It's Halloween here in the States, and I was planning to be Snegurochka, the Russian Snow Maiden, but it's too chilly out for my short silver dress, so I sort of just dressed up like I was going to the prom.  However, the pearls and white shawl, with my hair up in a bun on top of my head, made everyone think I was going for royalty, or something Victorian.  So, I put on a Hello My Name Is sticker and a little sign around my neck ---

-------------------------
HELLO
my name is
ANNA KARENINA

КУДА НА ПОЕЗД?
-Which way to the train?-

-----------------------


Fancy, literary, and just a little gruesome, which I like.

A month ago my organization collected environmental leaders from the Far East and Siberia, together with leaders from the national groups based in Moscow (Greenpeace, WWF), and we retreated into the Siberian wilds of the Altai Republic, geographically north of Pakistan (thereabouts on the globe).  We discussed that big sucking sound called China (and its resource needs) and the general state of the environmental movement.  Here in this photo we're on the 6 hour bus ride into the Altai Republic.  Foreground: Oksana, the leader of the top environmental organization in Kamchatka, on the right the lovely Aitalina from the Sakha Republic's top enviro org, Eige.  On the left, sitting behind Oksana, is Natasha, from the enviro group Dauria, located on the border province of Chita (where Chinese companies are taking forests in order to make your Ikea furniture).


This was on the first morning, before the cooks realized how early we get up and start looking for food.  Oksana foraged for raspberries, someone else produced dried salmon filets and red caviar, someone else brought out delicious homebaked rolls-- it was a greasy yummy jovial picnic breakfast.








 Nearby the chilly Katun River shone in the morning light.













We started our first day (after the requisite welcome speeches) with a report-back from Marina Rikhvanova, from the Baikal Environmental Wave.  We featured her (among others) in our Environmental Heroes talk this past Wednesday here in San Francisco-- she just two weeks ago came to NYC to pick up an award from Conde Nast for her outstanding environmental leadership in protecting Lake Baikal this year.  In this September photo she's showing slides of the 5000-strong crowd that gathered in Irkutsk in April 2006 to protest the oil pipeline planned to run within a few hundred meters of the lake, which holds 20 percent of the world's fresh water, and is home to many unique indigenous species, such as the nerpa, the world's only freshwater seal.  In the photo the banner reads "Baikal is worth more than oil."

Minutes at our four-days of meetings were taken by the enviro and journalist Anatolii Lebedev, who types with his two index fingers (typing HARD), and transcribes rather than outlines the conversation.  I sat next to him most days, partly because I was fascinated to watch him work.

Larisa from the ethno-ecological center Lach in Koryakia is seen here on the left.






We took a field trip to an old monastery on an island in the Katun River.  En route we had a nice walk through a village of cottages-- actually the regional center of government.  This cottage is on "Soviet Street."









More tomorrow...

I am astounded to find that the tally of mailing lists the Russia Team at work use is upward of 30 lists.  This is the sort of thing I imagine corporate US America doesn't have to deal with.

Some of these lists have thirty posts a day.

What I don't understand is why there was no mail today.  With the Russia Team out of the office having a retreat to deal with work division (of reading thirty mailing lists) nobody seemed to be doing any e-mailing.

I'm betting that the pile up of unread mail in the day we were all out crashed the server.

Last night my organization's Russia and China teams presented a talk giving examples of environmental heroes on both sides of the Amur River-- Siberia and the Far East, and China.

The groups whose leaders were featured in Russia were the Kamchatka League of Independent Experts, Sakhalin Environment Watch, and the Baikal Environmental Wave.

In China: Green Longjiang, Green Eyes, and Green Anhui.

The Chinese groups are younger and - though ambitious - don't have the same "wins" that the Russian groups can claim in 2006.  Someday!

The room last night was packed to capacity (it was a small room-- 40 people was too many - some had to stand).  Apparently this is a hot topic!

I spent the day sitting in on public policy classes at UC Berkeley, as I prepare to apply to the MPP program.  Every conversation about policy and health and climate change led to the general conclusion that we are all doomed, doomed, doomed.

I started out at 8 am pondering the poisoning of children in poor housing through the lead paint in their environment, and ended at 6 pm with a conversation with a professor about how we may have to lose some cities to rising ocean levels before the big oil and gas companies get serious about alternative energy and stop feeding our CO2 problem.

I just did a little poking around the interwebs to see if I could read up on lead poisoning in Russia, and stumbled on a website dedicated to documenting environmental victories.  Read and be inspired!

And then you can read about our remarkable partner Marina Rikhvanova and her first prize win in the Conde Nast environmental award competition.

Today someone from the National Endowment for Democracy came to our office to talk about building democratic institutions in China.  We talked about Russia, and she mentioned that a colleague of hers had written this article "Darkness Spreading Over Russia" about the Politkovskaya murder.  He writes:

[T]he idea that the Russian authorities would be targeting liberal journalists and human rights activists as enemies who need to be silenced should be of the utmost concern to the US and Europe, which still seem to regard Russia as a responsible partner.

Meanwhile, a journalist whose case I worked on at my previous job at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights commission, Ruslan Sharipov, wrote to me yesterday to say he has a hearing with the Department of Homeland Security.  He's been a refugee in this country now for a year, and he's finally getting some movement on his case for a Green Card.  The Uzbek government would torture him (again) and probably he wouldn't survive this time, should he be deported. The scary thing: the US government is demanding original documents from his court case in Uzbekistan that he couldn't possibly have with him, and they say he'll be deported if he doesn't present these documents.  I feel powerless against the crackdowns on journalists in Russia, but even more so in the case of this Uzbeki who has won awards for his writing on the lack of freedom in Uzbekistan, risking his life and the lives of his family, and who my country is now considering for deportation.

The organization where I work just had its annual three-day work retreat.  This photo is the staff plus a visiting Russian activist (far left, short lady in green scarf) Marina Rikhvanova of the Baikal Environmental Wave, and a couple of brave board members who decided to come frolick on the beach with us.  The place is the Marin Headlands, where we "retreated" at the YMCA Camp Bonita, out by the old lighthouse.

I'm the second person from the right in the back-- not the best photo of me -- I'm always so exhausted at retreats.


Some of my coworkers and our board members are just amazing people.  I think my current favorite coworker is Meerim, who was just hired to our Russia Team (she's front row, second from the right, kneeling).  She's natively from Kirghizstan, but is fluent in Russian and English.  She has the coolest watch-- <a href="http://www.cloudcuckooland.biz/laikaswatch.jpg">a Swatch commemorating the first dog in space, Laika</a>.  Laika was a street dog that was the most healthy of the dogs the Soviets tried to train for a trip in space.  Laika was the first living creature sent into space.  Alas, he died, and the ethical question of whether the scientists knew he would die or not is still a subject of debate.  This is just a sample of the fascinating conversations we had with Meerim these past few days.  She's got mad analysis.

This is your (English-speaking) brain on Russian.

Signs between Monterey and Big Sur, California, abbreviate canyon as "Cyn."  It was several trips down those roads before I finally decyphered the abbreviation.  My brain could not read that word as anything other than the Russian word for soup.  Суп.

I like this sign in particular, because Fern Soup kind of sounds tasty.  With pepper and fennel and maybe some quinoa?  MMmmmm.  Fern суп.



I fall between my native English and my adoptive Russian sometimes.  More often I latch on to the correct words and pronunciations and spellings when I need them.  But I do have a shyness that comes out when I find myself in mixed company - non-English-speaking Russian-speakers and non-Russian-speaking English-speakers.  I am a) not sure I want to be assumed to be one or the other (it can be a strategic mistake to pass as either, depending), and b) just as I have learned the hard way that you do NOT want to advertise to your employers that you know HTML or web design, you do not want to advertise in mixed company that you are an interpreter.  Suddenly anything else you could contribute or learn is subordinated to that useful role.  Unless I'm getting paid, or I care about the information or people involved in the interpreting that is needed, I don't want to be interpreting. 

This last Russian-American business conference I went to, I was surprised that I just didn't talk very much.  I was downright reticent.  I was skeptical of being a person speaking English or Russian, and therefore assumed an ally of one side or the other.  English-speaking people who don't know Russian are distrustful of you if you are too "native" in your Russian knowledge.  Russians are too imposing and assumptive if you are too "native."  I generally prefer the latter, and generally prefer to be assumed by non-Russian-speakers to be Russian.  It's just a nice distance to have.  But here, the Russians had come to San Francisco to sell their country's resources.  No mystery there.  The English-speakers, however-- that was a mystery that intrigued me.  After all the horrible betrayals foreign businesses have suffered in Russia, WHY would these people be persisting in investing there?  I kind of liked their mad optimism.  I wanted to win their trust and tell them about how much I love Russia, and why they should not only do business in Russia but do it RIGHT, so that the Russian people and lands are left better than they found them.

What also surprised me was that I was MOST intrigued by the wives, dragged along to live in Russia, in the most culturally backwards and godsforsaken places in Russia, for love of their businessman hubby.

These are women who I don't think ever imagined they'd have to learn Russian to keep up some kind of normalcy to their lives.  They were very grateful for my attention to them, what little time I could give them, and I really did want them to ask questions and let me give them basic language lessons.  They should know that there are things to love about Russia, and that Russian isn't impossible to learn, and that non-native speakers can achieve a high level of fluency.  Otherwise I can't imagine how they could bear their lives attached to these industry guys in these remote, weather-beaten places.

One of them was a vet.  I mean a veterinarian.  I gave her mad props.  I grew up rural, I really really respect vets.  I hope she learns Russian and sets up a practice on Sakhalin.  What a hoot that would be!


My butter dish from Vladivostok: a Gzhel girl and her stripey cat.  I call them Sofia and Tourmaline.

I spent a day with this guy, a real world citizen, WP.  He's done pretty much everything.  At the Russian Consulate tonight, the reception that concluded my involvement in the Russian American Pacific Partnership conference, I finally had to ask him what he HADN'T done yet in his life.  He said he hasn't studied or practiced medicine.  I asked-- how about deep sea diving.  And he treated us to the story of the time he was diving near the Galapagos and had to run away from two big grey sharks, in a place where a fatal shark attack had happened the day before.  That's pretty much the way it goes with him-- anything you can bring up he has an AMAZING story, of adventure of survival of drama of accomplishment.

The day ended with us going to dinner with another friendly friend who knows the Russian beat, and the two of them, both veterans, found their way to the topic of how the government has f*d the country with the Iraq war.  One thing they agreed on that shocked me but which I understood-- the removal of the draft creating a distance between the US people and the military.  The average US person doesn't feel the loss that volunteer military families feel with this deadly war in Iraq.  And while we don't feel the loss, we won't act to stop it. 

I hate to think that the draft could come back, but I understand their point.

I just got home from the first day of the annual Russian American Pacific Partnership conference.  The main message of the day is EVERYTHING  IS  JUST  FINE.    DON'T  WORRY. 

The elephant in the room is that Shell's Sakhalin II project is being subjected to creeping expropriation by the Russian government, on the perfectly legitimate (and convenient) basis of environmental disasters waiting to happen all around the massive oil and gas project.

So all these investors are waiting for some kind of realistic evaluation of the future of that particular project, and the Sakhalin Provincial Administration's reps are all about - we're not pessimists, we're sure it will all work out.  Our Russian contractors are almost world-class now, after a couple years of work on Sakhalin I and II. 

Sakhalin Energy, the Shell-run consortium that manages the project, didn't EVEN send a representative.  All the big displays and shiny colorful pamphlets are from Exxon, giving all the boring details on the Sakhalin I project.

There was one US government rep at the cocktail hour at the end of the day who seemed (after two shots of vodka) ready to make a scene at the conference just to get some truth out there.  Sakhalin is being driven into a state of bankruptcy and the inadequate infrastructure that existed previously is on its way to complete destruction, and Sakhalin I and II can take some if not all the blame. 

I wasn't much help, I'm sure.  I added to what he was saying, describing what I saw on a pipeline monitoring trip to Sakhalin in June.  He was seriously talking about getting himself fired tomorrow.  His wife seemed genuinely concerned.

So, I need to get my beauty sleep so I can be up and out in my business attire in time to see a Dept of Energy employee go down in grandiose flames of some kind.

(The massive Shell LNG terminal on Sakhalin, from space)

I'm about four people folded into one, according to a friend of mine.  I have far-ranging interests and I have tended to have about 12 projects cooking at the same time since I was about ten years old.  Horses, language, dance, poetry... these are my loves.  The Russian-oriented part of me isn't far from the poetry-oriented part.  I studied the Silver Age of Russian Poetry in my last year of formal Russian studies, and I fell in love with Anna Akhmatova's "Requiem."  She memorized that series of poems, putting nothing in print, meeting different friends on different bridges, disclosing parts of the poems and repeating the lines into the memory of each friend, only collecting the scraps from the collective memory after the Stalin purges ended, and she felt safe enough to put the poetry into print.

During that time, when she was composing "Requiem" in that beautiful city on the Gulf of Finland, Leningrad (now Petersburg), she wrote this:

Dante

Il mio bel San Giovanni,
Inferno, Dante

He didn't go back even after he was dead
To that ancient Florence of his.
Leaving, he looked straight ahead:
It's for him I am singing this.
Night.  A torch.  A final kiss.
Outside, the sound of fate-- a kind
Of howl.  From hell he sent her a curse.
In paradise, she was still on his mind.
He didn't go barefoot, late at night,
Penitentially attired,
Through Florence-- treacherous, full of spite,
Whom he so faithfully desired.

(translation - Lyn Coffin)

I know her imprisonment in that beautiful city was a real imprisonment, but this mix of desire for a place at the same time you are imprisoned there is a sentiment with which I strongly identify.  I grew up on a terribly remote, wind-buffeted shore of Eastern Lake Ontario.  I often feel like I will never feel at home anywhere else, at the same time as it was a place where I nearly ended my life out of sheer despair and loneliness.

It is a great mystery in my life, why I feel so at home in Russia.  I can't explain it, but one probable explanation is that many people in Russia feel this deep loyalty and love for their home at the same time they are aware that it imprisons them (from reaching their full potential, from living in full health, from living with freedom of religion and expression, etc. etc.).

The landscape of North Western New York also greatly resembles - in topography and climate - North Western Russia.

Windblown, buggy, snowy or muddy, a big flat swamp.  Birches, pine, aged cemeteries, abandoned villlages.  Horses.


Nathan Altman. Portrait of the Poetess Anna Andreevna Akhmatova. 1914.
The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Привет!  Hi, dear reader.  Welcome to my experiment in documenting my life as a Russian-speaking Amerikanka working in the Russian-speaking diaspora, and in Russian and Former Soviet lands!  I have been at this work for 13 years now, and I have many many stories to share.

My work has me traveling irregularly to Russia, and working daily on projects concerning the wellbeing of my second Rodina, my second motherland.  Akh, Rodina.  "Let them say you're a monster-- we like you,"  (to paraphrase the rock band DDT).

The Bad Beginning

My journey began when I was 15, seeking a way to avoid a summer trip to the boring German city of Emden (am Nordsee - that's about all anyone has to say about Emden), and hoping to provoke controversy in my own boring hometown.  A chance to go to the Soviet Union came up through my school's art club (it's a long story I'll tell another time).  Anyway, my head was turned, and at that tender age I pledged to learn Russian and go to Russia to live.  I did all that, and now I'm living a life that in one way or another seems to pivot on that country and its people.

I have no Russian ancestry.  I have no Russian relatives.  My father, a language nerd, learned some Russian in high school, and can make his way through simple texts with a dictionary.  I never heard it spoken when I was growing up.  I speak with an accent, but everyone thinks I'm second generation Russian.  Sometimes it takes some doing to explain that I just liked the language and so I learned it.  When they ask me "why?"  I say, "that's what you speak in Russia.  If you spoke Spanish in Russia, I'd have learned Spanish."