Walls Apart and Within

As the 20th Anniversary of (most) of the Berlin Wall's destruction approaches, who remembers why it was even built? Was it for protection or imprisonment?

Ask your children (if you have any) and see how much they know.
You may be surprised (or not, hopefully).

But walls are part of life, too. There are cell and arterial walls and the infamous blood brain barrier. Each works in its own sure, yet mysterious way to keep us alive.

Cell physiology

There are also the "walls" of separation of powers and between church and state (and sometimes, it seems, these, in particular, have very little meaning or reality).

There is finally, the wall between Man and God.

Solzhenitsyn wrote about that, too, though less overtly than some, since he was after all is said about him "of the intelligentsia," albeit a prisoner of conscience, too.

In Prussian Nights, his droning epic poem (not one of his best), he touches briefly upon the subject in an obtuse reference to Chavarka (or Cārvāka), which, unknown to most was/is a sophisticated, mostly defunct movement or line of thought within Indian philosophy that assumed "various forms of philosophical skepticism and religious indifference."

Also referred to (by others) as lokayata, in brief, it was a materialistic and atheistic school of thought.

"In ancient India, there were broadly three schools of philosophical thought -- Vedanta, Sankhya and Lokayata. Vedanta is theistic & spiritual, Sankhya and Lokayata are atheistic & materialistic."

And supposedly, according to Indian sources (e.g., this irritating ad-infested one), "what little we know today about the latter two schools are mostly from derogatory and dismissive references to these in the Vedanta literature."

That itself is surely debatable as "defunct" is still defunct.

Newsweek, not my favorite publication, seems to be looking at The Berlin Wall, too, as posted yesterday ( on the web) in an upcoming issue noting:

"The collapse of the 3.7-meter-tall monster in Berlin on Nov. 9, 1989, did bring about—or, more accurately, complete—a momentous transformation of the Old Continent. For the past 2,000 years, Europe had been the source of the best and the worst in human history. It invented practically everything that matters: from Greek philosophy to Roman law, from the Renaissance to the fax machine, from Brunelleschi to Bauhaus. But this was also where the world's deadliest wars erupted, killing tens of millions. It was in Europe that the most murderous ideologies were invented: communism, fascism, and Nazism, complete with the Gulag, the Gestapo, and Auschwitz."

While elsewhere, in La La Land (Los Angeles, of course)the Irony Curtain is being constructed or re-constructed (depending on your view of irony, iron and/or curtains).

And walls.
So many and so high (often) are the walls.

Lord, help deliver us from our less desirable, less iron, and even less ironic walls . . .

Stalin's Belly Button

A story in the Los Angeles Times by Megan Stack today seems to be a late Halloween follow-up to a story covered in September both here and by reporter Miriam Elder at The Global Post here.

Well, seeing the Times photo of this Stalin impersonator riding up a subway tunnel escalator surely makes it seem that way, anyway.

Writes Ms. Stack:

"[T]he visceral attachment to the icons [such as Stalin] is [ ] the consequence of a country that never quite shook off the shadow of the Soviet system. The world may regard Russia as a place utterly distinct from the Soviet Union, but here in Russia, where government buildings are still festooned with hammers and sickles, there is an abiding sense of continuum.

"The same doctors, teachers, builders and steelworkers continue to live and work in the same country, and everything in our midst was built by the hands of people in the Soviet Union," said Russian author Mikhail Veller. "The state changes, but the country remains the same."

Where's the Rest of Me?

Documentaries, from the West, of course, abound on Stalin, the Diabolical:

But (once more) what about within Russia itself today?

As noted on this blog and elsewhere last week, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has indeed (publicly) lamented the revisionism taking place while decrying the deaths of millions of citizens killed "as a result of terror and false accusations."

Continues Ms. Stack:

"It was a striking departure from the general drift of the country, which takes a nuanced, if not positive, view of longtime Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. But Medvedev, who has often provided a rhetorical softening to the ruling elite's hard-line stances, is regarded as politically weaker than Putin, and so far his more liberal statements have done little to change the Russian status quo."

Vladimir Putin, of course, continues to play maestro supremo or chess master (or Tsar?) behind the scenes of Russia's re-emergence as Superpower.

So what will his next move be?

One must continue to wonder how he really felt (or feels) about Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance.

End Meanings?

Such polar opposites, their relationship began and ended (or begins and ends) with questions yet remaining.

Solzhenitsyn, the heroic (jailed) contrarian and, Putin, the strong-armed (jailer) nationalist; somehow, they really did grow over those few brief years and across generations (and even gulags) to respect and ultimately "embrace" each other (on the surface, at least).

Yes, Mr. Putin had the former Bolshaya Kommunistecheskaya Ulitsa (Big Communist Street) in Moscow named after his "friend" shortly after his death, but residents there may have torn down the sign again.

Is President Medvedev still in Putin's pocket (or merely the lint in his belly button)?

And does anyone in Russia even remember this man anymore?

Dialectical Grave Digging

Paul Sonne does a bit of Tomb Travel in today's Wall Street Journal providing us with some haunting views of the "vexed social topography of the past."

Nikita Khrushchev's tomb, in particular, provides a stark and odd visual aid for those of us interested in the subject of this blog.  As the story goes, back in 1962, Khrushchev strutted into a modern art show at one of Moscow's famous exhibition halls finding, according to his esteemed, occasionally shoe-banging opinion, the avant-garde art on display to be "like dog droppings."  A particularly offensive epithet (?!) was hurled at sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who responded with a few choice, but careful words then, but surely in substance more than a decade later (after the two men reportedly reached a truce). Neizvestny became the sculptor for Khrushchev's tombstone.

Dog Droppings?

Further, writes Sonne:

"The design represents the conflicted yin-and-yang of Khrushchev's character -- the bright, progressive reformer who denounced Josef Stalin and closed the Gulag, intertwined painfully with the dark, shoe-banging man who stuck to retrograde tactics and encouraged building the Berlin Wall. Visitors took to the candid monument, which became, so to speak, dog-doo de rigueur. The Soviet authorities closed Novodevichy Cemetery to the public in the 1970s soon after Khrushchev was interred there, only reopening it in 1987 during Perestroika."

The treasures of other famous and not-so-famous tombs across old Europe are briefly mentioned or exhumed (so to speak) as well, including the memorial at Paris's Père Lachaise to 147 combatants of the 1871 Paris Commune [who] died in firing-squad execution.

Cemetery tours, etc. across the world might just lead to deep (and possibly), sober reflection.
Perhaps even, this All Hallows Eve can be a time of redemption, as Catholic free-lance writer Page McKean Zyromski shares it:

"The same way people gather today at the site of a tragedy on its anniversary to talk to each other and to reporters, the first Christians gathered on the anniversary of a martyr’s death to remember it [them] the way they knew best: with the "breaking of the bread." They retold the stories to inspire each other at a time when faith meant persecution and more martyrdom. Not even death could break the unity in Jesus which Paul had named "the Body of Christ."

Meanwhile, in Modern Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev had a few words to share from his video blog (via ITAR-TASS) in regards to Remembrance Day:

“I am convinced that no development of the country, no successes and ambitions can be achieved at the expense of human grief and losses. Nothing can treasure more than human life.

"There is no justification to repressions.

Let’s only think that millions of people died because of terror and false accusations.

"Millions were deforced of their rights, even of the right for decent burial,
and for long years their names were deleted from history.

“It is even impossible to comprehend the scope of terror,
from which all peoples of the country suffered.

“For 20 pre-war years the whole strata and estates of our people were exterminated. Cossacks were nearly liquidated. “Kulak” peasants were dispossessed and bled white.
Intellectuals, workers and the military were subject to political repressions.

"Representatives of absolutely all religious confessions were persecuted.

I am convinced that remembrance of national tragedies is as sacred as commemoration of victories. It is extremely important for young people to have both historic knowledge and public spirit and be able to emotionally empathize one of the greatest tragedies in Russian history.

“We are paying much attention to the fight against falsification of our history. But we sometimes believe the talk is only about inadmissibility of revision of the results of the Great Patriotic War. But it is no less important to prevent under the pretext of historic justice exoneration of those who exterminated their own people.

"Russia has to accept its past as it was.

It is important to study the past, to overcome indifference and intention to forget its tragic sides.

Nobody but us can do that."
 

A memorial service will take place today in Lubyanka Square, Moscow in front of the former KGB building.

Remembrance Day was instituted in Russia in 1991 after the breakup (or "disintegration") of the Soviet Union (USSR).

According to the latest (Russian) data, in the 1920s-1950s, 52 million people were sentenced for political reasons, six million were exiled without any court sentence and one million [were] executed.

 

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
~Emily Dickinson

Yosef Begun Not Finished

In the days when the Helsinki Group of dissidents was formed in Russia, led by Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Ginzburg and Anatoly Sharansky, ostensibly to promote the Soviet Union's abiding by the Helsinki Accords (to which it was a signatory) a Jew named Yosef (or Josef) Begun stuck out like a sore thumb.

Yosef Begun

In early 1971, having resigned from the military research institute at which he'd worked on radar technology and hoping his "sensitive worker" classification would be forgotten, Begun had applied for an emigration visa for Israel, quickly receiving a thundering "nyet." He became a political pariah, barred from any work in his (previous) professions and decided to become a fulltime Hebrew teacher. This became not acceptable to the authorities.

"I began to receive regular warnings that I was in danger of being indicted as a 'social parasite,' as someone not working," he recalls. "I responded to each warning by telling them of my full-time employment as a Hebrew teacher. After a year and a half the police indeed arrested me and I was charged with social parasitism.

"I defiantly wore a kippah in the courtroom. Students came to my 'trial' to testify that they had paid me for lessons and so I was employed. Nothing mattered. I was sentenced to nearly two years' exile in Siberia in the Kolimar region, 10,000 kilometers from Moscow."

The journey took 63 days. It was Begun's first introduction to the infamous Gulag Archipelago. He was ordered to live in a remote mining village where he worked as an electrical technician in a factory. When he was finally released, he was prohibited from living or coming within 100 kilometers of Moscow. After all, he was now a released felon.

But he had a young son from his first wife living in Moscow, and he had adopted the son of his second wife. He would defy the ban and sneak into Moscow to visit them. He was stopped twice by the KGB while in Moscow and released with a warning. Under the Soviet version of a "three strikes" law, the third time he was caught they arrested him. While waiting for his trial in 1978 he went on a hunger strike.

The prison guards tried to force-feed him through a tube up his nose, but he resisted, and by the time he was dragged into a courtroom his hunger strike was 43 days old. Unable to stand, he passed out before he could give the speech he'd prepared. The judge cynically wrote in the protocols, "The accused refused to answer the questions he was asked." Begun was deported back to Siberia to serve a three-year sentence, shipped there in a cattle car with starving and violent common criminals.

He was eventually released, but it was still very much the pre-Gorbachev era and dissent was a risky undertaking. The 1980 Moscow Olympics were in the making and the regime wanted no protests or dissidents ruining its showcase festivities.

But Begun refused to be cowed and published articles in the Western media on the plight of Soviet Jews. In one famous article he denounced the "cultural genocide" of Russian Jews being perpetrated by the regime, a slogan that came to be the rallying cry of the movement to free Soviet Jewry.
 

Today Begun lives in Jerusalem, where he runs a publishing house that brings important Jewish books to readers in Russian translation. He is in the process of publishing his memoirs. He speaks with Jewish students and other groups in the U.S., Russia, Israel, and even here in Hungary, where a film about his life, "Through Struggle You Will Gain your Rights," was screened between Yom Kippur and Sukkot this fall.

The rest of Steven Plaut's article, "The Man The Gulag Couldn't Break" from The Jewish Press can be found online here.

Yosef Begun on youtube (in Russian).

The Gulag Messiah

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a brilliant novelist/dramatist weaving the facts of his own brutal prison camp experience into haunting tales that continue to stir the conscience of nations. Viktor Frankl elevated his own awful Holocaust experience into a "search for meaning." Victor Herman "came out of the ice" and into the hearts of "middle" Americans.

In what is being touted as autobiography, As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon shares his thoughts on his own life amidst the horror and inhumanity of North Korean gulag and beyond.

Known for many things by many people within his own native land and throughout the world - from charlatan, "brainwasher" and cult leader to name the less flattering - to religious leader/teacher, patriot (or partisan), futurist, humanitarian, peace activist, poet, environmentalist, fisherman, rugged individualist, and finally, Messiah, to name the most notorious, perhaps least palatable for many; this book expresses Sun Myung Moon's unabashed and unique view of his life as well as his vividly perceived role as the "True Parent" (with his wife, Hak Ja Han) of all.

Having recently re-immersed myself into the world of "gulag literature" and having just read a copy of the recently translated pre-release version, I commend the team of translators and editors for meeting the reportedly challenging deadline. Moreover, as a "unificationist" myself, I must express my deeper, continually growing admiration and appreciation to the man I've simply called "Father" for over 30 years.

There are many personal anecdotes about the life of Reverend Moon contained within the 347 pages of this small book, particularly early into the first few chapters. Some of them may catch even the most skeptical or cynical, quite off guard.

Above all, however, the underlying theme remains that of a man driven and undaunted; ever forward for the sake of a mission, his mission; "the liberation of God's heart" and/or (simultaneously) the liberation of everybody on earth as well as in "hell."

Reflecting upon the plight of the growing number of church members sent to conduct missionary work behind the "Iron Curtain" (circa 1973) he writes:

"Each time I heard that one of our members had died in jail, my entire body froze. I could not speak or eat. I couldn't even pray. I just sat motionless for awhile, unable to do anything. It was as if my body had turned to stone. If those people had never met me, or never heard what I taught, they never would have found themselves in a cold and lonely jail, and they never would have died the way they did. I asked myself, "Is my life worth so much that it can be exchanged for theirs? How am I going to take on the responsibility for the evangelization of the communist bloc that they were bearing in my place?" I could not speak. I fell into a sorrow that seemed to have no end, as if I had been thrown into deep water. I saw Marie Zivna before me in the form of a yellow butterfly that had escaped Czechoslovakia's prison [and] fluttered its wings as if to tell me to be strong and to stand up. By carrying on her missionary activities at the risk of her life, Marie truly had been transformed from being a caterpillar to being a beautiful butterfly."

 On the unification of Germany (and Korea) he writes (perhaps presciently):

"I have studied the unification of Germany for a long time. I have listened to the experiences of those who were involved with regard to how it was that unification could come without a single bullet being fired or a single drop of blood being spilled. In so doing, my hope has been to find a way that is appropriate for Korea. I have learned that the main reason Germany could be united peacefully was that East German leaders were made to understand that their lives would not be in danger following unification. If East German leaders had not believed this would be so, they would not have allowed unification to occur so easily."

Labor in Hungnam Prison

As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen (Korean: 평화를 사랑하는 세계인으로)is the autobiography of Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church. Published in 2009 in both Korean and English, by Gimm-Young Publishers of Seoul. The book was first released in South Korea on March 9, 2009 and debuted at #3 on the Business Bestseller's List (경제경영). It has ranked on various (Korean) bestseller lists since then and is ranked 15th on the general bestseller's list there as of October 14, 2009.

A Bestseller Again?

A wider release and (at least one) updated English language edition is foreseen according to church sources.
Over 43 different language translations of the book are also simultaneously being prepared.

Is the world ready (or does it care?) for a "fresh" view of a remarkable man yet engaged in a remarkable journey?

I, for one, certainly hope so.

"In the First Circle" Refined

English translator Harry T. Willetts' version of perhaps the greatest novel ever written by one of the great writers of the last century shall finally be available. The definitive text (i.e., "as the author envisioned it") of "In the First Circle," arrives on bookshelves in the West on October 13th.

According to Edward E. Ericson, Jr., authority on the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and professor emeritus of English at Calvin College:

"In the First Circle" is the first work by Solzhenitsyn to go to press in English since he died last year at age 89. A major writer's death fosters reflection on his overall achievement, so this is the perfect time to reconsider the novel now that it is finally available to us as the author intended. A literary classic is defined as a book still read a century after appearing. On that basis one might say that the book has already had a 40-year head start on fulfilling that definition, given the acclaim with which the bowdlerized text has been received since its appearance in the West in 1968.

An intriguing intimation of the prospects for this version comes from the Russian experience with the canonical text. In 2006 a Russian television network presented serializations of classic Russian novels by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn. Fifteen million viewers tuned in to each installment of "In the First Circle."

More from his Wall Street Journal article adapted from his foreword to "In the First Circle" (Harper Perennial) can be found here.

Amazon.com shows "In the First Circle: The First Uncensored Edition (Paperback)" now available. Be sure to get the new edition.

North Korean Gulags for Extortion

As previously reported here, there exists an extensive, on-going North Korean system of gulags both North of the 38th parallel as well as in the former Soviet Union/Russia.

Jong-Il and Putin in 2002

Now it turns out that, according to a report just released by the East-West Center, the system of prison camps in North Korea are also being utilized to extract penance (and capital) from those brave, enterprising and starving souls who have dared to try to survive amidst the squalor of a bankrupt, inhuman system.

“The portrait that emerges is of a Soviet-style gulag characterized by an arbitrary judicial system, an expansive conception of crime, and horrific abuses,” write Haggard and Noland, who is also Deputy Director of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.

One particularly striking finding, they write, “is that the conditions that are frequently seen as characteristic of the country’s infamous gulag of political penal-labor colonies –such as extreme deprivation and exposure to violence – in fact pertain across the penal system, from the penitentiaries designed to house felons to lower-level jails [used to punish] a widening array of other economic and social crimes that are associated with the process we describe as ‘marketization from below.’” 

Even among the refugees imprisoned for relatively brief periods at lower-level penal facilities, a substantial number reported witnessing such abuses as forced starvation, deprivation of medical care, deaths due to beating or torture, and public executions.

Based on surveys of North Korean refugees, you can read more about the report here.

Or better yet, order a copy of the 39 page report, here for only $3.00.

The EAST-WEST CENTER is an education and research organization established by the U.S. Congress in 1960 to strengthen relations and understanding among the peoples and nations of Asia, the Pacific, and the United States.