SALASPILS CAMP MEMORIAL, LATVIA

SALASPILS CAMP MEMORIAL

MEMORIAL TO THE VICTIMS OF A CONCENTRATION CAMP IN SALASPILS
IN THE RIGA AREA, LATVIA

Photographed in 1984 in the USSR

"HERE BE GIANTS"

BARBAROSSA: Nazi Germany Attacks the USSR

OPERATION BARBAROSSA


© Gwendolyn Stewart 2009; All Rights Reserved

THE BREST FORTRESS MEMORIAL

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union at Brest, in what is now Belarus. The Nazis were surprised by the resistance, memorialized by the Brest Fortress monument pictured above.

THE SILK ROAD IV: BUKHARA

TIM ABDULLAH KHAN 

BUKHARA (UZBEKISTAN), USSR 1984 

The man wears a helmet, the woman and the child (in the sidecar) take their chances. Or perhaps there was a law covering the driver of a motorcycle, and only the driver. 

Bukhara, as we have seen, is an ancient Silk Road capital. The Tim Abdullah Khan (above) was a silk bazaar, dating back to 1577.  There is a vivid description of its construction and role here. The practical result of this domed construction, for the visitor, is a drop of ten degrees in the summer heat when you enter  into this covered marketplace. 

BORIS YELTSIN ON SAKHALIN

UP CLOSE & PERSONAL

BORIS YELTSIN

IN THE CROWD

OKHA, SAKHALIN, 1990

To build on the themes of two earlier postings, the new Russian leader letting the people surge up close in Moscow, and touring the far eastern island of Sakhalin: Find Boris Yeltsin by that trademark thatch of white hair. And read more about it in RUSSIA REDUX.

OVER SAKHALIN

FLYING OVER SAKHALIN

AIR SHOW DUO

Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk (Russia), USSR, 1990

Continuing east from Moscow -- via Baikal – we come all the way out to the island of Sakhalin, so far east in Russia that it is just north of Japan. 

For tales of Boris Yeltsin's journey to Sakhalin (an eyewitness account), and a little of Anton Chekhov's (not an eyewitness account; Chekhov wrote the book on that himself, a century or so ago); for stories of oil and gas and timber and salmon, and KAL 007 and the Kurils, have a look at Russia Redux. 

ABOVE LAKE BAIKAL

ABOVE LAKE BAIKAL

RETURN VISIT, 1990

While we are in the area, a photograph taken a half-dozen years later that gives some idea of Siberian country living.

This time I had come to Baikal and Irkutsk to cover the meeting between U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. I stayed to see a bit more of the area around the lake, including the infamous Baikalsk paper plant, now once again in the news.

INTERLUDE ON LAKE BAIKAL

LATE AFTERNOON

ON LAKE BAIKAL

TWO WOMEN & THEIR KNITTING

Listvyanka (Russia), USSR, 1984

Lake Baikal is famous as the "Gem of Siberia." I had been so keen to see it that I flew straight from Moscow to Irkutsk, the nearest big city, on my first trip to the USSR.

NASA has posted two striking images of Baikal from space, iced over, here.

More to come in RUSSIA REDUX

THE DAY OF RUSSIA

THE DAY OF RUSSIA 

MOSCOW, JUNE 12, 1991 

On June 12, 1990, Russia in the guise of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, and under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, declared sovereignty -- while still part of the USSR. One year later, on June 12, 1991, Russia held its first election for president, and Yeltsin won. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union was no more. 

June 12 was later designated Russia's National Day, the "Day of Russia." 

To show that he was closer to the people than his rival, Mikhail Gorbachev, the head of the USSR, Yeltsin allowed people to literally come up close and personal. In the photograph above Yeltsin is returning from his polling place to the car (for a photograph of Yeltsin holding his putting-the-ballot-in-the-ballot-box pose, look here under June 12, 2006). Some of the fervor he inspired, and the scrambling to get near him, can be sensed. Boris Yeltsin has the car door in his hands; his chief bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, has his back. And the crowd is pushing, pushing. 

Subjecting himself to a popular election won Yeltsin a meeting with U.S. President George Bush in the U.S. nine days later, and then, on July 30, a courtesy call by President Bush on President Yeltsin in his new Kremlin office (a photograph of the meeting can be found here). 

Today, June 12, 2009, George Bush turned eighty-five and went sky-diving in Kennebunkport, Maine. 

A SUMMER DAY ON THE RIVER (NOVOSIBIRSK)

A SUMMER DAY ON THE RIVER

THE RIVER OB' 

NOVOSIBIRSK (RUSSIA), USSR 1984 

On a Sunday two-thirds of the way between Mother's Day and the Summer Solstice, a treat from a boat on the River Ob'.  We have taken off from the city of Novosibirsk, the largest in Siberia, and a major node on the Trans-Siberian Express.  

THE SILK ROAD II: BUKHARA

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY

ON FARAWAY STREETS

BASHFUL IN BUKHARA

BUKHARA (UZBEKISTAN) USSR 1984

You have been introduced to one of the monuments of the Silk Road city of Bukhara; now meet a few of its people.

THE SILK ROAD I: BUKHARA

NADIR DIVAN BEG MADRASA 

Today, something from the world of Islam – something beautiful, and something a bit unusual. Shown above is a close-up of the pishtaq (a "portal projecting from the facade of a building") of the Nadir Divan Beg Madrasa in Bukhara, Uzbekistan.  

Bukhara is a Silk Road city, Persian-influenced, over two millennia old.   The UNESCO World Heritage Committee calls it "the most complete example of a medieval city in Central Asia." It was once "the largest center for Muslim theology in the Near East";  a madrasa (madrasah, medresseh) is a school, a school for the study of Islamic religion and thought. 

The Nadir Divan Beg Madrasa, built in 1622, was, the story goes, originally meant to be a caravanserai. This is supposed to somewhat soften the violation of the Islamic prohibition against the depiction of living creatures:  better on an inn for trading caravans than on a religious institution. 

But then, phoenixes (above) are only mythical, no?  And the human (man?) in the sun? As to the two white deer (one shown above), well, perhaps they may be called "stylized."

When I visited Bukhara in 1984 and photographed the madrasa, Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union. Uzbekistan has been independent since the end of 1991. 

OTHER WEDDINGS I

AT LENIN'S FEET

OTHER WEDDINGS I  

BACK IN THE USSR  

As June is almost here, and with it the wedding season in the USA, two weddings from other countries, other cultures: In today's photograph a newly married couple in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk comes in 1984 to be photographed at the foot of the Lenin statue in the heart of town.

A RAINY DAY IN THE PROVINCES

A RAINY DAY IN THE PROVINCES

ON THE EVE OF PERESTROIKA

LENIN BILLBOARD & CAR

ROSTOV-ON-THE-DON (RUSSIA), USSR

Thinking Again About Communism, III

The USSR on the Eve of Perestroika: "To Us the Most Precious Is the Preservation of Peace" -- V.I. Lenin," the slogan on the billboard says. The year is 1984.

Lenin had died in 1924. (More in HERE BE GIANTS)

THE FALL OF COMMUNISM II

SHIFT CHANGE 

Katowice Coal Mine, Poland, 1981 

THE FALL OF COMMUNISM II

Speaking of the fall (or not) of communism ("All Rise," May 21, 2009), we are in the primetime of the twentieth anniversaries of the fall of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe.

The year 1989 saw the second "Springtime of Nations." In astonishment, and uncertainty, the outside world, and even the political actors within the various members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, watched as events unfolded and limits were pushed.

Now, twenty years later, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, serves as a stand-in for all the regime changes that year. And the violent climax of the downfall of all the Soviet-bloc regimes in Eastern Europe came on Christmas Day, in Romania, when the just-deposed former leader Nicolae Ceausescu -- and his wife -- were executed by firing squad.

But the Polish story should not be overlooked.  Timothy Garton-Ash believes "to this day that the Round Table - that is to say, the negotiated revolution - was a particularly Polish discovery, and is in a way Poland’s gift from 1989 to the world."

The backstory includes the founding of the Solidarity trade union in Poland in August 1980, and its rise and rise until it was crushed in December 1981. When I took photographs all over Poland in the summer of 1981 (including the coal miners in Katowice, above), it was obvious how entrenched Solidarity was in the workplaces, and in society more generally.  At its height, there were said to be ten million members, out of a population of thirty-some million.  

That summer, and into the fall, there was nervous speculation as to whether the Soviet Union would invade; it was the era of Leonid Brezhnev and the Brezhnev Doctrine ('what we have, we hold'). But in the end, on December 13, 1981, Poland's own leaders imposed martial law.  Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders were thrown in jail.  

Solidarity came back to life again after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow and seemed to embrace the possibilities of reform in other communist countries besides his own.  Still, as Garton-Ash testifies, "You have to remember that nobody knew what would happen next and nobody knew what the Soviet Union would accept." 

ALL RISE: OBAMA & THE FALL OF COMMUNISM

ALL RISE 

The 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party 

OBAMA & THE FALL OF COMMUNISM
THE FALL? WAS WHEN EXACTLY? 

Today, in Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama made a rather strange statement for someone who is supposed to be so bright, and who is in charge of the national security apparatus of the U.S. 

Here is the wind-up: "Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world." 

Okay. Then: Enemy soldiers… strong alliances …  

Then, "It's the reason why we've been able to overpower the iron fist of fascism and outlast the iron curtain of communism, and enlist free nations and free peoples everywhere in the common cause and common effort of liberty." 

"…outlast the iron curtain of communism.…" 

Oh, yes? The People's Republic of China, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, has fallen? (and the regimes in Cuba, and North Korea, and Vietnam…?) 

Twenty-five years ago, President Ronald Reagan came back from his first trip to what he had been pleased to call "Red China" and spoke of the "so-called Communist China." This in 1984. 

In the fall of 2007, at the time of the most recent Chinese Communist Party Congress, I showed an American in Beijing a copy of the photograph above, taken at the previous Congress, the 16th (November 2002). He looked at the giant hammer and sickle and said, Oh, Russia. 

Whatever one may think of what has happened since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communists have not ruled there since December 1991, while in China they go on and on.  So far.

RED STARS

RED STARS

Twenty years ago today the Communist giants met, in Beijing, for the first time in three decades. Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made the trip to China for talks with Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader, and Zhao Ziyang, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

The leaders met in the Great Hall of the People. In the ceiling of its vast auditorium is the red star of communism (above, right). The Soviets were the seniors in revolution, the Bolsheviks having taken power in Russia in 1917; the People's Republic of China was not founded until 1949. As can been seen in the sample of a Soviet red star (left), the USSR placed special additional emphasis on its contribution to the victory over the Fascists/Nazis.

Gorbachev was himself a star when he came to Beijing -- to the outside world, certainly, for the reforms he had undertaken back in the USSR -- perestroika and glasnost'. He also had admirers among the Chinese, including some of those demonstrating in Tiananmen Square, the heart of Beijing, when he arrived.

The story of the Sino-Soviet rapprochement brought the international media, and the Tiananmen demonstrations provided a dramatic story just waiting to be broadcast. The dénouement was the crackdown of June 3-4, 1989.

Zhao Ziyang lost his post, and lived out his life under house arrest. His memoirs are just now being published.

Mikhail Gorbachev went back to Moscow to continue his attempts to reform the USSR. The USSR dissolved into its constituent parts ("Republics") at the end of 1991.

Jiang Zemin was brought from Shanghai to be the new General Secretary, and Deng Xiaoping remained the power behind the throne unto death. The People's Republic of China  is due to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary on October 1, 2009.

Arguments raged about which path to reform was superior, the Soviet or the Chinese. Which was the brighter "Red Star," Gorbachev or Deng?

STALINGRAD TANK & BOY

STALINGRAD TANK & BOY

May 9 is Victory Day in Russia, the equivalent of V-E Day for the U.S. and Europe, where it is celebrated on May 9 (different time zones).

Pictured above, a Soviet boy playing on one of the tanks in one of the memorials to the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the turning points of "The Great Patriotic War," or World War II. By this boy's time the city had lost the "Stalin" in its name, and as "Volgograd" now honored the river Volga and not the former Leader of the USSR.

It was 1984, and I was wandering around the Soviet Union for seven weeks by myself, exploring and taking photographs. By the time I arrived in Volgograd, I was quite cut off from the outside world.

So it was left to an angry woman in this city in which, as the Soviets saw it, they helped save the world from the Nazis, to inform me that President Ronald Reagan had threatened to bomb the USSR.

It was the summer of the Los Angeles Olympics, and the Soviets were staging a tit-for-tat retaliatory boycott of those Olympics. The U.S. had devastated them by boycotting their 1980 Moscow Olympics after they had invaded Afghanistan.

The Chinese in more recent years could not have wanted their Olympics more than the Soviets wanted theirs then, or Vladimir Putin wants the Winter Olympics in Sochi now.

The Cold War had newly heated up. Into this time of tension, Ronald Reagan let fall his "joke," in the warm-up to one of his Saturday radio addresses. He declared "Russia" an outlaw nation and announced that the bombs would fly in five minutes.

"MOTHER RUSSIA" IS IN DANGER

"MOTHER RUSSIA"

Is

In Danger

"Mother Russia," the hugely tall monument to the Battle of Stalingrad officially known as The Motherland Calls!, is in danger. The statue sits on top of the hill called Mamayev Kurgan in the Russian city now known as Volgograd. When it was built, four decades ago, it was the tallest in the world; now it is sinking, and, possibly, in danger of toppling.

The size of the monument is breathtaking. This representation of what after all is meant to be human leaves actual human beings creatures of a totally different scale.

The scale of the killing in the killing fields of the hill "Mamayev Kurgan," and in Stalingrad as a whole, is likewise hard to grasp. It is estimated that two million people perished in the battle.