Moscow, 1937-1938

We arrived in Moscow on December 24 (1937). My daughter Irina met our train. We were happy to see one another, we laughed together; a taxi took us to Lavrushinsky Lane. In the elevator I saw a hand-written announcement which shocked me: "It is forbidden to flush books down the toilet. Persons breaking this rule shall be tracked down and punished."     

Hemingway

In March 1937 I was living in what used to be Madrid's Palace Hotel, now a hospital. The wounded cried out, there was a smell of carbolic acid everywhere. The building was unheated. There was little food, and as in Moscow in 1920 I often fell asleep dreaming of a piece of meat.     

A Source of Inspiration and Joy

Last month I happened to be in a sanatorium in the Moscow suburbs. There I was in daily contact with people in various professions and fields of endeavor: workers and collective farmers, Party functionaries, scientists and technicians. Every evening movies were shown. For the most part these were recent releases from various studios in our own country. And not infrequently after a showing dozens of eyes would be trained on me, the film expert, and what I saw in the faces around me was incredulousness, doleful surprise and outright reproach. The films did not live up to the viewers' expectations, they did not create the mood which my new friends had expected.     

In Life and Letters

When does one stop calling a writer "young"? That is hard to know. Leo Tolstoy wrote Childhood [Detstvo] when he was twenty-three; but as I understand it, he was never ranked among "the young," as we now use the phrase. However, Vasilii Aksenov or Andrei Voznesensky, despite the fact that they are thirty-seven, are still "young." The present author was regarded as "young" until he was forty-five, and then graduated to the "middle generation." How does one leap into the "senior" class? What does this take? To begin to write memoirs? To do a "History of My Contemporary" or "Past and Thoughts"? (These, incidentally, were begun when Herzen was forty.) Well, and what if one does not have the guts? I can answer exactly. I know. One has to begin to write recollections of one's encounters with famous people. This testifies to solidity. If, in addition, one begins to cite in these reminiscences passages from correspondence with the reader (not selected passages, for God's sake!), then one becomes even more substantial in the eyes of the reader and may bravely consider oneself the "older generation."     

Meyerhold and the Theater

When I Was a boy I saw V. E. Meyerhold a number of times at the Moscow Art Theater. I remember him as a crazy old man playing Ivan the Terrible and as an emotional, indignant youth in The Sea Gull.     

The Family Law Act, 1975: One Consumer's Viewpoint

This is a paper about some of my experiences as a consumer of the Family Law Act, 1975. I decided to write about these experiences because few other consumers have done so. The literature in this area is dominated by the experts — the lawyers, the court counsellors, the social scientists. There is no formal provision for consumers' opinion to be considered. My personal experiences highlighted how different it was to be on the receiving end as a consumer in contrast to my academic understanding of the Family Law Act as a university educator. Unless consumers begin to voice their opinions loudly and clearly, we are not going to see further reforms to this legislation, and indeed the high expectations of the people who created the Family Law Act will not be realized. I believe my professional background, personal experiences and the time lapse since my case, afford me the opportunity to evaluate the effects of the Family Court upon me. In attempting to take a dispassionate view of this process, I hope others will take heart and write about their experiences too.     

"Hate Has Not Come Easily to Me"

… I read the Moscow papers carefully, but I cannot pretend I understood everything. I remembered how Bonnet and Chamberlain used to dream that Hitler would march on the Ukraine; the Soviet-Nazi Pact had been dictated by necessity. The drble de guerre [phoney war] and the persecution of (French) communists proved that Daladier had no real intention of fighting Hitler. Nonetheless Molotov's phrase about "the nearsighted anti-fascists" cut deep. That was the winter when I first needed a pair of glasses; but I wasn't ready to consider myself "nearsighted": my memories of the Spanish War were still fresh; fascism remained for me the main enemy. I was profoundly shaken by Stalin's telegram to Ribbentrop which spoke of a friendship cemented by blood that had been shed. I must have reread that telegram a dozen times, and although I believed in Stalin's genius as a statesman I was boiling. This was blasphemy1 How was it possible to equate the blood of Red Army soldiers with the blood of Nazis? And how to forget the rivers of blood drawn by the fascists in Spain, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in Germany itself?     

The Writer and the Reader

Shortly after my return to Moscow that time, the paper gave me a ticket to a meeting of Stakhanovite shock workers. I arrived an hour ahead of time, but the Kremlin's big hall was already filled. People talked quietly among themselves, no one left his seat. This was wholly unlike the noisy meetings in the crowded smoke-filled halls of Paris. I asked my neighbors where Stakhanov himself was sitting and whether they could point out Krivonosov, Izotov, the Vinogradovs.     

First Textbooks on Modern History

The second half of 1997 saw the publication, at last, of textbooks on modern history for the basic school (Modern History. Part I: A Textbook for the Seventh Grade of the Basic School [Novaia istoriia. Chast' I: Uchebnik dlia 7 klassa osnovnoi shkoly], L. N. Zharova, I. A. Mishina, M. V. Ponomarev, V. A. Rogozhkin, A. A. Fedorenko [Moscow: Center for Humanities Education, 1997]; and Modern History, 1500-1800: A Textbook for the Seventh Grade of General Education Institutions [Novaia istoriia, 1500-1800: Uchebnik dlia 7 klassa obshcheobra-zovatel'nykh uchrezhdenii], A. Ia. Udovskaia, P. A. Baranov, L. M. Vaniushkina [Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1997]). Their lack had created a dead-end situation in me seventh and eighth grades. Since they came out in press runs of 50,000, they are not going to make it into all the schools. What is important, however, is that a beginning has been made. Let us hope that these will be followed by reprintings as well as the publication of new books.     

Pasternak

B. L. Pasternak would come over almost every evening. I met him during the summer of 1917, shortly after my return to Moscow. I remember he took me to his apartment (he was then living off Prechistensky Boulevard), My diary contains the following brief entry: "Pasternak. Poetry. Oddity. Staircase."     

Literature and the Arts

The author reviews The Revolutionary Romanticism of Shelley, a critical biography by I. Neupokoeva (Goslitizdat, Moscow, 1959, 470 pp.) which shows the poet as a child of his age and relates his creative output to his social as well as his esthetic views. Literaturnaya Gazeta, 1961, No. 3.     

Soviet and British Historians to Meet

This note reports on the papers to be delivered at a joint conference of Soviet and British historians in Moscow. ["Anglo-Soviet Conference of Historians in Moscow," Voprosy Istorii, 1960, No. 6.]     

The Pussy Riot Case

The performance put on by the feminist punk group Pussy Riot in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (CCS) in Moscow is rightly considered a major event in the international protest movement of 2012. The Pussy Riot case became a litmus test for liberalism and for the schisms in Russian society, raising a wave of irreconcilable criticism from the radically inclined pro-Putin majority, including politicians, the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, and journalists. A central theme in the criticism directed against Pussy Riot was anti-Western rhetoric. Asserting that the West supported Pussy Riot's actions, the critics portrayed the performance as an attack on the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church and on Russian statehood. In the ideological components of the anti-Western campaign against this punk group, a parallel emerges between the Pussy Riot case and the Beilis trial held a hundred years earlier in terms of social antagonism and the appraisal of liberal values. Whereas Beilis's acquittal on the eve of World War I marked a tendency toward the establishment of democracy in Russia at that time, the conviction in the Pussy Riot case was a triumph for antidemocratic and anti-Western values, showing that contemporary Russia has completed its transition to an authoritarian regime.     

BJ Spitler: geriatric care management pioneer

The late BJ Curry Spitler pioneered a new geriatric care management business model that combined care management with home health services and emphasized high levels of training and professionalism for all members of the caregiving team. After working with BJ to write a marketing plan emphasizing quality, I learned to appreciate what she did when my mother needed "assisted living at home" services from the firm. Thanks to BJ Curry Spitler and her vision of helping seniors age in place, more elders are able to remain independent in their own homes with dignity and safety, and peace of mind for their families.     

Too Much Work in the Boarding Schools!

An important new development in Soviet education is the nation-wide organization of a system of boarding schools for children. The following article by the Principal of Boarding School No. 15, Moscow, deals critically with a current pedagogical problem — over-loading children with classes and homework. "We Must Find A New Way — And Can," Izvestia, March 23, 1961.     

In This Issue

Norbert Wiener of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the leading U.S. scholar in cybernetics, attended the First Congress of the International Federation on Automatic Control and Regulation held in Moscow in the summer of 1960. He was invited to visit the editorial offices of the major Soviet philosophy journal for a discussion with its editors. The following is a stenographic report of this discussion. Professor Wiener's remarks are retranslated from the Russian. ("Norbert Wiener Visits the Editorial Offices of Our Journal," Voprosy Filosofii, 1960, No. 9.)     

Publisher's Announcement

Norbert Wiener of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the leading U.S. scholar in cybernetics, attended the First Congress of the International Federation on Automatic Control and Regulation held in Moscow in the summer of 1960. He was invited to visit the editorial offices of the major Soviet philosophy journal for a discussion with its editors. The following is a stenographic report of this discussion. Professor Wiener's remarks are retranslated from the Russian. ("Norbert Wiener Visits the EditorialOffices of Our Journal," Voprosy Filosofii, 1960, No. 9.)     

Using Psychotherapeutic Methods in Social Skills Training

One seeks in vain an entry on "parapsychology" in Soviet dictionaries and encyclopedias. It appears, as far as could be established, for the first time in the Filosofskaya entsiklopediya [Philosophic encyclopedia], edited by F. V. Konstantinov and issued by the publishing house Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya (1967, Vol. 4, pp. 212-213). The entry "Parapsikhologiya" was contributed by S. Gellershtein (Moscow). It is especially valuable because it cites the early Russian literature, including the works of the physiologist I. R. Tarkhanov (1905) and the many-sided V. M. Bekhterev (1908), who studied telepathy within the framework of his research on suggestion [vnushenie].     

Notes

An airliner lands at Vnukovo Airport. A few minutes later its passengers are already in Moscow. They have traveled to town by express coach on an electric monorail road. Such a road is already in the drawing-board stage. Its first line will connect Vnukovo Airport with the terminal of the Frunze Radius of the Moscow Subway. In the not too distant future similar noiseless high-speed coaches will transport passengers by monorail to suburban recreation centers around Moscow.     

Science and Technology

Following Academician Kolmogorov's initial statement over his signature, the rest of the article is a popularized version of a report prepared for a graduate seminar of the Mechanics and Mathematics Department of Moscow State University. The popularization was prepared by the editors of the magazine Tekhnika Molodyozhi (Technique for the Youth) in conjunction with Kolmogorov's colleague from the University's Laboratory of Probability and Statistical Methods, N. G. Rychkova. Tekhnika Molodyozhi, 1961, Nos. 10-11; slightly abridged.