He left the Ukraine at age 18. The
opportunity to return presented itself. The eighty year old man wouldn't let it
pass.
He hadn't been driven from the
Ukraine. The opportunity to immigrate to Canada presented itself. Simply, a lot
of his friends and neighbors had left to seek a better life on the Canadian
prairie. There wasn't anything keeping him back. The romance of travel called.
Now he planned on returning to Ukraine
– a visit. An ambition to go back lay dormant for a long time while Russia remained
largely closed to American tourists. A
recent trip to the high Canadian plain, another home, rekindled his desire to
return to the place of his birth. After all an old friend, August Krueger had
returned.
"I saw on the news, Russia is
giving the land back to the farmers. I should go back there and claim my farm.”
Gus said.
"I saw August Krueger. He lives a
little north of Calgary now. He is one of the fellows from our same village in
the Ukraine. We were always good friends.
Even our parents had been good friends. He went back to visit the
Ukraine this last May.
"You can't go on your own. They
went to Moscow and to Kiev. In Kiev they rented a car. With the car, they got a
chauffeur and an interpreter. It cost him close to $900. That was just for one
day, but then they could travel. They went through all the towns where they had
lived. The road still goes past our place, he said, but there are no buildings.
You couldn't get to his place. There is no road. It's just one big field. The
church is still there, but it's now a warehouse.
"There aren't supposed to be any
German people. He found one older fellow who could speak a little German. He
didn't have a German name anymore, must have changed it. He could still name
some of the people who lived there. The third family he named was the Krueger’s.
He was the only one left with a German Heritage."
With the report from August Krueger,
Gus started giving some thoughts to checking things out for himself. Ads in a
German language, Mennonite, monthly magazine offered Russian tours. These
monthly enticements motivated the old man to start reading Russian, to request
more detailed information, and finally to book himself and Olga on a four week
Russian excursion.
The trip wasn’t a sentimental
homecoming for either of them. There is no one left for Gus to visit. While
Olga has relatives scattered though out the Soviet Union, they thought their
chances for a visit with any were poor. Still, they didn’t rule out the
possibility. They, through feverish correspondence, worked diligently toward
that end. It paid off.
With the trip booked and as the
departure date neared, they maintained an ambivalent attitude toward this tour.
On the one hand there is a desire to return to the place where they were born
and raised and, on the other a fear for whatever memories such a place can
invoke. Bittersweet couldn’t be more accurately defined. Long after the plans
were set, and the money paid, the trip remained a "we're thinking of"
proposition.
This ambivalence was finally shaken by
a chance meeting with a recent Russian immigrant. Prior to this encounter Gus had little
confidence in his linguistic skill.
But this Russian encounter brought the
trip to life. He could still speak the language. After that Olga became
interested in her travel wardrobe.
Some people have bumper stickers that
read "born to shop" or "shopping animal." Olga isn't one of
them. She doesn't wear clothes for making style, status or social statements.
She is content with slacks, blouses and tennis shoes. The utility value of
clothes impressed her more than style.
She wears modest, conservative dresses
on Sundays for church, but is otherwise happier in something that you can roll
up the legs and sleeves, and wear in the garden.
When, the reality of the forthcoming
trip took over. Her wardrobe became an issue. She called upon her daughter for
technical advice. She had always managed to buy clothes without her daughter’s
aid before. This wasn't her first trip abroad. Yet somehow for this trip,
fashion had become important.
With three full afternoons at the
stores, she had nothing to show for it. Polyester won't do. It's too hot. An
almost suitable dress was rejected because of its collar, also too hot. The
search went on.
Finally, these efforts were reinforced
by the aid of her daughter-in-laws.
She unlike Gus fled from the Ukraine,
a fact which seems to assert itself in the selection of travel attire. As for
Gus, he travels with what he has which at the time was likely a ten-year old leisure suit.
Gus left the Ukraine before Stalin's
brutal collectivization of Soviet Agriculture. His sense of fashion isn't
influence$d by political policies of the 1930s.
Olga, who grew up in the terror of collectivization, had Stalin's ghost
dogging her in the shopping malls, on the flight over and upon their arrival in
Moscow.
Her first card home read simply:
"They keep us busy on sightseeing tours. We see Red Square today. Tomorrow
we leave for Alma Atta. The flight over was nice, a little turbulence. The
weather is nice. Hope everyone is well."
The intervening forty years since
leaving the Ukraine shroud another existence. The trip brought into play the
juxtiposition of two clashing realities: one where the horrors of the twentieth
century were dramatically played out, but were now covered over by the security
of a ranch house in suburban America.
Her return to Russia threatened to
lift that shroud. The Ukraine, from the late 1920s until the end of World War
II, wasn't about life. It was about endurance. It was about survival. The
conditions there were set by "Uncle Joe" Stalin, master of terror.
Adam B. Ulam outlined the course of
Stalin’s Russian iron fist in Stalin the
Man and His History.
Terror was nothing new to Russia. But
what had once been limited to the social statement through assignation became
by the civil war a primary instrument of "real politic."
Stalin observed Ivan the Terrible's
only fault was that he didn't liquidate enough people. Stalin did not make the
same mistake. In Stalin's Soviet Union there wasn't room for opposition. Russia, the Party and Stalin were one, a new
trinity. His part of the world was a dangerous place where no one was safe. Lenin
sought to consolidate power by promising peace and land, which he delivered.
Stalin sought to create a communist state, which he did through terror.
Terror had been an element of politic
before Stalin, and before the Civil War and before the Revolution. But in the span of 40 or 50 years dating from
the 1870s the nature of its politics changed, from the dramatic assassination,
to mass terror during the civil war, to a general "war upon the nation."
His first target was the peasant, then
the bureaucracy, followed by the Party and on the eve of World War II a purge
of the Military.
His purge of the military illustrates
his thoroughness. In the army, his victims included: three of five first marshals;
three of four full generals; all twelve lieutenant generals; sixty of sixty-seven
corps Commanders; and one hundred and
thirty-six out of one hundred and ninety-nine division commanders.
Stalin did not limit his elimination policies
to Soviet citizens.
In 1943, the German Army uncovered the
mass grave of 15,000 Polish officers who had been in Soviet prison camps until
1940. Now it’s known as the Katyn Massacre, the total number of victims was
nearly 22,000. Historians speculate Stalin ordered massacre to insure that
after the war he would have militarily weak and compliant Poland on his western
border at the end of the war. It’s a point of view that’s indirectly confirmed
by Winston Churchill.
Years later, Churchill wrote, in his
history The Second World War, about
one particularly chilling social conversation he had with Stalin at the Teheran
Conference. During dinner light and genial conversation turned to the question
of German demilitarization. Stalin observed that Hitler's armies depended upon
50,000 officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end
of the war, Germany would cease to be a military power.
Here Churchill was taken aback with
horror and indignation. Stalin insisted, "Fifty thousand must be shot."
"I would rather" replied Churchill,
"be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself than sully
my own and my country's honor by such infamy."
Roosevelt, in an effort defuse the
tension, lightheartedly suggested that shooting forty-nine thousand would do
it.
Churchill excused himself and
retreated to the next room, where Stalin and Molotov shortly rejoined him. Both
with great smiles, it was all a joke, they claimed. There wasn't anything
serious in the suggestion at all.
Churchill wasn't convinced.
Of the incident he goes on, "... I
was not then, and am not now, fully convinced that all was chaff and there was
no serious intent lurking ..."
Serious intent understates Stalin's
disposition. The serious intent of the first five year plan was nothing short
of a "war upon the nation," more terrible than the war with Nazi
Germany which claimed 20 million.
This assessment is Stalin's.
Churchill wrote:
""Tell me," I asked,
"have the stresses of this war been as bad to you personally as carrying
through the policy of the Collective Farms?"
"This subject immediately roused
the Marshal. ""Oh, no," he said, "the Collective Farm
policy was a terrible struggle."
""I thought you would have found it
bad," said I, "because you were not dealing with a few score
thousands of aristocrats or big landowners, but with millions of small
men."
""Ten millions," he
said holding up his hands. ”It was
fearful. Four years it lasted ... It was all very bad and difficult - but
necessary.""
Olga doesn't talk about her childhood.
But Gus spoke of those years from the second hand memories of his mother,
brothers and sister. It was a comprehensive social and economic restructuring
which ultimately resulted in an unprecedented reign of terror.
Everything about Stalin’s Soviet Union
has a strange, surreal and most certainly nightmarish tenor to it. The first
five years was no exception.
In what can only be called an
understatement, about it Stalin biographer Adam Ulam, in Stalin, The Man and His Era, wrote: “But like
so many things about Soviet society at the time, almost everything about the
plan had an air of unreality. Officially begun in 1928, it was not voted on by
the Sixteenth Party Conference until April 1929.”
If nothing else the first five year plan
was a watershed event of the Twentieth Century. And as Ulam points out, to this
day it remains historically controversial.
Often called the great leap forward,
it set out to establish a communist economy and propel the Soviet Union into
the industrial age. In what transpired some see one of the greatest crimes of
modern history. To other’s it was a breathtaking feat of social engineering,
which while ruthless and cruel, laid the foundation for a richer and more
rational economy and enabled Russia to withstand the German invasion.
If Stalin’s methods were somewhat less
than benevolent, his ultimate vision was kinder than that recorded by history.
He envisioned a prosperous, Marxist, industrial economy.
To achieve this end, according to
Ulam, first, the peasantry represented a kingdom of darkness that must be
conquered. What threatened communism, threatened Russia. Stalin purposely waged
a war against the nation’s peasantry.
Secondly, the serious intent of the
plan was money. Since defaulting on international loans the Soviet Union had
lousy credit rating. Her only source for capital to industrialize was grain.
Before the revolution the peasant economy provided up to 12 million tons of
grain for export. In 1928 Russia imported 250,000 tons.
And finally, the industrial economy he
intended to create needed an abundant supply of cheap labor.
Ulam sums it up this way:
“He knew the effort to collectivize
through compulsion would mean civil war; he said so in 1924 and 1925 when urged
to adopt a more modest policy of collectivization and of “squeezing the kulak,”
But it would be a civil war he could he could win. The enemy’s forces would be
divided and dispersed, his united and resolute. There would be instead (and
there were) tens of thousands of little civil wars: in every soviet village.
The poor peasants would help the Party and GPU and, if need be, though this was
to be avoided, the Red Army could also be used in the struggle. Once the kulak
was done with and the peasant’s were on the collective farms what could they
do? They might be unhappy, might rebel here and there or sabotage deliveries,
but one could take care of this increasing the GPU forces in the countryside (a
was done). And then the tractor would come to make the work easier, and more and
more village lads would find industrial employment in the cities The peasant
would acquire socialist consciousness and would be grateful to the Party and
Comrade Stalin for saving him from what Marx had called “the idiocy of rural
life” and enabling him, after a painful but short interval, to enjoy the
benefits of a cultured existence in a modern industrial society.”
What followed was anything but “a
painful but short interval.” In reality
a government waged war against its citizens for nearly a decade of brutal
repression during which, according to official Soviet sources, about 40 million
people were arrested, executed or otherwise repressed. For perspective, the
population of the entire Soviet Union was 162 million in 1937.
The official numbers regarding
Stalin’s repression did not come to light until 1989. They appeared in the
official Soviet press and filled in what were called “blank spots” in Soviet
history. Those official numbers include the 5 to 7 million who perished in
famine of the early 1930s, and the 5 to 7 million arrested in the “Great
Terror” in 1937 and 38. Of those, 1 million were executed and the rest sent to
labor camps where most died. Not counted were the 9 to 11 million peasants who
were deported to Siberia from 1930 to 1932. Western historians believe about 5
million of those died after being forced off their land.
Under the economic plan, the Soviet
Union increased its grain exports from 1,000,000 tons in 1929, to 5,400,000
tons in 1930. The issue went beyond grain and foreign capital. An industrial
nation needs labor. 80% of Russian labor was locked in agriculture. The peasantry
was not inclined to embracing Communist ideals. For comparison, in 1930, US
agricultural employment stood at 21.5% of the labor force, according to the US
Department of Agriculture.
For someone living through the first
five year plan, things started getting bad in 1929. There came the taxes. Mass
arrests started toward the end of 1929. Stalin, having secured his position, returned
to a policies Lenin was forced to abandon in 1921. Collectivization was under
way.
About that time Gus received the only
letter from his brother Sam until after World War II. He said: “Sam wrote, at
that time, it was bad there. He was thinking he wanted to get married, but he
couldn’t buy anything and he didn’t have anything. He was kind of telling me
his problems. I knew things were bad in the Ukraine. Things were bad. They
couldn’t get out. Nobody could leave anymore.”
If Stalin made his move to crush the
Ukrainian peasantry, the wealthy peasantry, the Kulak class, was his first
target. The first mass arrests began in late 1929. Stalin announced on December
27, 1929 that his intention was a liquidation of the Kulaks. An official Party
ruling, 'On measures for the Elimination of Kulak Households in Districts of
Comprehensive Collectivization,' was approved by the Politburo on January 30,
1930.
Initially, a wealthy farmer might have
been some one with as much as 100 acres. The definition of wealth in time
changed to include some one working 30 or 40 acres. Finally it included almost anyone deemed
undesirable.
Gus's mother lost her farm in 1931. Gus
explained:
"They didn't just take the land
away from you. You had to pay so much in taxes or whatever. They wanted grain.
You paid and pretty soon they came for more. If you didn't have it, they took
everything you had. The last time they came to my mother's, they cleaned out
her house. She had stuff cooking on the stove. They dumped the food and took
the pots and pans. They took everything.”
According to historian Robert Conquest
in Harvest of Sorrow, when Stalin
made his move to crush the peasantry in 1929-30 he also resumed the attack on
the Ukraine and its national culture. This attack had been abandoned in the
early 1920s, during a time when Soviet government was barely hanging on. In
fact for a few years in the mid-1920s was functioning as independent county and
there was a small but growing independence movement.
In 1926, the tax on peasants in the
Ukraine and the North Caucasus which normally provided the Soviet Union half of
its total marketable grain was 3.3 million tons. By 1930 it was been raised to
7.7 million tons. The 1930 harvest was good.
In 1931, that same 7.7 million tons
was demanded from a poor harvest of only 18.3 million. This left only 250
pounds of grain per person in the Ukrainian rural population.
Conquest described the plight of a
“former landless peasant who served in the army (who) had by 1929 thirty-five
acres, two horses, a cow, a hog five sheep and forty chickens, and a family of
six. In 1928 the tax on him was 2500 rubles and 7,500 bushels of grain. He
failed to meet this, and his house (worth 1,800 to 2,000 rubles) was forfeited
and ‘bought’ for 250 rubles by an activist.”
The first five year plan which was to
have run through 1933, was pronounced to have been concluded by the end of
1932. It main industrial targets would not be fulfilled until many years later.
Those targets didn’t seem to be the principal point. Goals for farm
collectivization, on the other hand, were met many times over by the end of
1930.
In January, 1930, the Soviet Central
Committee tripled the rate of collectivization in some regions seeking to
complete the process in all grain-producing regions by the fall of 1931. In
fact this was largely accomplished by the end of 1930.
Initially Gus’s mother and stepfather
were fortunate.
After they lost their house, Gus said:
"There was nothing left. First they
stayed with relatives for a few days and then moved to the city. For awhile
they weren't bothered. He worked in factories and elsewhere, my stepdad did
carpentry and all that stuff. It was in 1935 when they took him.”
By 1932 two million, mostly peasant
farmers, were in detention camps. From
there they were deported to Siberia. As many as twenty-percent died in transit.
In the spring of 1932 there was again famine in the Ukraine. By the middle of
the year three million people were on the move seeking some measure of
prosperity. By March of '33, people were dying of starvation on a mass scale,
an estimated 5 million perished in the Ukraine.
The famine was entirely a matter of
policy. It wasn’t that there wasn’t food available, but simply denied. Conquest
writes:
“This was particularly true when the
grain was piled up in the open and left to rot. Large heaps of grain lay at
Reshetylivka Station, Ooltaya Province, starting to rot but still guarded. From
the train, an American correspondent saw ‘a huge pyramid of grain, piled high
and smoking from internal combustion.’”
According to biographer Ulam, Stalin’s
wrath against the peasant was motivated by what would happen in the cities if
the workers did not have enough food. By 1931 or 1932 even that concern was
cast aside. In 1929 city dweller ate 47.5 kilograms of meat, poultry and fat.
In 1930 it was 33 kilograms; in 1931, 27.3; “and in the terrible year of 1932
less than 17. He was saved from near and actual starvation by a somewhat
increased consumption of bread and potatoes.”
During that time the industrial work
force almost doubled.
Against that backdrop Gus’s mother and
his stepfather landed well. Well here being defined as not starving. Similarly,
Olga described here childhood home a small house where one room had become an
improvised stable of sorts, sheltering a cow, a pig and some chickens. The
small yard was a vegetable garden. And as a small girl she fondly remembered
walking the cow to let it graze along the shoulder of the road.
Yet at the time historian Conquest
writes, skilled workers in Ukrainian cities earned no more than 300 rubles a
month. There was no famine in Kiev, for example, for those with jobs and a
ration card. But only a kilogram of bread could be bought at a time. Supplies
were poor. The ‘well landed’ lived on black bread, potatoes and salt fish. Most
lacked adequate clothing and footwear. And at that, ‘well landed’ was a tenuous
foothold.
The government had other methods of
extracting a peasant family’s valuables in more systematic fashion. The
government had established foreign currency stores which freely sold goods and
food.
These were the Torgsin, literally
“trade with foreigners,” stores. These accepted payment only in foreign
currency, precious metals and gem stones.
In the Torgsins, life's necessities
could be purchased, but not without risk. Anyone with foreign currency had
connections beyond the Soviet border and was suspect.
Gus would send his mother ten dollars
when he could. At the time it was a lot of money.
He told me, "Ya, ya,
torgsin. That's where my stepdad went to
get the money exchanged that I'd sent them in 1935. He was arrested after that.
Charged with being a spy because he received American money. They just wanted
excuses. They sentenced him for seven years to a work camp in Siberia. They
sent him to some island not far from Alaska.
He never came back."
In 1937 or 38, a German Mennonite
village, Halbstadt in Zaporizhia province that dated back to the time of
Catherine the Great, were all sent into exile as spies. They survived the
famine in 1932 and 1933 with financial help from German co-religionists.
Because of this contact with the outside world were also charged with being
spies.
Gus explained: "They were taking
all the men away, especially in the German colonies. They were trying to get
rid of them. They sent them to Siberia to work in the woods and on the
railroad. They sent them to labor camps. At first they tried to find some
reasons.
"And they were after Sam. One
time they came in and he hid under a bed. They didn't find him.” They had come
in the middle of the night. Mother took her time answering the door, and then
explained she hadn’t seen Sam for four or five days and didn’t know where he
was. They searched the house but did not look under the bed.
"Later on they took everybody who
was able to work. They even took some of the women, especially German colonies.
They were trying to get rid of them, because the people stuck together. They
kept their own language, their own schools and all of that. They wanted to
spread them out. Everyone was scattered, hardly ever were two of the same
family left in one place. Most of those who were really persecuted were the
ones who were religious. You were not allowed to have a bible at all, and not
allowed to teach any religion at all. That's why no one wanted to join the
collective farms.
"In fact, they came and burned
down my uncle's place, because he wouldn't go into a collective farm. He
wouldn't join up. He had a trade and was still making a living. Shortly after,
they were sent away, into the woods, way up north of Finland. He died up there. It was cold and they didn't
get enough to eat.
"The people were stubborn. They
just wouldn't give in."
Finally to complete picture of this
surreal nightmare were the laws regarding state property. Ulam paints this
picture:
“… So in the summer of 1932 a decree
was flung out at the peasant: stealing of socialist and kolkhoz property was to
be punishable by death or, if there were mitigating circumstances, by no less
than ten years of forced labor or jail. The law, a Soviet author acknowledges,
was used not only against thieves but also against those “who maliciously refused
to turn over grain for state procurements,’ i.e., in practice against many who
simply kept bread for their families’ needs. Under this law the father of Paul
Morozov was shot for concealing grain, having been renounced to the authorities
by his fourteen-year-old son. (The young monster, having been garroted by a
group of peasants led by his uncle, was the extolled by propaganda as a
patriotic saint of the Young Pioneers – the Party’s youth auxiliary.)”
Robert Conquest, estimated the
collectivization at of 11 million dead between 1930 and 1937 from famine, and
3.5 million dying in labor camps. Those exiled were either crowded into camps
or simply left in the forest, with only a few axes and shovels to create a new
settlement. One such group managed to establish a prosperous community only be
discovered in 1950 and then charged with sabotage.
The official figures on the
deportations paint broader picture that extends beyond the Ukraine. Here are
the ‘blank spots’ that were filled in in 1989.
In 1932 and 33, 1.5 to 2 million
peasants were arrested for violating “extremely cruel” laws regarding state
property.
In 1935, 1 million former officials,
merchants and noblemen from Moscow and other cities were branded “class
strangers” and sent away.
During 1937 and 38, between five and
seven million were arrested during the “Great Terror.” Of those 1 million were
executed outright and the rest sent to labor camps where most of them died.
During World War II, up to two million
ethnic Germans were rounded up and deported. Another 3 million Moslems were
forced to move. One million of those died.
And finally, this is precious, after
1940, two to three million people were arrested for reporting late to work, a
crime punishable by up to five years in a labor camp.
As for Gus's step father, his six year
sentence to exile was a death sentence.
In 1933 Stalin moderated his
repression of the peasantry, or what was left of it. According to Ulam, by that
time Soviet jails were overcrowded to a point that lead to outbreaks of
typhus. Official policy was changed to
restricting the right to arrest to judicial authorities and the militia. It
also set forth to reduce the jailed population to 400,000 throughout the entire
Soviet Union. The prisoners, who were released, were “pardoned” to up five
years of compulsory labor in forced camps, and to be accompanied by their
dependents.
By 1937 virtually the entire peasantry
had been settled onto collectives or the industrial labor force. What was left
of it was some twenty million fewer than in 1928. Their standard of living was
still below what it had been in 1928.
Olga in returning to that place and
memoried os it wanted a new dress.
The ghost of the 1930s was exorcized
in Alma Atta. They were able to visit with some of Olga's family. After her
first post card, she they remained silent for almost two weeks. Then, there
followed a flurry of correspondence.
The tone of her letters changed
completely from the first one written in Moscow.
"Greeting from Kiev. Beautiful city with lots of parks. Dad and I skipped the city tour today and
drove to Zhitomir. Everything changed.
Could not recognize anything. It changed so much. Everything
shrank. Were in the home where I lived.
"In Yalta it was nice also. Swam
in the Black Sea, it was colder than the Mediterranean in 1977. In Alma Atta we
met allot of relatives. So far, Kiev is the nicest city. They sure have parks
and monuments everywhere, on honor of somebody or thing. We are being treated
royally. Today is the first time that I really had to use my Russian. Dad talked allot, especially in Moscow and on
the planes. We sure covered a big area of Russ. by bus and air..."
Upon their return, their conversation
wasn't filled with the wonders of perestroika and glasnost. This was 1989, and
since the mid-1980s the Soviet government had been releasing its iron grip. The
reforms resulted in increased contact between Soviet and United States citizens
and travel restrictions were greatly eased. A tectonic shift in geopolitics
made Gus and Olga’s trip possible.
Yet nevertheless, even with these
reforms the Soviet government didn’t enjoy much confidence among Olga's relatives.
They remained skeptical, believing the reforms were only temporary.
Politics aside, there were other
wonders. The Moscow subway for example, which in Gus' eye was is one of more
memorable "sights" of his Russian tour.
"It is something that must be
seen," he said, "indescribable."
Glasnost and Perestroika played
another role in their visit. First it led to an open proposition from a
currency black marketer in a Moscow restaurant. The official exchange, at the
time, was a ruble for about a buck sixty. On the black market, the exchange was
ten rubles per American dollar, and about five for Canadian.
Gus met the offer with a great deal of
suspicion. He thought it was a sting. Given his stepfather’s experience with
currency exchange, some thoughts of an unexpected side trip to Siberia must have
crossed his mind.
But after consulting with Olga and
some of the others in his tour group, he agreed to meet this gentleman later to
make the currency exchange. This transaction left him with a number of One-Hundred
Ruble notes. It seem tourists are not given currency in that large of a
denomination. Spending this money was bound to raise suspicion. It wasn't until
they arrived in Alma-Atta that they were able to have these notes changed for
five and ten rubble notes. Olga's relatives
were more than pleased to provide the service.
The transaction struck a wooden stake
through the dark memories of Stalin’s terror.
Gus took a great deal of satisfaction from
this "illegal" transaction. In a way it was this one small act that
dispatched Stalin's ghost. It was after all the exchange of his ten dollars
that landed his stepfather in Siberian labor camp.
Kiev seemed a city of great beauty and
charm. Their connection to Ukrainian earth was more potent than either imagined.
They were able to return to the house that Olga grew up in. Travel in the
countryside had changed since August Krueger’s visit. Gus hired a Kiev cab for
a day. First offering the driver $50.
The driver had to consult with the car's owner, who decided that $50 dollars
was a little light.
As Gus countered with $75, the offer
was accepted before he could finish. A bargain was struck at $70. In that there
was room to breathe – space to exhale.
Olga returned to Ukraine by herself
eleven years later and then spent a few weeks in Germany. In both places she
visited with relatives. She didn’t give much thought about her wardrobe prior
to embarking on that journey. It was a work trip of sorts, to peel away the
unconventional circumstances of her suburban American life and retrace her
Ukrainian-German roots. The work product was a number of note books outlining genealogies
with small stories relating to that family tree.
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