Re: Why doesn't everybody hate the former Soviet Union/Russia?


"Eugene Holman" <holman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:holman-0511052026360001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Having been accused in this august forum of being a Kremlin agent, I would
> like to take this opportunity to express and offer for critical discussion
> my take on the former Soviet Union/Russia. To simplify things, and to be
> consistent with SCB norms, in which alternate entities often engage in
> dialogue with themselves, I will use a Platonian, Uo Hu[i]-ian
> question-and-answer format to interview myself.
>
> A. When did you, Eugene Holman, first become aware of the existence of the
> USSR?
> B. On October 4, 1957, the televison show ("The Life of Riley") that I was
> watching as an 8th grader was interrupted to announce that the Soviet
> Union had launched the world's first earth satellite.
> A. Had you never heard of the USSR before?
> B. Of course. I vaguely remember the news stories about Stalin's death, as
> well as discussions among my relatives about whether Stalin was a good or
> bad man, comparted to Hitler. I hesitate to add that my father was a WW II
> veteran who was fully aware of the role that the USSR had played in the
> defeat of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, I was too young, eight years old,
> back in 1953 to be able to think systematically about Stalin's historical
> role.
> A. You grew up in New York during the late 1950s, Eugene, at a time when
> the city was full of refugees from Europe. How did this experience
> influence the development of your attitudes about Germany, the former
> adversary turned ally, and the USSR, the former ally turned adversary?
> B. Such a complex question! My grandfather was a Germanophile, and he
> taught me about Bach, Beethoven, Brecht, and other positive manifestations
> of German culture. It took a while before I learned, on my own, about the
> Holocaust, but that was in the late 1950s ­ there was popular song by folk
> singer Bill McAdoo, called "Go down you murderers, go down". It contained
> the lines: "They even set Hitler's generals free, who killed six million
> Jews. They're back with the West German army, and I call that murder,
> too." . Being accepted as a student at the élite Bronx High School of
> Science in 1958 brought me into contact with people such as Heikki
> Leesment, an Estonian who did his best to explain to me and any fellow
> classmates willing to listen what had happened in the Baltics. Heikki
> taught me my first words of Estonian and, although himself not
> particularly gifted at learning languages, helped and encouraged me to
> develop my gift. I will never forget the copy of *Vaba Eesti sõna* that he
> gave me to pore over.
> A. You digress, Eugene. What were your attitudes about Germany and the
> USSR?
> B. Well, having had a strong Germanophile grandfather, I followed his
> advice and chose, to the distress of my parents, who would have wanted me
> to study Latin or at least French, to study German as my first foreign
> language. I eventually emerged as the best student in our high school in
> German, also winning a city-wide German competition and being awarded the
> prize for excellence in German in a school where approximately half of my
> fellow students spoke German or Yiddish at home. On the other hand, after
> sputnik, a Russian club was established at our school, thank you Mr.
> Joseph Cotter. We learned Russian from a PBS program, the purpose of which
> was to teach scientific Russian. I will never forget the theme music: the
> prelude to Ravel's orchestration of Moussorgsky's 'Pictures at an
> Exhibition'. Our high school only began to teach Russian officially during
> my junior year, and, as a rule we were not allowed to study two foreign
> languages. My German teacher, Ms. Rosa Karlin, happened to be the Russian
> teacher as well. She recognized that I had more than a normal knack for
> languages, and allowed me to sit in on her 8-in-the-morning Russian
> classes. This, and my own curiosity about Russian as the language of the
> Soviet Union, at the time evidently an emerging scientific power, served
> as the basis for one of the riskiest decisions I ever made: at the tender
> age of 16 I decided to take the College Board Examination in Russian, a
> language that I had never studied officially. I finished with a schore of
> 650 or thereabouts, at that time among the top one percdnt in the country.
> Thus, when I was accepted at Cornell University as a major in German, I,
> quite exceptionally, had scores on the SAT language examinations that put
> me in the top one per cent for both Russian *and* German.
> A. You are still digressing. How did you feel about the countries that
> used these languages?
> B. That is a difficult question. As a person with mixed African-American,
> American Indian, and European background, I began to become cynical about
> the claims that certain peoples were making about being right, and others
> being wrong. Having been taught by Mr. E. Karpf, probably one of the
> greatest social studies teachers ever, to be critical abut such claims, I
> learned how to avoid confusing the German or Russian languages with
> whatever the German and Russian-speaking states had done. Knowledge of
> German made me aware of Central European patterns of thinking, while
> knowledge of Russian opened access to masses of information about the
> peoples of Eastern Europe, such as the Vepsians, Mordvins, and Bulgarians,
> that I would never have learned to understand to any degree without a
> knowledge of Russian. For many years I subscribed to *Novoye Vremya*, even
> if 'communist', a far better source of news about the world than *Time*,
> *Newsweek*, or *Der Spiegel*.
> A. So tell us, Eugene, what is your take on the Soviet Union?
> B. Briefly, I regard the Soviet Union as a failed social experiment. Its
> original purpose was to continue the revolutionary trend begun by the
> American in 1776 and by the French in 1789. The goals were too high and
> the leaders too ruthless for the experiment to succeed. In any case, I do
> not regard the earliest Soviets as Russian imperialists, nor do I regard
> the Soviet Union as, essentially, Russia in communist drag, even if its
> ultimate fate was to be something similar. I concede that the Soviet
> Union, a country that murdered ­ or democided ­ tens of millions of its
> citizens, was one of the most criminal countries ever to have existed.
> Nevertheless, it had one redeeming feature, that I consider to be of the
> utmost importance. Although a dictatorship, the Soviet Union was dedicated
> to providing its best minds with a real education. Having myself spent
> some time as a researcher in the USSR, I know what a person had to master
> in order to effectively use a Soviet library, some of them among the best
> in the world. The best thing that the Soviet Union did was allow people to
> develop intellectually, which included questioning the entire Soviet
> system, to such a degree that they were able to bring the system down in
> an elegant and controlled fashion. Many contributors to SCB hate Mikhail
> Gorbachev. I regard him as one of the greatest personalities of the 20th
> century: he realized that the Soviet system was going nowhere, and he
> presided over its peaceful demise. No colonial empire has ever
> desintegrated as stylishly as the former USSR did, and I have no pangs of
> conscience, even when thinking about the victims in Vilnius and Riga, when
> mentioning this.
>
> Regards,
> Eugene Holman

a little long-winded but interesting. so how did you end up in finland?


.

Relevant Pages

  • Why doesnt everybody hate the former Soviet Union/Russia?
    ... my take on the former Soviet Union/Russia. ... They're back with the West German army, and I call that murder, ... particularly gifted at learning languages, ... sputnik, a Russian club was established at our school, thank you Mr. ...
    (soc.culture.baltics)
  • Why not everybody hates the former Soviet Union/Russia
    ... my take on the former Soviet Union/Russia. ... They're back with the West German army, and I call that murder, ... particularly gifted at learning languages, ... sputnik, a Russian club was established at our school, thank you Mr. ...
    (soc.culture.baltics)
  • Re: The Baltics Should Emulate the UK
    ... > go to manage in many different languages. ... three or four languages, typically Russian, English, and Finnish, seldom ... German, French, or Swedish, in addition to Estonian. ...
    (soc.culture.baltics)
  • Re: OT - Unknown WW2 History... (Longish...but hopefully interesting)
    ... Not just the formation of local Nazi groups, but volunteers who joined ... joined the German Armed Forces between 1939 and 1945. ... faced under the brutal rule of the Soviet Empire. ... Russian general, captured when forced to remain in place by Stalin’s ...
    (rec.arts.mystery)
  • Re: [OT] aargh.. the big swirl of offtopicness sucks me in, too. help!
    ... brutally suppressing other languages and cultures in the process. ... administration using german terms and names for cities, ... I totally agree with you about suppression of culture. ... national identities i doubt that it was official soviet policy to ...
    (Debian-User)