The Importance of Being Russian-American.

My mother grew up in a conservative Italian and Polish Catholic enclave in Springfield, Massachusetts in the 1960s and by her account barely came out with her sanity intact. She did like many aspects of these cultures, as do I, but right now I’d like to talk a little about why she grew up in that milieu. It would, one might think, have been equally reasonable for her to have been raised Russian-American—especially since her parents had married in the 1930s and had their early batch of children, not including her, around Double-ya Double-ya Two.

Now this was a time of a great Communist icon standing in opposition to the Church and a great Christian icon standing in opposition to the Party: Josef Stalin and Mikhail Bulgakov.

Now ironically good old 'Uncle Joe' began life as a devout seminarian in a little religious college in Georgia where he wrote love poetry and was radicalised and dropped out to become a revolutionary. When he came to power a quarter of a century later many people often don’t realise that it was over the objections of a man who wanted an admittedly more moderate communist union to aggressively attack the countries around it, whereas Stalin was content with a hardline, but regional, hegemony—such was the double-bind of the Russian thing. And just before Stalin came to power a civil war had ended, in which the West supported well-meaning but brutal and potentially even more oppressive monarchists and democrats—the Whites, who fell as much to squabbling amongst themselves as they did to the Reds.



My great-grandfather came over to the United States in the nineteen-teens, founded a family, heard about the Revolutions, went back to fight for the Whites, made commissar or commander or some such high post, lost a bunch of battles, went back Stateside to live with his family once again, and drank himself to death in East Longmeadow.

So a lot of the Left in countries like Britain and to an extent America (see Henry Wallace at one point) was a cog in the murderous machine of a man who seemed more than a man in his efforts to force his country to escape from the boundary of oblivion whether it wanted to or not. A faith that set itself against faith in a quest for salvation within a world that it could not see anything beyond. A brotherhood of equals unless you spoke out against it, which got you hard labour or worse. A war on poverty fought with real bullets. Such was the double-bind that Russia was in, and when Hitler invaded in 1941 a lot of peasants in the Ukraine thought that he’d be better than the man who had starved them for the sake of an idealism turned in against itself. What they didn’t realise was that the Nazis’ whole thing about Slavs being subhuman hadn’t been just a campaign promise.

So with World War II we have evil versus evil and the United States, and my family up to and including my ultraconservative Russian and Polish grandfather, on the side of the evil man who was like a kindly dad even though he was not really. Flying joint missions, marching on Berlin, divvying up the spoils. Meanwhile a lot of other ethnically Russian people in the West intermarried or changed their names to avoid the stain of association with the Communist menace from beyond the eastern horizon. And when Stalin died in 1953 he went to Hell, not because he was ‘worse than Hitler’ as is sometimes claimed but because if your defence is that you were not Hitler then you have set the bar worryingly low in the first place. Then a man named Khrushchev came to power and denounced Stalin and stranded us and our ideals and our reasons for battling against them. And many in Russia thought vaguely of defecting to America for some reason but then realised that they would live under a cloud of suspicion just like even Whites who had gone there—even people who had gone there before the Revolutions had happened at all.

What to do? What to do? Waiting for détente could never have been an option, nor waiting for the miraculous Autumn of Nations that ripped through the world like a hurricane. It was still the mid-1950s when Senator McCarthy waxed supreme in America and the John Birch Society theorised that President Eisenhower was taking orders within the Communist conspiracy from his brother Milton. So some of them fled to the underground Church, in which, unlike Uncle Joe, many still believed. The Church found and received, and they started up underground movements in the decades that followed. A couple of decades after that, the whole system just kind of collapsed under its own weight. My grandfather, as it happens, died at fifty-five when Richard Nixon was President, possibly because Christ died at thirty-three and Grand Duchess Olga died at twenty-two if you are willing to take that sort of synchronicity to the bank.

And then there is what my family has been doing since then, which is another story. My mother, when we were legally resident in Vermont, regularly voted for Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist with a Russian Jewish background of some description, for Congress. So the world turns on. This is our American life.