Friday, September 27, 2013

The Wretched of the Earth With Robert Fulford





It is hard to be truly wretched in our developed world even if you are poor. Those who achieve that state are usually sick in ways we yet do not know how to heal and that includes drug abuse. Otherwise you can obtain shelter and food of some sort. If that is dealt with, your social needs are easily addressed and mind candy is freely available to stave of boredom. Include family and friends and all is well with the world.


What the Soviet world refused its citizens was the opiate of hope. They lived in a world in which they knew they were nothing and they could not escape except into the world of the loyal commissar and that was only for a few. Their only escape was family and barring that a bottle of vodka.


Huge parts of the world still live in some facsimile of this existence although it has been steadily waning.


My glimpse into Soviet wretchedness


Robert Fulford | 13/09/14 




In its world premiere this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, a French film called “Friends from France” aroused in me anxious memories. In the opening scene, the stars going through Soviet passport control look extremely worried. It’s 1976 and they are bringing gifts for refuseniks, Russian Jews who were treated as pariahs because they had applied for visas to Israel.


Two visitors, masquerading as tourists, are afraid they’ll be caught doing something illegal. I know how they feel. I, too, went to Russia, on the same errand.


The Soviets severely punished Jews who wanted to leave. Bureaucrats stripped them of their professional credentials, whether they were mathematicians or kindergarten teachers. Unemployable, they were told to wait for their visas. This meant living in limbo for years, maybe (so far as anyone knew) forever.


In France, Anne Weil decided to go to Russia to help them. The idea was to reassure the refuseniks that there were people elsewhere, Jews and others, who cared about their treatment. The visitors took along goods (ranging from books in Hebrew to diapers).


Weil is the co-author and co-director, with Philippe Kotlarski, of “Friends from France.” The script, often touching but sometimes clumsy, combines two love stories, an unintended pregnancy and a smuggled manuscript.


What I worried about at passport control was the computer I was bringing so that a refusenik group in Moscow could use it to keep their records. In 1988, I didn’t even know how to turn on a computer. What if the border guards asked me to demonstrate how it worked?


None did, as it turned out. They ignored it and instead insisted on reading my file of clippings on refuseniks. One guard actually summoned a friend to show him an article. After a half-hour delay, they gave back the clippings and waved me through.


This was on a two-week trip with Professor Irving Abella, Rev. John Erb and John Oostrom, a former Tory MP. Our chief (and shepherd) was Wendy Eisen, a veteran of the refusenik campaign.


In Moscow and St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad), we spoke with dozens of people who were in effect prisoners, caged by a state that was methodically making their lives miserable. They were brave and determined, and managed to see the comedy in their situation, most of it related to ham-handed bureaucrats.


In Leningrad, I went to a party for a family that had its visa and was to leave the next day. The grandfather showed me the Second World War medals that he would wear on his Red Army uniform as he left the country.


The Soviet bosses viewed all their citizens with contempt, not just the Jews. I understood the depth of their disdain only when I saw the Beriozkas stores and restaurants, state businesses accessible only to foreigners with hard currency or credit cards. They had all the best food and liquor. With just that one enterprise, the state imposed an insulting class system on a society that claimed to be classless. When I bought a drink for a refusenik couple in a Beriozkas bar, they were treated as interlopers.


I missed the last few days of our program in Leningrad because of a brutal toothache. A refusenik recommended I consult a children’s dentist who had lost her credentials after she applied for a visa. Without much equipment, she carried on a clandestine practice in her apartment. She said I needed root-canal therapy. “But go home to have it. Don’t let a Russian dentist touch your mouth!” Russian dentists had a poor reputation, apparently even among other Russian dentists.


A character in “Friends from France” says that in the USSR she learned certain truths about freedom that never seemed crucial back home. Similarly, my talks with the refuseniks made me realize, on an emotional level, that you are never even slightly free when you do not have the right to leave your country without official permission.


Homeward bound, I got a plane to Helsinki at the Leningrad airport. More education awaited me there. The people in the terminal were glum as they drank their coffee, glum while they filed onto the plane, glum when they took their seats. Then the cabin staff locked the doors for take-off–and immediately, as if cued by a producer, everyone smiled in unison, the biggest smiles I ever saw.


It was a silent but eloquent critique of a political system that was then (though no one knew it) coming to the end of its brutal and wretched life.


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