The Reticulator

I’m still reading Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag”. One thing I like about her writing is the way she tells about marks the gulags left on the landscape. (Historical “marks on the landscape” is what a lot of my Spokesrider blog is about, too.) I don’t know if Putin would allow her to see all those things anymore, but she was able to visit a number of the sites. She tells how one can still see depressions that are left from the semi-dugout zemlyanka structures where prisoners lived in temporary camps at the building sites of roads and railways in Siberia. And she remarks on how all that’s left of a number of the camps are the “punishment isolators,” one of which was being used by an Armenian car mechanic at the time of writing.

Of course, the marks they’ve left on people are the more important thing. What is it like living with those of the older generation who once were prison guards and administrators?

And of course, what about the prisoners?

I actually met one of them, back in 1965. I looked him up just yesterday, and saw from a Wikipedia article that he died just last November. This was John Noble, who had written a couple of books about his experiences. He was born in Detroit, and was living outside Dresden when the Soviet army came. He was a prisoner until sometime after Stalin’s death. I think his books are still in our house somewhere. I saved one of them when my daughter thought she would clean out some of our stuff a few years ago. They had made quite an impression on me at the time. One of them was titled, “I was a slave in Russia.” When Anne Applebaum wrote about the establishing of the prison camps at Vorkuta, I recognized that name as one where John Noble had been. Now, thanks to the maps in her book, I have a better idea where it is.

In 1965 I was at a summer camp for highschoolers that was put on by the Minnesota Farm Bureau. Our principal said the Farm Bureau wanted to pay for two students from our school to attend, and asked if I’d like to be one of them. The Farm Bureau was a conservative, Republican type of organization, and that’s the type of program that was put on. I do remember meeting some of my first proto-campus-radicals there, who would soon be heading off to college, too, and who weren’t buying what was said. I liked it pretty well, though. I had read John Noble’s books long before that, and was glad to get a chance to meet him. I was surprised that he was such a small man. Afterwards I asked him whatever happened to the radio show that he was going to be doing, and he gave some answer that didn’t explain much. As far as I know, the radio program never came off.

But even before I ever heard of John Noble, I had heard about the midnight knock on the door. I am told kids of my generation grew up fearing the nuclear bomb. I certainly heard about atomic weapons when I was in elementary school, and about what they could do, but what I really learned to fear was the midnight knock on the door. I’ve been fascinated by the prison camp genre ever since, but I guess not fascinated enough to have read Anne Applebaum’s book before now.

Much of what she writes about life in the prison camps is familiar to me, from my reading of Noble, Solzhenitsyn, and others, but there is much new information, too, to put their accounts in perspective. More on that some other time.

It’s at least two years ago that I started watching Russian Internet TV — mostly RTR Planeta. I watch it in spurts. There are weeks or months at a time when I just don’t have time or there is too much network congestion.

It seems there have been some changes since I started. The female news anchors/program hosts smile now. Back then, I remarked on how they seemed to be all business — though just as they signed off they might give a very quick, almost shy smile.

I remember reading some time ago about how Russians just didn’t smile as much as Americans. In fact one American business that went to Russia had to teach the employees how to smile at customers. It wasn’t natural for them.

But now it seems natural enough for them. The males, too, are more smiley than I remember back then. Some of the female hosts are flirty and sometimes even giggly now.

So where did this change come from? Or is it just my imagination? (It seems there are fewer instances of female hosts wearing dresses with shoulder pads now, too.)

One thing that hasn’t changed is the ubiquitous notebook computers. Every program host/anchor seems to have a notebook computer in front of him/her (and a little to one side) though I’m not sure what for.

It would seem to me that there is a lot less to smile about in Russia these days (if you don’t count the material prosperity) but maybe that has nothing to do with it.

Here’s a BBC article about “Russia’s deep suspicions of the west“.

The author, Rupert Wingfield Hayes, seemed to find that the Cyrillic highway signs made Russia unfriendly for foreign tourists. I’m not quite sure what he expects. If I ever got to do the bicycle tour in Russia that I’d like to do, I really wouldn’t care to have English language signs as a crutch. If I want to read highway signs in English, I can do that at home. I don’t need foreign travel for that.

He also makes some other points that make it sound like Russia still is as inward-looking as it was before the time of Peter the Great, or at least that it is turning back to those days. He talks about the hostility to foreign investment and the shutting down of the British Council centres in Russia.

I can’t say I like this hostility. Sometimes on weekend evenings I watch the standup comedians on RTR Planeta. I can understand hardly anything of what they’re saying, much less “get” the jokes, but one thing I do note is that an inordinate amount of time is spent making fun of America and Americans.

Russian comedy skits about Americans? Yes. When’s the last time you saw an American comedy skit making fun of the foibles of Russians?

And as far as Russia being inward-directed, it should be noted that an ubiquitous symbol is still the Foreign Ministry building in Moscow. You’ll see it on every Mosfilm DVD and you see it as a background on the news programs. Seems to me Russia has more than itself on its mind.