Dear One –
It’s June, can you believe that?! How time flies. I hope you had a lovely Memorial Day weekend and that you are ready for summer.
Having experienced the Russian version of honoring those who served and gave that “last full measure” in World War II, I was struck by the contrasts between the way they take note and seem to think about all that ended sixty-five years ago – and how we commemorate World War II and honor those who sacrificed for our country.
I have actually been trying to write this for a few weeks, and I keep putting it off, still processing impressions and memories, I guess. Although I have thought a great deal about the Den’ Pobedy – Day of Victory in the former Soviet Union as opposed to our Memorial Day weekend, I have also been ruminating about similarities and differences on several levels.
The first comparison has to do with our two countries – or I mean the USA and the Commonwealth of Independent States (a name you can take with a grain of salt). The second evaluation involves the contrasts I have seen in the former Soviet Union itself from the first time I arrived there on December 27, 1993. I have been going back and forth to various parts of the former Soviet Union for varying lengths of time:
December 27, 1984 through January 21, 1984 (or so) –
Obninsk (city in the Kaluga Oblast – 230 miles southwest of Moscow),
Spassk Zagorye,
Zagorsk (now Sergeev Posad again), and
Moscow (all travel between cities and towns by bus supplied by Russian Peace Foundation)
June 5, 1984 through July 2, 1984
Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo – the Tsar’s “Village” where the summer palaces of Catherine the Great and other rulers of Imperial Russia are, outside of St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, formerly Peterburg),
St. Petersburg, then by train to
Moscow
July 2, 1984 through July 16, 1984
Kharkov, Ukraine (arrived there on overnight train from Moscow)
Kiev – just travel by car from Kharkov to Kiev’s Airport
April 8, 2005 – August 30, 2005
Alma-Ata and by overnight train to
Astana (then flew back to Alma-Ata, also called “Almaty”)
May, 2007
Moscow – volunteering in Bishop Vaxby’s office and
In the Moscow Seminary Office
April 10, 2010 through May 25, 2010
Moscow – the Methodist Building, working on two independent studies for my Doctorate of Ministry in Missional Evangelism until May 8, 2010 when I flew to
Vladivostok, arriving the morning of May 9, 2010
Now it’s hard to know where to start telling you about what has seemed to change and what has seemed to remain the same. I guess I first should tell you that I started learning Russian in the fall of 1968 when I was in high school. Then I majored in the Teaching Russian with an emphasis on Russian and East European Area Studies at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. My minor was French. I graduated from high school in 1970. (By the way, we’re planning our 40th reunion celebration for Homecoming Weekend – October 1-3, 2010 in our hometown of Barrington, Illinois, forty-five miles northwest of Chicago.)
I wanted to learn Russian after having studied French since eighth grade and Latin since freshman year in high school because of the trauma of the Cold War and a kid’s idea of trying to be of some help somehow. As a lot of us baby boomers were, after the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960’s, we were subjected to civil defense drills, the spectacle of Nike missile sites in the Chicago area, and people who built fallout shelters in their back yard.
Because of whatever I understood (not much) about World War II and the Korean war when I was nine years old, it didn’t make any sense to me why after all that violence, death and destruction the leaders of the nations couldn’t just find a way to talk to one another rather than terrifying little children with the image of all out nuclear war. So I had this idea that maybe if I learned Russian I could somehow help explain us to them and them to us . . . or something. I know . . . idealistic and pie-in-the-sky . . . and I never thought I was the only one doing that kind of thing . . . and just wanted to help somehow.
Seems like I’m way off track. But it also appears to me that we are even in more need of peace, love and understanding in so many ways.
The biggest difference between how the people of USA -- my parents’ and grandparents’ generations went through World War II compared to how the people of the Soviet Union experienced it was that mostly we just sent people, money, equipment, weapons, food, and whatever else “over there”, whereas for the Soviet citizens the war was THERE. Estimates are that twenty-seven million people were killed. In the European part of the Soviet Union over 20,000 cities, towns and villages were completely destroyed.
Now, of course it is important to note that before the war, Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact and after Poland fell to Nazi Germany, the two leaders split it in half. The story is that in June of 1941 when Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union it took most of the day to convince Stalin that it was true.
Anyway . . . the point is that there is really no comparison between what it is like to send millions of people to war, as horrible as that is, to what it is like for war to be waged on your territory.
And enough is way beyond enough.
We really have to work harder to stop the violence and keep it from happening. I know a lot of people are working on that on many levels, but there is always more to do.
Please don’t think that I am naïve enough to think it is easy. And sometimes it takes force or the threat of using force to protect people. But truly I don’t think we have tried hard enough not to use the weapons we have at our disposal these days.
And they are ever more heinous. Even the thought of using them should be unimaginable.
Another tangent. Please excuse me. I am going to try again tomorrow to more calmly tell you what I have been wanting to tell you.
Rest assured that God Who is Love and Peace, Justice, Righteousness, Mercy and Faithfulness has good plans for people of good will. And I believe we are privileged to be called on to help make peace, take care of orphans and widows, ensure domestic tranquility . . . and make it possible for every person and every family on earth to have decent homes, clean water, fresh food, job opportunities and all the blessings we take for granted. It’s a matter of sharing what we are given beyond what we need. It’s a question of the will to work for peace. It’s the idea that we can do it and find the people who believe that – don’t ask those who don’t believe in it to help.
With God all things are possible.
I hope you have a good rest of the week.
In Christ – Kathy
Peace is Possible
God will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.
Isaiah 2:4
Kathleen Ware Harris © 2012
kwharris777@gmail.com
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