minutes to make our connection to Batumi), we were back in the station. Our guide had gone off to see about tickets.

When a big, double-chinned, oily-skinned man in uniform entered, we paid no attention until he addressed us jovially in Russian and invited us to go out with him to “see something interesting.” The day was hot and the man's uniform was not trig. I recalled afterward that his hat was pushed well to the back of his head. He led us through a trim lawn-garden and through a charming rustic stone doorway to a near-by building which I thought was perhaps a museum.

We entered a rectangular room containing a long table and an official-looking desk. The big man gave us chairs, sat at the desk and, taking off his cap, tossed it top downward on the table. I stiffened. It was red and blue. An NKVD cap! Our jovial guide was really a lieutenant in the secret service.

I looked up at the window. It was barred. The door was shut. I nudged Elma. “Do you see what I see? We're in jail!”

The boorish lieutenant didn't approve of our speaking English. He growled: “You both speak Russian?” I answered that I did, but my friend only a little.

He smiled. He had thick lips and his smile wasn't friendly. “Very well, talk. Who are you? What are you doing here?”

II told him my name was Elizaveta Eagan, that I was an American from Moscow on my way for a vacation at Batumi; that my companion was Elma Ferguson, British, also from Moscow and going to Batumi. We had been routed by Intourist by way of Tiflis, where we had decided to make a side trip to the birthplace of Marshal Stalin. We had now seen the sights and were waiting for our train which would make a connection at Tiflis for the Black Sea.

“Now,” I said, “I see you are NKVD. Will you please tell me why we are being held here and how er are going to make our train?”

“Train?” He grinned. “You have no need to worry about trains.”

He tossed a chuckling comment to a swarthy little man who had entered the room as the questioning began and was sitting silently. I took it that he was the local Communist Party secretary, just observing.

I began again pointing out that we were legal travelers with Intourist tickets, that Moscow had lifted wartime restrictions on travel, and that he had no right to restrain us.

“Now, Tovarisch Elizaveta — ” the lieutenant interrupted.

I interrupted right back: ”I'm not your tovarisch and, to you, I am not Elizaveta. You will please address me properly.”

That stung him. After a few flustered words in Georgian to the party man, he returned to the attack.

He asked for our passports. I told hum he should know that Intourist had taken them away as soon as we registered at the Tiflis hotel, and we wouldn't get them back until we checked out.

By now it was nearing time for our local train to Tiflis. I said as much to the lieutenant and demanded that a decision be made. I insisted that, if we were to miss our train I must at once be allowed to call Intourist in Tiflis and friends in Moscow. That stumped him. He said he would have to submit the matter to his kapitan.

“Bring on your kapitan,” I said. “I'd like to discuss this phony arrest with him. You were going to show us ‘something interesting.’ Show us your kapitan.”

Soon he came back with a tallish, spare-haired captain. The lieutenant was talking volubly. The captain was looking worried. They stopped in the corner and held a conference in mumbled Georgian with the party man, then the captain came to the table and addressed me. He asked all the questions the lieutenant had asked, and got the same answers. Then he asked the one his fat aide had not: “Did Intourist route you to Gori?”

I admitted it had not. He shrugged. “See?”

”I do not see,” I snapped. ”Is it forbidden to go on a picnic without a special pass? We have ridden an interurban train up here from Tiflis to have a picnic and see the great Stalin's birthplace. What is so illegal in that?”

The outburst got us nowhere. Mumbling a few words, the captain left the room. At 15 minutes of train time, I insisted that the lieutenant go get Kapitan. He left. The party man left. The train came and left. Elma and I could hear it through the barred window.

I was concerned then. How could Intourist, or our Embassies, trace us? Had we got ourselves in a jam we couldn't get out of? I confess we were worried and scared.

Finally Kapitan and the lieutenant returned. They had questioned our guide. Her story agreed with ours, but they were taking no chances. We were not to be turned loose . . . yet. At this point, I knew it was time to play our trump card — and hope for the best. I pulled myself up, took a deep breath and let my words rip:

“Listen, Mr. Captain, I am a diplomatic attaché from the American Embassy and the editor of the magazine Amerika, published by the Bureau of Information and Cultural Affairs in Moscow. My friend is a diplomatic attaché of the British Embassy and an editor of British Ally, published in Moscow. Now, are you satisfied?”

Kapitan studied us and his lean cheek twitched. Then he turned on the lieutenant with old fury. Even in Georgian, I knew what he was saying. ”Great grunting son of a pig! Look what you have got us into with your clever spy catching. Diplomats! Immune diplomats! No one can arrest them. We shall be lucky if this does not cost us both our heads.”

I broke in on the captain by asking if we could go now. “But certainly, certainly, a great mistake . . . You understand, of course, you have not been arrested . . .”

Not arrested? Then how explain the missed train, the missed connection in Tiflis? If he had released us in time to catch our train, we should not have considered ourselves arrested. As it was . . .

Kapitan bellowed for the station master. In a moment the little man appeared. “The express to Tiflis — when is it due? Stop it!”

The little man answered calmly: “Impossible, Tovarisch Kapitan. The express cannot be stopped.”

What look the Kapitan turned on him then I do not know, but I saw the little man's face blanch. “Yes — yes, Tovarisch Kapitan. I shall stop the express.”

Ten minutes later Elma and I were installed in a luxurious compartment, having been handed up the steps by the bowing, scraping captain. Behind him stood the lieutenant, timidly smiling and bearing Elma's coat. The captain tried to make his last smile friendly.

“And please bear in mind, Citizens,” he said, “that you have not been under arrest. One so humble as I, a mere kapitan, could not presume, you know, so much as to question diplomats.”

I did not sleep well that night. I kept wondering what might have happened if we had not been immune diplomats.

No Russian has immunity from arrest, and the fatalism with which they undertook friendships with Americans often astounded me. They risked their jobs, ration books, even apartment leases by befriending me. I felt imepped, in turn, to protect them. There is no one I am more concerned with protecting than the man who bought my Christmas tree decorations.

It was my second Christmas in Moscow. When I heard that the Mostorg (Moscow's Macy's) had the ornaments, I couldn't stay away. Aroun the counter where the baubles were on sale, the crowd was five deep.

I had pushed well to the front when it dawned on me that I did not know the Russian names for these things. I looked around for help. On my right was a short, shoving, Red Army pilot. On my left, a studious-looking, pleasant, dark young man in civilian clothes. Perhaps because he was at least five foot ten, I turned to him.

“Bute-lubezni . . .” I began — which means something like “Have the goodness . . .”

He smiled a really warm, attractive smile and said, “Pazhaluste — Your pleasure, Citizeness . . .”

I told him, first, that I was an American and, second, that I wanted to get some of the ornaments but didn't know their names.

“Merely point out what you wish,” he said smilingly. “I shall do the rest with pleasure.”

I did, and he did, and I thanked him. Then we prated — as simply as that.

About a month later I was in the between-acts promenade in the Bolshoi Theater. He was standing on the steps. Our eyes met. I smiled and his eyes lit up. He nodded, ever so slightly. Here was a cautious one, I thought; he'll have no dealing with an inostranka. And I decided to forget him.

Later, after we had taken our seats, I swept the theater with my rented glasses and saw him. He was looking at me. I lowered the glasses and smiled. So did he. And that was all there was to that.

youtube

The next time I saw him, perhaps two weeks later, was when I was enjoying a manicure and he was having a haircut in the hotel barber shop. We paid our rubles at the same time and he followed me out. Instead of turning toward the Embassy and its vigilant guards, I turned in the opposite direction and started walking purposefully — nowhere. Within a block I heard his quick step crunching on the snow-covered sidewalk and, glancing sideways, met his shy grin.

“The Russian lessons?” he asked in English. “How do they go?”

As I fumbled for an answer, he went on in halting but correct American. He apologized for “accosting me,” and when I brushed that off by asking where he had learned English and why he hadn't used it at the Mostorg, he explained, now in Russian:

“I speak English, though not well, partly because I am a metallurgist and must read it, partly because for several years I worked as an interpreter for an American mining engineer in the Urals. Also, partly because my mother's first husband was an Englishman.”

He stopped speaking, but his eyes twinkled. Then he added: “But you are the only American I have ever spoken since nine years ago when the mining engineer was ordered home.”

“You know, of course,” he added, “that we Russians are discouraged from having contacts with foreigners — that I should not be walking with you. Do not think I disapprove of such regulations. I approve. I believe it is a good thing to discourage Russians meeting foreigners.”

I took issue with that. In a world grown small by virtue of radio and aircraft, I argued, all the world's people needed to know about all the others so as to create peace and brotherhood.

“No,” he said. “Our country is young. Our political and economic system is the most advanced in the world, but it is still not strong. We do not yet have physical comforts. Our people are not yet wise. Many might become overcritical if they knew how great is the difference between the way we must live and the way the big capitalistic countries do.”

He went on to say that he felt no qualms about talking to a foreigner because he was quite satisfied with his life and his future. He could withstand the “temptation.”

“But I'm no fool,” he added. “I know I am breaking the unwritten law in walking and talking with you. Anyway, may I go walking with you again some day soon? Sunday at 5 P.M., say, on Gogolovski Boulevard?”

I said yes, and that I understood the situation, but wasn't he risking a lot just to practice his English?

He flushed, then grinned shyly and looked me straight in the eye. “It is not the English. I would like to know you. So — shall we walk on Sunday?”

I said what any girl would. Yes. It was only after we parted that I realized we had not even introduced ourselves.

It is dark in Moscow in winter-time at 4:30, but we had no trouble finding each other for our date. We struck across the little park above Pushkin Square and out the boulevard. This time I took the initiative. Perhaps he already knew my name, but I said: “My name is Elizabeth. What is yours?”

He told me — Alexei — and asked me my father's first name. I answered William, and he told me his father's name was Mikhail. That put us on a very formal footing and we remained Elizaveta Vasilevna and Alexei Mikhailovich for the next several meetings. For we made other dates and walked miles through the bitter Russian nights.

It was at the third meeting that Alexei brought me a bundle of press clippings — stories about Russian women scientists, doctors, writers, politicians, soldiers. I explained 6hat we got all these stories at the office, and he rather lamely excused himself by saying that he wanted to be sure I saw what marvelous opportunities the Soviet Union granted its women.

Suddenly I realized that I was being wooed. Alexei Mikhailovitch had a motive in trying to sell me on a future in the Soviet Union.

We walked all winter — once or twice a week. When spring came we were still walking thought we had got to the Lisa and Alyosha stage. But Alexei never came to my apartment and I never met him anywhere but on the street.

One day in May we took a train to the country. We got off at a little village station on the edge of a birch forest and walked through the sodden leaves to a hillock just beginning to green. We ate our picnic lunch. Afterward we strolled through the sunlight into the helter-skelter cluster of log cabins that was the village-proper.

Alyosha stopped a sweet, wrinkled old Babushka and asked her if there was a place in the village where we could buy a glass of tea. She insisted we come into her house. As we entered the old lady's cottage, I whispered to Alexei that he must explain I was an Amerikanka.

So he did, and she did not seem to fear me. Instead she beamed all over and, turning again to Alyosha, asked: “And you, boy, you are the husband of the young Amerikanka?”

Alyosha turned to me. “What shall I sat? May I tell her, Lisa, that I soon shall be?” Then, in a swift outpouring of persuasive Russian: “Let me say it, Dorogaya moya — my dear. Will you stay in Russia with me — be my wife — join me and my people? . . .”

I had known it was coming. But this was — literally — too sudden. I lost the words of Alyosha's impassioned plea, but the gist was that he was offering me the greatest gift in his power to bestow: that I should, by marrying him and becoming a Soviet citizen, fulfill the destiny of modern woman by renouncing the false idols and ideas of imperialistic capitalism for world-wide communistic brotherhood.

I don't know, really, how I should have reacted to such a proposal — by moonlight, say, on the banks of the Moscow River, or even if it had been offered in a peasant cottage without political orchestration. But I could not help looking beyond Alyosha to Babushka. I saw her eyes darting from his lean, strong figure in his dowdy, almost-threadbare civilian “uniform” of shiny blue-serge coat and worn brown trousers to my old, but still firm and well-cut, mustard-colored tweed suit.

I realized, which Alexei had not, that he was speaking Russian and that Babushka had anticipated my answer with her eyes.

“Alyosha,” I said, and I spoke in English but my answer was American. “Alyosha, you are kind, considerate and most patriotic. But I cannot marry you. Not for the reasons I see in the eyes of our hostess — not for any reason that would occur to you, because it has nothing to do with clothes or food or housing — not for the reasons you defend as justified in keeping Russians and foreigners apart.

“Believe me, Alyosha, I cannot marry you—” and here my voice almost broke, because he had never before looked so admirable, so almost-heroic, so dedicated — “because you do not really love me. You love Russia. You would love to make a convert. You want a disciple, not a wife.”

I had got a grip on myself now. I was filled with a rush of recollections of Red Army men and women — fliers, foot soldiers, policemen, housewives, students — all of them living in daily dread of a visiting from the secret police.

“I am an American woman, Alyosha,” I concluded, “and I have bred in my bones the conviction that a man — or woman — is not born to serve the State but that the State is born to serve the man or woman.”

6 notes · View notes

theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

On Tuesday, close to 200 climate activists crowded into the Capitol Building offices of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who will re-assume the position of House speaker when the new Congress is sworn in come January.

The activists called on Pelosi to lead Democrats in developing an ambitious, comprehensive plan to address climate change — a Green New Deal. Halfway through the protest, rising Democratic star and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited to show her support, which drew a torrent of media coverage.

New Dem star protests speaker on first day of freshman orientation! The media loved it.

[embedded content]

I’ll be honest, though. I’ve seen intra-left disputes on climate change reprise themselves over and over again, to no one’s benefit, and when I heard about this protest, I felt a twinge of dread. Why target Pelosi, who has always been a climate champion? And how is she supposed to have a comprehensive climate plan already when she hasn’t even taken the gavel? Aren’t there worse enemies of the climate to protest?

But I talked it out on Twitter, emailed with a few of the organizers, and now have a better handle on what’s going on. And it turns out to be quite a bit richer and more significant than what you might get from the headlines.

As I said in my Monday post on Democratic climate strategy in a polarized era, there are three basic prongs of a unilateral left strategy. The first is using House congressional committees to investigate and slow President Trump’s deregulatory agenda. The second is accelerating policy innovation in states that Democrats control.

And the third is defining a long-term, comprehensive federal climate agenda for when/if Democrats regain the power to implement one. That is why climate activists swarmed Pelosi’s office. The left is making an early bid to set the highest bar possible for the 2020 Democratic climate change agenda.

Here’s how it unfolded and what’s at stake.

AOC thanks climate protesters. Sunrise

Climate hawks received a few disconcerting signals in the wake of the midterm elections (which turned out to be a much bigger victory for Democrats than they appeared early on).

A piece in the Hill reported that House Democrats had no plans to move on climate change, which appeared nowhere in their list of priorities. Meanwhile, Pelosi, who is very much intent on keeping her speakership, started talking the day after the election about a “bipartisan marketplace of ideas,” which is not exactly what you’d call reading the room.

Pelosi had signaled that she planned to revive the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming (2007-2011, RIP), but activists and the incoming class of social democrats wanted something much bolder. They needed something to rally around.

And here it is: AOC plans to introduce a draft resolution that would put parameters around the committee, its work, and its membership. It is … bold, to say the least.

The resolution — supported by the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, two youth-led organizations pushing for a Green New Deal — has a number of interesting provisions, but two demands are central: that the committee be given a mandate to develop a Green New Deal that would decarbonize the US economy, and that no members be appointed who accept donations from the fossil fuel industry.

Reinstating the Select Committee is a great decision that I fully support.

These dynamic leaders want to ensure is that the committee: – Has a mandate to draft a Green New Deal for 100% renewable energy – No appointed members that accept funding from the fossil fuel industry

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 13, 2018

Specifically, the committee “shall have authority to develop a detailed, national, industrial, economic mobilization plan for the transition of the United States economy to become carbon neutral and to significantly draw down and capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and oceans and to promote economic and environmental justice and equality.” It would be required to produce a draft plan by January 1, 2020, and draft legislation by March 1, 2020.

In other words, the committee must produce a package of legislation ready to move if Democrats take power in the 2020 elections.

Here are the goals the resolution sets for the Green New Deal:

(1) 100% of national power generation from renewable sources; (2) Building a national, energy-efficient, “smart” grid; (3) Upgrading every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety; (4) Decarbonizing the manufacturing, agricultural and other industries; (5) Decarbonizing, repairing and improving transportation and other infrastructure; (6) Funding massive investment in the drawdown and capture of greenhouse gases; (7) Making “green” technology, industry, expertise, products and services a major export of the United States, with the aim of becoming the undisputed international leader in helping other countries transition to completely carbon neutral economies and bringing about a global Green New Deal.

That … pretty much covers it! It’s difficult to imagine how you could get any more ambitious than that.

Of course, every one of those bullet points represents dozens of policies and thousands of implementation challenges. Wonks like me look at this list and we wonder about the details. We wonder so hard, our hair tingles.

But that’s not really the point, at least for now. The point is this represents perhaps the first time in US history that a Democrat has proposed a plan for addressing climate change that actually scales to the problem and has some chance of influencing the party’s agenda.

Pelosi testifies at a House hearing on climate change — way back in 2007. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

But there’s more. The resolution is equally ambitious on the subject of equity. It says that the Green New Deal “is a historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic security available to everyone participating in the transformation.”

To that end, it instructs the committee to develop a plan that would include a job guarantee, measures to combat income inequality and racial injustice, and maybe a universal basic income (UBI) for good measure.

Here’s the full list of equity provisions:

(i) provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure every person who wants one, a living wage job; (ii) take into account and be responsive to the historical and present-day experiences of low-income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities, rural and urban communities and the front-line communities most affected by climate change, pollution and other environmental harm; (iii) mitigate deeply entrenched racial, regional and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth (including, without limitation, ensuring that federal and other investment will be equitably distributed to historically impoverished, low income, deindustrialized or other marginalized communities); (iv) include additional measures such as basic income programs, universal health care programs and any others as the select committee may deem appropriate to promote economic security, labor market flexibility and entrepreneurism; and (v) deeply involve national and local labor unions to take a leadership role in the process of job training and worker deployment.

As iv demonstrates, this is about much more than carbon. It doesn’t separate out the climate problem from society’s other ills, as climate wonks have so often advocated. It sees environmental, economic, and social problems as intertwined, with a common set of solutions.

It’s a full-spectrum vision of a sustainable social democracy — a level of progressive ambition that most US citizens have likely never encountered.

As for how to pay for this, all the resolution says is that funding will primarily come from the federal government, “using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, public venture funds and such other vehicles or structures that the select committee deems appropriate, in order to ensure that interest and other investment returns generated from public investments made in connection with the Plan will be returned to the treasury, reduce taxpayer burden and allow for more investment.”

So that’s AOC’s proposal: a committee on steroids, charged with developing the most ambitious national climate plan in history, with equity at its heart.

Political media desperately want the story of this protest, and AOC’s participation in it, to be another chapter of “Dems in Disarray.” But the truth is close to the opposite: This was a case of the Democratic base and leadership working together for mutual benefit. It was one big alley-oop.

Here’s how it went down.

Sunrise and Justice Democrats were planning a protest to push Pelosi on climate. AOC and her staff, who are in close touch with the activist left, suggested that protesters need something concrete to rally around, some specific demands; that’s why they wrote this draft resolution.

So protesters go to Pelosi’s office — where the cameras will be — as a show of force, to demand that Dems stop taking fossil fuel money and start planning for a real climate solution. AOC then comes to visit and support the protest, thus bringing more attention and more cameras.

Together, they help thrust climate change into the news cycle and get the term “Green New Deal” published in most of the nation’s newspapers, a fairly adroit bit of agenda-setting in a hostile media environment.

As for Pelosi? It would not surprise me at all to find out that she knew it was coming — was maybe even in on it. At the very least, she welcomed it and gave it further publicity:

Deeply inspired by the young activists & advocates leading the way on confronting climate change. The climate crisis threatens the futures of communities nationwide, and I strongly support reinstating the select committee to address the crisis. https://t.co/rjVJYSJraf

— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) November 13, 2018

Of course, this falls far short of accepting the protesters’ demands. (There will be much more intra-Dem negotiation before anything like that happens.)

But Pelosi is signaling to Democrats on her right that she is being pressured from the left on climate change, that this is where the energy and enthusiasm is among the party’s most active young supporters, that Dems will get hounded endlessly if they don’t act on this. She and AOC are working together on this, not at odds.

Thank you, @NancyPelosi.

We have 10 years left to plan and implement a Green New Deal before cataclysmic climate disaster.

Reinstating the Select Committee is exactly what we need to do. https://t.co/Uy5BnrLZcR

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 13, 2018

Now the trick is to build more pressure. “Right after we left Pelosi’s office,” Evan Weber of Sunrise tells me, “we went to the offices of Raul Grijalva, Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal, and Ro Khanna to ask for their support for the resolution.”

So far, freshman Reps. Khanna, Rashida Tlaib, and Deb Haaland have endorsed the resolution. The movement is pushing for more and believes, according to Weber, “there is actually an opening to have this resolution included in the rules for the new Congress.”

This is how activism is supposed to work. The climate left sent the signal it needed to send — that it is mobilized and fully willing to be a pain in the ass — and Pelosi was happy to amplify it. The political world heard.

It is an inverted mirror image of the Tea Party: Rather than trying to bring out the worst in Republicans, activists are trying to bring out the best in Democrats.

I admit, I have trouble envisioning the resolution passing in anything like its current form — it’s such a quantum leap from where the party currently stands. But I have proven an abysmal political prognosticator in recent years and no longer presume to predict anything. Maybe it will pass!

Regardless, it strikes me as a significant development in US politics that there is finally a constituency for full-scale mobilization on climate change — for making decarbonization a top national priority. At long last, there is an actual climate left! Perhaps that label will no longer be applied to a bunch of hapless wonks and economists.

Just as the Republican House climate caucus is shrinking, the Democratic House climate caucus is growing. And as it grows, its ambitions increase. The Overton window is shifting before our eyes.

In the long term, Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats tells me, the movement will focus on “repeating the success we had in recruiting, training, and helping elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” The idea, he says, is to “build a caucus of like-minded, mission-driven legislators who will fight tirelessly for solutions that match the urgency and scale necessary to tackle the systemic crises in our country.”

From California to New York – @justicedems challenged the status quo by running candidates who truly represent the people – not corporate interests. Candidates who come from all walks of life and fight for voters, not donors. pic.twitter.com/nie8co7dpB

— Middle Seat Digital (@MiddleSeatCo) November 13, 2018

Suffice it to say, that won’t be easy. There are many among the 200-and-some House Democrats who are not going to look with delight on the prospect of supporting a huge, deficit-financed investment plan that includes a job guarantee and possibly a UBI. And that’s to say nothing of how Democratic senators might feel on the subject. Centrist and more conservative Democrats from purple states will not go gentle into this good night.

But now the 78 percent of Americans who say they support a clean energy transition have something to rally around. Now there is an actual left flank on climate change, a coalition of civic groups and elected officials who take the IPCC’s warning — that we have only 12 years left to take transformative action on climate change — seriously.

And like it or not, having a left flank will inevitably mean that Democrats in positions of power come under pressure and suffer criticism.

”Today’s Republican Party is an organized alliance between fossil fuel billionaires and white supremacists. They must be stopped, and we are not confused about this in the least,” says Weber. “Stopping the Republican Party does not mean unconditionally supporting everything that Democrats do; to the contrary, it means fighting for the party to lead vocally and unapologetically on issues that matter to the majority of Americans.”

Original Source -> Climate activists to Nancy Pelosi: go big or we won’t go home

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

0 notes

newssplashy · 6 years

Text

Opinion: The decline of the civil war re-enactor

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — The sun rose on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, 2018, to reveal a line of cars parked behind the Union Army’s tents.

It was an annoying historical anachronism for the brigade’s commander, Ted Brennan, 49, who was brushing his teeth with a horsehair toothbrush.

“We try to be as authentic as we can without getting dysentery,” Brennan said of his unit, several of whom were frying bacon and brewing coffee over a fire. They were camped in a sea of canvas tents that housed many of the 6,000 re-enactors at the event. Beyond the spectator stands and hot dog stalls, the Confederates were camped just out of sight.

The 155th Gettysburg anniversary re-enactment, which was held over the second weekend in July, was a chance for dedicated hobbyists to blast away at each other with antique rifles and rekindle old friendships over campfire-cooked meals. Spectators paid $40 to watch nearly a dozen mock skirmishes over the course of four days, and there was an old-timey ball Saturday night. An Abraham Lincoln impersonator was on hand to pose for photos.

It was also a snapshot of a hobby in decline. Gettysburg is among the biggest re-enactments of the year, and it still draws thousands to the sweltering Pennsylvania countryside in the middle of summer.

But that’s nothing compared with the re-enactments of the 1980s and 1990s, when tens of thousands would turn out. In 1998, at the 135th anniversary of Gettysburg, there were an estimated 30,000 re-enactors and 50,000 spectators.

Many of today’s re-enactors were born as the last Civil War veterans were dying, and grew up amid the celebrations and re-enactments of the centennial that lasted from 1961 to 1965. But the heyday of re-enacting was the ‘90s, during another moment of national fascination with the Civil War.

In 1990, Ken Burns’ “Civil War” documentary pulled in nearly 139 million viewers (huge ratings for a PBS program), and James McPherson’s 900-plus page academic book, “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” published in 1988, spent months on the best-seller lists.

Interest in the battlefield experiences of Civil War soldiers was fueled by cinematic hits, like the 1989 Oscar-winning film “Glory” and “Gettysburg,” a 1993 release that was more than four hours long. (Hundreds of re-enactors were cast as extras.)

But in the past decade or so, the crowds at large scale re-enactments have dwindled. Longtime hobbyists are aging out and retiring — soldiers in their 50s and 60s filled much of the camp at Gettysburg — and younger people aren’t marching onto mock battlefields in nearly the same numbers.

Enthusiasts cite a number of factors. Video games are to blame, some grouse, while others attribute diminishing interest to the rising expense of gear. A reproduction Civil War rifle alone can cost more than $1,000.

But many are more introspective about it. In the 1980s and ‘90s, “the whole tone of the country was different,” said Thomas Downes, 68, a retired machinist from Cleveland, who has been re-enacting for the Union side for 38 years.

“Up until the last five or 10 years, the social causes of the war did not come into what we do,” he said. “We were paying tribute to the fighting man.”

“It wasn’t ‘I’m racist and I want to glorify slavery,'” he said. “Nobody really thought a lot about the social reasons of why the South went to war. It was just these poor guys who were underfed, undermanned, underequipped, fighting valiantly to the last man, until they couldn’t stand anymore.”

Brad Keefer, a 61-year-old corporal in the Union re-enactor ranks and a professor of history at Kent State University, said: “Re-enactors look at the war as a four-year period between 1861 and 1865 in which you can cut out all the stuff leading up to the war and very much ignore everything that happened afterward.”

“We don’t get tangled up in all the messy bits, which are the causes and outcomes, which are complicated and uncomfortable,” he said.

It’s a vision of history placed in narrow context. The military details are meticulously researched and re-created down to the stitching of a uniform, but the broader social and political realities of the Civil War — the profound struggle over slavery and emancipation, racism and equality, citizenship and disenfranchisement — are largely confined to the margins.

Still, those issues can’t be ignored. After a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where demonstrators wore swastikas and carried Confederate flags, and where an anti-racist protester named Heather Heyer was killed, at least two smaller Civil War re-enactments were canceled. That the battle flag Confederate re-enactors carry is still used as a means of intimidation makes it hard to defend as a purely historical object, independent of its racist implications.

“You build a comfort zone for the hobby to function,” Keefer said. Pointing to the Confederate camp, he said: “And give them the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t at Charlottesville.”

There are many ways to be a Civil War re-enactor.

It’s not just the battlefield roles. At Gettysburg this year, there were also nurses and surgeons, nuns and chaplains, and 1860s-era government volunteers.

Steven Mark Diatz, a retired librarian from Alexandria, Virginia, had appointed himself the role of war correspondent for the New York Herald, one of the largest newspapers at the time and, in Diatz’s words, a “sensationalist rag.”

“I was always intrigued by how the war was brought home,” Diatz, 63, said. “Plus I can go anywhere on the battlefield as long as I stay out of the way of the firing.”

Diatz spends much of his free time portraying other historical characters, including soldiers in the American Revolution, the Spanish-American War and World War II. After Gettysburg, he planned to shave off his mustache and spend the next weekend dressed as a Royal Navy officer at a Jane Austen festival in Louisville, Kentucky.

Katie Mullins, who was portraying a volunteer for a long-extinct government organization, said that technically, she and her fellow volunteers on the U.S. Sanitary Commission shouldn’t be at the re-enactment at all. “It’s a bit of an anachronism that we’re here now during the course of the battle because the Sanitary Commission arrived afterward,” she said. “But nobody does a re-enactment of a battle’s aftermath.”

Despite the obsession with historical detail, there were plenty of re-enactors who brought air mattresses, propane burners, flashlights and jugs of Gatorade. Some camped out with entire families in tow.

There are many hard-core re-enactors — the kind of people who want to know what it felt like to march 25 miles in disintegrating shoes, sleep in ditches and subsist on hardtack and rancid salt pork — who eschew Gettysburg as a mainstream event. But at least one Union unit spent several days marching along highway shoulders to get to this year’s re-enactment, retracing the movements of the Army of the Potomac.

Another unit traveled from Germany, and hundreds of cavalry re-enactors showed up with their horses.

One cavalryman, Nathaniel Williams Sr., said he grew up riding in southern Virginia but didn’t learn that his ancestors served in the 2nd U.S. Colored Cavalry, a Union regiment of free blacks and liberated slaves, until later in life.

“I had no idea we were in the Civil War,” said Williams, his horse grazing in a field behind his tent. “It was never taught to me. It opened up my eyes to a lot of things.”

Williams first organized a re-enacting group about 20 years ago, recruiting relatives, friends and members of his church. This year, about two dozen people in his unit made the trip. They were the only black unit there.

Black re-enactors form a small faction within the overall hobby. But groups who portray U.S. Colored Troops — the designation the Army gave to ranks of all-black regiments — tend to re-enact battles where black troops played key roles in the fighting, including the Battle of Fort Wagner in South Carolina, depicted in “Glory.”

Army commanders initially made black regiments perform menial labor and didn’t regularly order them into combat until after Gettysburg.

“Even though we didn’t fight here, we make it a family event,” said Williams, sitting alongside his wife, Angela, who was wearing period dress. “We’ve got three days, we can spend time together and have fun.”

The actual battle of Gettysburg was some of the most savage fighting in the Civil War, but no one wants to die early in a re-enactment. If you catch an imaginary bullet in the beginning of a skirmish, you miss out on most of the action. (For the cavalry, dying in mock battle is even rarer because it means falling out of the saddle.)

But casualties inevitably mount. Sometimes, there’s just “no way around it,” Keefer said, not long after going down under intense fire from the Confederate lines.

“We were getting killed there,” he said. “There were just too many Rebs shooting.”

Once down, some of the wounded took the opportunity to pull out their smartphones and take photos and videos. A crew of bucket-carrying women made their way around the battlefield, topping off the canteens of both the living and the dead.

Re-enactors shoot gunpowder, not bullets, but serious accidents do happen from time to time. Usually it’s heatstroke and heart troubles that pose the greatest threat, a problem that has grown as the average participant has aged. A Friday evening skirmish at this year’s event was interrupted when an infantryman collapsed in the sun. Modern medics carted him off the field.

The fighting was over when the buglers sounded “Taps.” The soldiers placed their caps over their hearts, shook hands and congratulated each other on a good fight.

Union and Confederate re-enactors alike turned out to a ball Saturday night, as did women in hoop skirts, bonnets and period jewelry. Music was provided by the 2nd South Carolina String Band, which played several hours worth of popular mid-1800s ballads and waltzes with a decidedly pro-Southern slant, ignoring requests for “Yankee Doodle” in favor of “Dixie.” (The band’s website boasts that “all five of their recordings have been listed in the Top 30 selections on Amazon.com’s Civil War Music page for the past 5 years running.”)

Back in the army camps, re-enactors pulled out bottles of whiskey and moonshine, traded stories and rehashed historical debates.

“We’ll talk about McClellan moving too slowly on the peninsula and then we’ll talk about Joe getting divorced,” said Frank Beachem, a 59-year-old from Manassas, Virginia, and onetime mall Santa who works in government procurement.

At one camp, a seasoned re-enactor tested a new recruit’s recipe for hardtack, the tooth-cracking bread that formed the backbone of a soldier’s field rations. “If it’s edible, it’s not real hardtack,” he said. As he bit into a piece — barely edible, passably accurate — the sound of a banjo and fiddle wafted over.

Historical flourishes and stacked rifles aside, the camp at a Civil War re-enactment resembles a Boy Scout jamboree. The slice of rustic outdoor life is one of the hobby’s big draws.

“I tell people it’s a chance to have a guys’ weekend out camping, just doing it a little more old school than people are used to,” said Christopher Wesp, 34, a relatively recent recruit and former Marine who served three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“From my first event, the camaraderie that I felt and started building was very close and comparable to what it was like being in the service,” he said. “That’s the thing I missed most about being in the Marine Corps.”

Politically, Civil War re-enactors tend to be conservative, perhaps a reflection of the demographics of a hobby that skews heavily white and middle-aged. But it’s not a monolith. One Union infantryman, a 20-year-old college student, described himself as a Marxist and card-carrying member of the International Workers of the World.

Most re-enactors have strong preferences, but few stick exclusively to one side, instead switching into Confederate or Union garb if the opposing ranks are too thin.

Still, some Union re-enactors said they chose to wear blue at least in part because of their political convictions or because they wouldn’t fight against the U.S. flag. The Confederates were more likely to say family history had a role in how they picked their side.

“We portray Confederates because they were the underdogs and they had all the odds stacked against them,” said Bill Adams, known as “Pork Pie,” an engineer from southern Michigan who has been playing a Confederate soldier for the past 35 years. “The politics that caused the war, we don’t even care about.”

Some Confederate re-enactors, including Kenny Glass, 46, an emergency medical technician from Selma, Alabama, said that slavery had little to do with Southern secession, an assertion that is at odds with historical scholarship.

“I’ve been called a racist, a bigot, everything you could think of in the world when people find out I do this,” Glass said. “I tell them they need to learn their history. It wasn’t fought over slavery. It was fought over Southern rights, that’s just the way I see it.”

Don King, a Confederate re-enactor who grew up in North Carolina and now lives near Sykesville, Maryland, disagreed. The South fought the war because of slavery, he said, but “you can’t fight a battle with only one side.”

“Think of what a ‘Star Wars’ movie would be without the Empire,” he said. “Just because you’re acting on one side doesn’t mean you embrace their historical beliefs.”

Part of the problem is that the historical beliefs have modern day implications. Scrutiny of Civil War re-enacting from outside — as well as introspection and concern about its future on the inside — reached a fever pitch after the violence last year in Charlottesville, Virginia. But it built along with protests in many cities that demanded the removal of Confederate statues and monuments from state grounds, spurred by the murder of nine black worshippers in South Charleston, South Carolina, by white supremacist Dylann Roof.

Recently, threats against re-enactors have disrupted several events. In October, police in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia discovered a suspicious device — possibly a pipe bomb — amid the concession stands at the annual Cedar Creek re-enactment. A month later, a threat was made against participants in a parade that commemorates Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Those incidents cast a shadow over Gettysburg this year. Word trickled out that Cedar Creek had been canceled entirely, and while the reason was not stated, many thought it was obvious.

“Who would mess with Civil War re-enactors?” said Downes, the retired machinist from Cleveland. “We’re just a bunch of nut cases running around playing cowboys and Indians.”

After a skirmish Saturday afternoon, Downes was in a melancholic mood. He said that problems with the heat were forcing him to consider retirement.

Lighting his pipe in the shade of the general’s tent, he reminisced on nearly four decades of re-enacting, saying it provided an outlet and escape. “This is so fulfilling,” he said. “It carries over.”

“Historically, I’m way too old to be doing anything like this,” he said. “A lot of the people I re-enacted with have either crossed over the river are just too old.”

His wife tagged along for years, portraying a camp washerwoman, but she finally caught what Downes called “a severe case of common sense” about a decade ago. “I’ve got friends whose knees are gone, who’ve got bad backs. You just keep coming out for the friendships,” he said.

Like other re-enacting units, his group finds itself back in Gettysburg and other battlefield towns with some regularity. They occasionally set up camp on National Park Service land to serve as a living history exhibit, and they also meet up during the winter to practice drills.

Afterward, the troops may head to a local bar for a cold beer, and they’ve learned to leave their costumes on. Without their Union insignia, “no women are coming up and asking to take their picture with us,” Keefer said with a wry smile.

“Without these uniforms,” he said, “we’re just a bunch of middle-aged schlubs.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

source http://www.newssplashy.com/2018/07/opinion-decline-of-civil-war-re-enactor_30.html

#News

0 notes