A failure of imagination brought us to this horror
Aligning political will with beat of human heart is our hope
When she opened the apartment door, her modern Western appearance startled me. She had two little ones wrapped around her legs, tykes peering out with open curiosity at the stranger.
It was 1990. I was in Moscow. I spoke no Russian; I had learned to say “please” and “thank you” on the plane.
As were the teenagers I was chaperoning, and my colleagues, I had been whisked away from our welcoming reception by my host family to begin an almost two-week stay in the heart of what was then the Soviet Union. We were engaged in an early email telecommunications project linking New York and Soviet schools.
By coincidence, my host teacher Sergei’s wife’s name was Marina; mine, Maureen. I was a librarian; so was she. She spoke perfect English. The family was multi-generational: her parents, her teenage brother, her husband – my new teacher colleague – and the two little ones, close in age to my own youngest son.
I have thought of them often over the years, these strangers who took me in with gracious warmth and hospitality. I have never thought of them more than during these last few weeks, this family who joyously toasted in Russian every one I had ever loved or known in joyous camaraderie around their dining table.
Marina’s parents are undoubtedly gone. They had cried openly one night in front of me as a documentary about the impact of their war in Afghanistan on Russian troops aired for the first time on state television. “We had no idea” they repeated over and over. The then-teenage Kirill was proud beyond measure to have a job in the first McDonald’s to open in Russia, proud to be mistaken for “an American.” His parents, even in front of a stranger, were in open lament at his uncertainty about going to university because such a decision would ensure he would be conscripted. Kirill is undoubtedly a father himself now, in fear for his own son’s fate.
I had left on this trip with my family somewhat disconcerted; fears engendered by the Cold War lingered. I came home full of hope — the reality confirmed that the human heart beat to the same drum, a shared and common longing for solidarity and peace and a secure future for our children.
The connections established between the teens involved were strengthened when the kids from Moscow came here to stay the following year. Where are they now, these oncehopeful teens? Are they perhaps watching their own sons made canon fodder, experiencing the fast shuttering of doors and windows to the world that had opened for their generation?
On a field trip with our guests to New York City , one Russian student had cried when she thought she might not pass the Dakota where John Lennon had lived and died. Imagine.
What else but a failure of imagination has brought us to this horrific moment where young Russian soldiers are ordered to lay siege to cities, soldiers whose parents in 1990 were still bringing up the horrors of the siege of Stalingrad in casual conversation?
What else but a failure of imagination led us in the brief moment of Russian glasnost and perestroika to impose a shock-and-awe economic framework as oligarchical and international greed and corruption raped and pillaged the Russian economy and engendered chaos and fear, paving the way for the rise of an embittered authoritarian like Vladimir Putin.
In that beautiful moment when the Iron Curtain fell, why didn’t the West seize the opportunity to envision new kinds of inclusive European security frameworks, ones that looked to the common threats to human wellbeing such as climate disruption, nuclear proliferation and profound global economic inequality — threats which called to EastWest common cause. As the Russian economy crumbled, why didn’t we envision a kind of Marshall Plan outreach, one tied to the development and progress of civil society institutions and the embrace of democratic values? Why didn’t we take advantage of a growing fondness among the people for the West? Why did we strengthen and expand a security arrangement born out of fear of an ascendant USSR even as the empire was erased, a no-longer existent threat.
Instead, we solidified an arrangement that insured the arms manufacturers of the world an endless succession of client states and fed a gnawing sense of encirclement and enfeeblement in Putin and his advisers.
This failure to see in new and different ways has led us to spend trillions, fortunes upon fortunes in preparation for war, on ever more mind-numbing weaponry while we have reduced endlessly our commitments to diplomacy and statecraft. It leads us even now to a budget that enshrines the modernization of nuclear weapons, weapons whose threat give many of us pause as we open the morning news. Truly the current call for the re-arming of Europe is a call to devolution and ultimate demise.
The what-might-have-been list is long, but if any good is to come from the horror of the current moment when yet more of our planetary family suffers untold nightmares, it must be in the clear call to a renewed understanding that our peace and futurity on a global scale demands that we work to align the political imagination and will with the beat of the human heart. The present moment underscores what an uphill battle this is, made even worse by the bitterness and rage now surely engendered. In spite of all the forces that align against it, one must hope that the horrors of the moment will help focus the imagination on the imperatives contained in such a vision.
I am sure that even as my heart longs for this for my grandchildren, Marina and Sergei and Kirill are doing
the same.