Man from the Magazine.

Alexander Lukashenko is the offspring of another universe.

He graduated from the Mogilev Pedagogical Institute (now Mogilev State A. Kuleshov University) in 1975, after 4 years studying there and the Belarusian Agricultural Academy in Horki in 1985.

He served in the Border Guard (frontier troops) from 1975 to 1977, where he was an instructor of the political department of military unit No. 2187 of the Western Frontier District in Brest and in the Soviet Army from 1980 to 1982. In addition, he led an All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol) chapter in Mogilev from 1977 to 1978. While in the Soviet Army, Lukashenko was a deputy political officer of the 120th Guards Motor Rifle Division, which was based in Minsk. He later rejoined as a tank specialist.

In 1979, he joined the ranks of the CPSU. After leaving the military, he became the deputy chairman of a collective farm in 1982 and in 1985, he was promoted to the post of director of the Gorodets state farm and construction materials plant in the Shkloŭ district. In 1987, he was appointed as the director of the Gorodets state farm in Shkloŭ district and in early 1988, was one of the first in Mogilev Region to introduce a leasing contract to a state farm.

The Soviet system, of which Belarus was a component until the USSR fell apart in 1991, functioned to advance non-entities like Lukashenko. In some ways, like making a university education available to those of hardscrabble upbringings, this was admirable.

And, glancing at Lukashenko's CV, it can be seen that he knew exactly how the bread was buttered. In short, he gravitated to the political organizations attached to the military and agriculture, proving his bona fides in these groupings, where the real power resided. It's entirely reasonable to imagine that had the USSR not collapsed, Lukashenko still would have emerged as a regional power broker.

How much any of this matters now is an open question. This article explains it quite well without quoting the late Kenny Rogers ("The Gambler").

We also can assume that Lukashenko has a nest egg in the Bank of the Kremlin should event require relocation.

'We will perish': embattled Lukashenko sends SOS to Putin, by Andrew Roth (The Guardian)

Belarusian leader seeks Kremlin support against external threats as analysts predict an end to his rule

 ... Putin has stopped short of offering support or an endorsement of Lukashenko, who is facing the gravest crisis of his career. It is likely that Moscow will wait and see whether Lukashenko can survive the next weeks or even days, as protests and labour strikes grow and pressure mounts on him to leave office.

“Now it’s clear that Lukashenko’s era is over, and I think that’s clear for everyone in Moscow, including in the Kremlin,” said Dmitry Suslov, a professor and foreign affairs expert at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics.

Even if the Belarusian leader does limp through this crisis, Suslov said, his model of president-for-life probably will not. People around Lukashenko are reported to have already sounded out the Kremlin on fleeing to Russia if he is deposed, according to a Bloomberg report ...

Russiagate: "The question now is, has the Mueller report finally freed up the rest of us to challenge the more insane flights of fantasy?"

But was it consummated?

As usual The Onion wins.

Shocked Vladimir Putin Slowly Realizing He Didn’t Conspire With Trump Campaign (The Onion)

‘Who The Hell Was I Working With Then?’ Asks Russian President

MOSCOW—Saying that he had been “totally blindsided” by the revelations from the recently released findings of the Mueller investigation, a shocked Vladimir Putin reportedly came to the realization Tuesday that he didn’t conspire with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign after all ...

... "I spent so much time emailing back and forth with DonaldTrump46@hotmail.com about compromising the democratic voting process, and now it turns out it was all fake?"

America spent the Cold War exaggerating the capability of our Soviet foes, so I suppose we might as well travel the same path with Putin and today's Russians. Concurrently I loathe Trump, but persist in believing we must do things for the right reason -- or it's just more fake news. 

This essay from an old Russian hand amid the journalistic ranks hits all the correct notes. Russiagate has been a massive distraction from discussions that should have been taking place since The Donald became president.

Russiagate: The Great Tragic Comedy of Modern Journalism, by Matt Bivens (Medium)

 ... I was not surprised to see politicians up on their hind legs, panting mindlessly about Russians. But to see journalists at CNN, The New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, competing to be even dumber … hot on the trail of a non-story, recklessly discarding fairness and professionalism … dragging us gleefully down every rabbit hole … applauding the collateral damage to bystanders, as they indulge their collective rage against Donald Trump, their hysterical certainty that he must be a Russian asset … What can I say? It’s been heart-breaking.

I know of smart, progressive-leaning journalists who politically oppose Donald Trump, but who feel like strangers in their own newsrooms, afraid to speak out against this mob psychosis. When I meet old colleagues, we have to feel each other out cautiously, until with relief we realize: Thank God, you’re not one of them — not one of the pod people from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” that might point at me and scream.

I would hear their tales of the lunacy in their journalistic operations, shake my head in concern, wish them the best. And then I’d go back to my job in the emergency department, taking care of people with heart attacks and strokes and broken bones.

Watching from afar, I would cheer on those few brave enough to ask questions — people like Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, Aaron Maté of The Real News, John Solomon of The Hill, Masha Gessen at The New York Review of Books, and my old friends Leonid Bershidsky at Bloomberg and especially Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. And I would wait for the madness to end. But it didn’t.

And then Stephen Cohen of The Nation, another voice of reason, sent me a copy of his book, “War With Russia?” It’s a collection of his heretical writings about our new, unnecessary Cold War, and the opening essay, adapted from a talk he gave in Washington D.C., made me ashamed of my silence.

“Some people who privately share our concerns — again, in Congress, the media, universities and think tanks — do not speak out at all. For whatever reason — concern about being stigmatized, about their career, personal disposition — they are silent. But in our democracy, where the cost of dissent is relatively low, silence is no longer a patriotic option,” Cohen wrote, adding, “We should exempt from this imperative young people, who have more to lose. A few have sought my guidance, and I always advise, ‘Even petty penalties for dissent in regard to Russia could adversely affect your career. At this stage of life, your first obligation is to your family and thus to your future prospects. Your time to fight lies ahead’.”

Well, what was my excuse?

Special Prosecutor Robert S. Mueller has now turned in his findings, and there’s not much there. For weeks beforehand, mainstream media warned about this — exhorting readers against succumbing to feeling “disappointed”.

Disappointed? I guess, as my friend Taibbi has noted, it would have been an immense relief had the U.S. president been found to be a high-level traitor. We could have all brought picnic lunches to his execution.

Right before the species-ending war with Russia.

In their fanatic loyalty to the narrative, what used to be my favorite media have stridently reminded us that, Mueller aside, “it’s not over!” The “focus of the investigation” will move now to the New York prosecutors, to House committees. The American intelligentsia will continue to dream up wild theories — they’ll be Scotch-taped on every vertical surface, connected by bits of yarn and magic marker scribbles and hyperverbal mania.

The question now is, has the Mueller report finally freed up the rest of us to challenge the more insane flights of fantasy? Or is it instead so close to the 2020 presidential elections — and so legally dangerous for some of the intelligence insiders who have tried to bring down the president — that skeptical journalists more than ever will be bullied to keep silent?

An excellent four-part documentary film about recent Russian history called Moscow's Empire.

It has been only 26 years since the Soviet Union dissolved, which is a blip in the overall timeline of history. Absent context, little can be understood with respect to what this span really means.

Conceding from the outset that this four-part documentary film is very Eurocentric -- it includes nothing about what has been happening east of the Urals and in the various -stans -- it remains a valuable overview of the past two and a half decades of Russian history.

Moscow’s Empire (Deutsche Welle)

The four-part documentary Moscow’s Empire shows how the former Soviet nations faced an anarchic decade marked by military conflicts and the search for new national identities and a new self-awareness.

In the late 1970s the Soviet empire began to crumble. After the fall of the Iron Curtain it fell apart completely in 1991 - bankrupt, traumatized and humiliated on the world stage. The former Soviet nations then faced an anarchic decade marked by military conflicts and the search for new national identities and a new self-awareness.

The end of a decade of upheavals saw the rise of a ”new tsar” at the helm in Russia, determined to guide the ”old” empire” back to former global power. After becoming president in 2000, Vladimir Putin began undoing the internal chaos that had beset the country, while at the same time restricting newly won freedoms. His leadership style was authoritarian and arguably autocratic. Moscow became an increasingly confident player on the international stage, aiming to limit on western influence.

The war in Georgia, and above all the recent conflict in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea exacerbated the divide between East and West. A new Cold War appears to have emerged, returning conditions to the 1980s. The four-part documentary Moscow’s Empire looks for answers to these developments, and provides a variety of perspectives on life in the former Soviet block countries - from the people who have experienced events at first hand and in some cases shaped them.

Following are the four parts.

1


2


3


4


Part four of the documentary ends with Russia's annexation of Crimea in March, 2014, and the subsequent imposition of sanctions by the USA and EU. Nothing is said about Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine (presumably by Russian irregulars) on July 17, 2014.

Fighting has continued in Ukraine since then, and of course there is an ongoing investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 American election. This article from August is an update in the vein of Deutsche Welle's fine documentary film.

The punishment continues: America’s new economic sanctions may hurt Russia’s recovery (The Economist)

But whether they will change Vladimir Putin’s behaviour is another matter

 ... As Mr Putin looks towards his fourth term (he is expected to win next year’s election), Russians are more concerned with their wallets than with Crimea. Growth this year is projected to be 2% or less. For the elite, the prospect of long-term stagnation and endless standoff with the West raises questions about the country’s direction. “The sense of an historic dead-end evokes panic,” writes Vladimir Frolov, a Russian analyst. Sanctions will not cause Mr Putin to reverse course, but they do make it harder for him to drive his way out.

Wastin' away again in Nizhny Novgorod: "Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives."

As I remember him (photo credit).

Since I've been to Russia a few times ...

Euro ’85, Part 30 … Or, as it was called at the time, Leningrad.

"My shoes are filled with Volga mud ... "

 ... and once might well have enjoyed fine East German beer in the same room as Vladimir Putin ...

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part One).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Two).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Three).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Four).

 ... I'm designating myself the reigning local expert. As such, my expertise compels me to defer to a journalist who actually lived in Russia for a long time. Ladies and gentlemen, the inimitable Matt Taibbi.

Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

 ... Even I think there should be a legitimate independent investigation – one that, given Trump's history, might uncover all sorts of things. But almost irrespective of what ends up being uncovered on the Trump side, the public prosecution of this affair has taken on a malevolent life of its own.

One way we recognize a mass hysteria movement is that everyone who doesn't believe is accused of being in on the plot. This has been going on virtually unrestrained in both political and media circles in recent weeks.

I believe drinking more Radeberger is not a potential key to resolving Russia's economic difficulties.

It's worth noting that Mikhail Gorbachev's response to the 1980s-era problems cited below was not to dismantle the Soviet Union, but to reform it, something only an "insider" could hope to achieve. However, once Gorby the Insider went under the hood and began tinkering with rotted parts, dismantlement was the direct result.

There was far too much sand and not enough cement.

Putin's new edition of Mother Russia may not be quite that dilapidated. If it is, we may wish to be ready for the consequences. I enjoyed drinking beers in Volodya's general proximity while in Dresden all those years ago, but as I've learned time and time again in my own life, nostalgic beer memories seldom pay the bills.

Russia's Economy Is Collapsing. Here's What You Need to Know, by Jenna McLaughlin (Mother Jones)

... Why did the Soviet Union lose control of its satellite states behind the Iron Curtain in 1989? Lots of reasons, but the proximate cause was a disastrous war in Afghanistan; plummeting oil prices; and a resulting economic crisis.

War, sanctions, an oil crash, and finally bankruptcy. And while history may not repeat itself, it sure does rhyme sometimes: 25 years later Vladimir Putin has managed to back himself into a situation surprisingly similar to the one that led to the end of the Soviet Union and the final victory of the West—the very event that's motivated almost everything he's done over the past few years. This is either ironic or chilling, depending on your perspective.

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Four).

In 1989, Dresden was the sort of destination that merited two days of sightseeing before rejoining the train for Prague or Berlin. Before World War II, the city’s history, architecture and position astride the Elbe prompted frequent comparisons with the Czech capital. These comments largely ceased following the still controversial Allied bombings in February, 1945, which killed perhaps 40,000 residents, reduced the city’s center to kindling, and were witnessed by Hoosier soldier Kurt Vonnegut, who incorporated his experience in his 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.

To this very day, feelings are hard. In 1989, the East German the sluggish regime was lightning fast when it came to exploiting the past for political purposes.

It should suffice to say that with the exception of the Zwinger Palace and Opera House, the GDR didn’t make a truly serious effort to restore Dresden’s grandeur during the Communists’ 40-year run. Bits and pieces of pre-war Dresden, most of them pockmarked by unrepaired bombing damage, survived, resting uneasily alongside shoddy Communist-built, high-rise buildings built from unpainted, pre-fabricated concrete.

Culturally, the city was in a time warp even by the GDR’s standards, situated such that it was popularly reckoned to be the only part of East Germany unable to receive West German television transmissions – and in Communist countries, it wasn’t possible to stroll to the neighborhood Engels-Mart and buy a satellite dish.

But … there were certain advantages.

Maybe just one.

Analogous to West Germany, where the beer always seemed better in the southern region of Bavaria, the beer brewed in and around Dresden tasted better, and none more so than Radeberger Pilsner, brewed just outside Dresden, and served in the city’s most user friendly beer drinking venue, the Radeberger Keller. It was a below-ground restaurant downtown, and we went there every night of our stay to cool our heels, kill time and drink what for us was extremely cheap, good beer.

We had little else to do, although one evening Jeff and I entertained our fellow foreigners, especially the heavy drinking Finn, with a bout of “drinking wine spo-dee-o-dee, which we defined as alternate shots of Cuban dark rum and Bulgarian cabernet.

The service staff at the Radeberger Keller was a shade surly and inefficient in the typical fashion of the Bloc, which didn’t institutionally value such merits of customer service, but traditional beer hall etiquette was honored, and we were allowed to seat ourselves wherever open spaces permitted, with one exception.

One seating area, a gallery off to the side, was perpetually festooned with “Reserviert” signage, and not coincidentally, it was always filled with the privileged caste. In East German terms, this meant the friendly faces, brown uniforms and dingy black suits of the Soviet officers and bureaucrats who liberated Dresden from the Nazis in 1945, and never bothered to leave.

In 1989, there were almost 500,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany, and a sizeable contingent resided near Dresden, where a branch office of the KGB maintained a fraternal presence, and although there’d have been no way of my knowing it then, at least one of those KGB officers assigned to the area had come to develop as much affection for Radeberger Pilsner as my motley group of Western volunteer workers.

None other than Vladimir Putin, in fact.

You may recall that Putin became acting President of Russia on the last day of 1999 and was legally elected to the office a few months later. Around this time, an English language translation of a slim Putin biography appeared, and my friend Jon loaned me his copy. Putin’s first-person testimony about his six years as one of the KGB’s men in Dresden included the frank admission that he found Radeberger delightful, so much so that it threatened the continued viability of his slim, athletic build by distracting him from exercise. Furthermore, when not dieting, he confessed to frequenting the Radeberger Keller.

As an aside, having visited the former Soviet Union on three occasions prior to the 1989 stay in Dresden documented here, I can say with perfect candor that Soviet beer was wretched, indeed, and in general terms didn’t rise to the level even of the bilious beer occasionally brewed in East Germany. But Radberger was a famous export label, and there was profit to be derived from it, so the brand was not degraded. Presumably the hoarded hops were going in the Radeberger instead of the people’s lager.

In retrospect, Putin’s fascination with Radeberger seems quite reasonable to me in the context of the time and place. After all, I was right there in the same beer hall, equally fascinated, though not only by the merits of the beer, also by the denizens of that perpetually reserved gallery off to the side, with the officers and bureaucrats of what in effect was an occupying power, albeit in one with a steadily ticking shelf life, drinking beer and having it all in a captive foreign land.

And so, in the final, authorized version of my five days in Dresden in 1989, there can be no confirmation that Putin was ever among those fellow Russians in the Radeberger Keller’s reserved seating area, much less that he and I drank beer together. I still believe it, anyway. The only famous person I ever met was Alvin Dark, manager of the 1974 Oakland A’s world championship club, and laying claim to beers with the future president of Russia is both more interesting and validates the way I spent the late summer of 1989.

Along with the rest of his statue, Lenin’s shoes were removed from the Volkspark entrance after unification. I’d have liked to have them as souvenirs of one of the most unforgettable times ever.

I wonder what Putin remembers?

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Three).

Once the volunteer brigade was billeted at the Planterwald quasi-M*A*S*H camp in East Berlin, we began an unforgettable three weeks of daily work. It wasn’t tremendously difficult, if occasionally dirty, and followed invariably by nightly beer drinking, both at the camp and various other pubs both near and far.

After a few evenings, our favorite became an underground Keller near Alexanderplatz that served Wernesgruner, one of the few East German beers brewed to West German standards.

Granted, cheap beer was plentiful in grocery stores, which were well provisioned by the prevailing standards of the Bloc. These simple lagers were palatable at minimum levels of price, flavor and alcoholic content, but it was revealed later (after unification) that those East German brewers responsible for producing everyday beers often were forced to substitute other bitter substances in place of sometimes unavailable or too expensive hops.

Like bile from the stomachs of cattle.

Yes, really.

Each weekday morning at around 6:00 a.m., I’d rise from the top bunk, usually bleary-eyed and hung over, and watch the girls in our co-ed tent get dressed. Afterwards I’d freshen myself at the shower tent, splashing some water on my face and brushing my teeth, and then adjourn to the mess tent for rolls and coffee or tea. Some days I’d buy a bottle of local “Maracuja” soft drink for refreshment. After that, it was a ten minute walk to the S-Bahn station, and then another 10 minutes aboard the train before the changing point. The second S-Bahn train deposited us somewhat near the job site, but too far to walk, so we always took a street car for the final mile.

My friend Jeff Price was in my group, along with an Italian, a Finn (both of them male), and a woman from Northern Ireland. There was another woman from West Germany, and then two guys and two gals from the FDJ. We worked alongside veteran employees of the East Berlin parks department, and I noticed early on that none of them seemed eager to abandon socialism for the enticements of the capitalist world. In short, they pretended to work, and their bosses pretended to pay them. To most, especially one named Wolfgang, this was an excellent arrangement indeed.

At first, I resolved to play it straight and at least try to put in a full day’s work for a full day’s pay, but from the beginning there was much to warn against the futility of such an honest approach.

At an orientation of sorts prior to being handed shovels, we’d been lectured by the volunteer brigade’s Communist party functionary (an older man with ludicrously black-dyed hair) about the importance of the labor, and the East German student assigned to translate the man’s utterances couldn’t help mocking them aloud, safe in the knowledge that the functionary couldn’t speak a word of English.

Our translator’s greatest scorn was reserved for the bureaucrat’s admonition against consuming alcohol on the job. In fact, virtually all the East German students in attendance raised their eyebrows and giggled, and for the next three weeks, my own group made daily lunchtime visits to the secluded park Imbiss for one or two half-liters of low-alcohol Berliner Weiss emit Schuss (with a shot of non-alcoholic raspberry syrup added).

Sometimes we even ate lunch.

Weekends were for exploration. Sometimes Jeff would accompany me, but most often I’d wander off alone to walk through the neighborhoods and try to get a feel for life in the capital of the GDR. Both halves of Berlin were subsidized by their respective sovereign nations to serve as showplaces of the economic systems espoused by each, and accordingly, West Berlin was hyper-Western and East Berlin just as over the top in the other direction, yet they shared the characteristics that preceded the forced division of the city.

The Wall was omnipresent, yet seldom seen during my ramblings. You just felt it.

The entire city had been laid waste during WWII, and while West Berlin retained almost no discernable scars of the conflict, bullet holes could still be seen amid the crumbling brownish-gray, coal smoke stained stucco of the surviving housing stock in East Berlin.

Newsstands touting “news of the world” instead stocked only East Bloc papers and the broadsheets of Communist parties abroad.

Time itself was a variable concept. One Sunday morning I was strolling down a deserted street when I heard familiar music coming from an opened third-story window. It was Country Joe & the Fish, circa 1968: “One, two, three, what are we fighting for?”

I’d buy a greasy sausage, watch people walk through the parks, and a Trabant would rumble past. All of it was grist for an earnest contemplation of the meaning of geopolitical life.

It would require thousands of words to retell all the stories, and perhaps someday there’ll be time to rewrite this narrative and tell a few more of them. However, the point today is to explain the Baylor-Putin beer-drinking symmetry, and to do so, I must now fast-forward to the end of the three-week active work segment, the harvesting of my final weekly pay packet of a crisp 100 Ostmark note bearing the visage of Karl Marx, and the delivery of the stated bonus owed the Western contingent in exchange for our labor.

From the beginning, we volunteers had been promised an extra payout at the conclusion of work. Presumably, we’d be rewarded with a week as pampered guests of the FDJ, time spent touring the GDR outside East Berlin. We’d stay in cluttered university dorms, eat in minimalist university cafeterias, and meet committed socialist university students from different parts of the country.

The reality of this reward proved far less comprehensive than what had been promised. Something was up, and apparently we had become afterthoughts. Our escorts, practicing leftists from West Germany and Switzerland who were demonstrating the art and science of the junket, weren’t shy in expressing their annoyance at the absence of preparations and unexplained changes in the schedule.

In the end, and with some difficulty, we were able to transfer from East Berlin by train to Rostock on the Baltic coastline for two rainy nights before being shifted all the way back through East Berlin southward to Dresden, close by the Czechoslovak border, where we were warehoused for five days – roughly three too many.

Yes, there was the Zwinger palace and Opera House, and an excursion by Elbe steamer to the castle at Konigstein proved quite fascinating. But, honestly, it became boring after two days, and we began examining options, of which there were few.

Among the cities we were supposed to have visited was Leipzig. The visit was summarily cancelled, and when a small group of us tried to buy tickets to make the journey ourselves by train from Dresden, the officials at the ticket window literally shut it in our faces. Why couldn’t we go to Leipzig? We didn’t know it then, but the rumbling of protests was beginning to be heard there, and by September, rallies were a weekly occurrence. Undoubtedly the East German authorities didn’t want us to know, and didn’t want us to go.

We were stuck inside of Dresden, with the Leipzig blues again.

(Part 4 is tomorrow)

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Two).

My miniscule role in the GDR’s final socialist summer came about because of a stubborn determination to be different from the rest of the backpacking tourists, and to spend as much time as possible in the Soviet Bloc during my months-long European sojourn in 1989. I’d become fascinated with the countries behind the Iron Curtain, and ideology was no consideration for me.

In fact, as an abortive attempt to visit North Korea earlier in the year proved, none of their Parties would have me as a member – but I never felt safer than when wandering through a police state as a simple onlooker.

For budget travelers like me, the GDR was one of the tougher Communist nuts to crack. With the sole exception of turncoat Yugoslavia, a passport alone usually was not sufficient to gain entry to the countries comprising the Bloc. Official permission in the form of a visa, either obtained stateside prior to departure or approved at an embassy somewhere in Europe, also was required.

However, merely possessing a valid passport and official visa still did not constitute final approval. Upon arrival, the traveler customarily was required to register with the governmental authorities, and the most common way of doing so was to report to the state bank and engage in the ritual of the mandatory currency exchange.

A specified number of dollars per day of one’s approved duration of stay was swapped for useless local currency, which was even more worthless – literally not worth the paper it was printed on – if carried out of the country afterwards, and which could not be exchanged back into dollars before leaving unless the minimum required exchange had been exceeded. That’s assuming someone could be located to perform the exchange function while a train was parked at the border being inspected by angular uniformed soldiers carrying machine guns.

In effect, the entire territory of the East Bloc was tantamount to the company store, and you had to use company scrip to buy most items. In large measure, eating and drinking proved fabulously cheap, as were hostels and home stays in “private” rooms available in slightly more liberal Bloc locales like Hungary (I use the “L” word with due caution).

As you might expect, the notoriously hardline GDR was little interested in budget travelers, backpackers, hippies and other forms of decadent Western life, even if it desired the hard currency we carried in our money belts. Prepayment of expensive hotel rooms was the norm in East Germany. The question for me was this: How to spend time in the GDR without breaking the bank?

----

The answer came from Vermont.

Volunteers for Peace was, and remains, an organization dedicated to the principle of international volunteer exchanges between all willing nations, and generally speaking, among people of all ages. During the Cold War, VFP provided numerous opportunities to evade the restrictive entry requirements outlined above in return for a modest registration fee and two or three weeks of volunteer work toward a specified project, which might be assisting at an archeological site, or helping rebuild a house for use as a daycare center, or agricultural work.

Problem solved. A $100 registration fee was mailed to VFP, the requisite visa paperwork completed, and the GDR was penciled into a summer’s itinerary that included June in Czechoslovakia with my friend Jiri’s family and three July weeks in Moscow dedicated to studying the Russian language -- although as it turned out, used primarily to roam the streets in search of glasnost-level excitement.

With almost two months of adventures behind me, the last week of July offered a few recuperative days of decadent R & R in West Berlin, but first I had to get from the last stop on the East Berlin side to my destination in West Berlin. I was encumbered with booty gleaned from the USSR, which proved to be a challenge getting past East German border control; having succeeded, it subsequently cost far more to mail all of it home from West Berlin than it had required to amass through swapping Marlboros and logoed university t-shirts.

A few bureaucratic prerequisites later, the S-Bahn train rolled into Zoo Station on the west side of the Wall. I was keeping company with several Americans who’d been in the Russian language program with me. Collectively we met Professor Donald Barry, my cousin, and quickly embarked upon a five-day alcoholic binge, with my new friends gradually peeling off for their own adventures elsewhere until only Don and I remained for a final evening at Dickie Wirtin’s for goulash and lager.

The next day, still in West Berlin, I followed instructions to a cold-water flat where several of the Western volunteers had been asked to meet, including my Louisville friend Jeff. We prepared a communal meal, drank a few bottled beers that I’d packed, and chatted about the month to come. The evening was spent curled up on the wooden floor, with occasional interruptions as our hostess tended to her baby. Bread, jam and tea was for breakfast, and then we rode the subway back to Zoo Station, and over the Wall to Friedrichstrasse station, itself located in East Berlin, but also serving as a West Berlin public transportation stop and the control point to East Germany.

Later that afternoon, joined by others who’d come from different directions, we had our first glimpse of the place that would serve as home for the coming three weeks. Some distance from the epicenter of East Berlin, in a wooded park by a lake, and only a short distance from Treptower, location of the grandiose Soviet WWII memorial, was a fenced compound not unlike the M*A*S*H encampment on television. It was constructed entirely from surplus East Germany military tents and equipment, and there were showers, latrines, a commissary, a stage and a shop. We were divided eight to a co-ed tent, in which there were bunk beds, blankets and little else.

Roughly two thirds of the campers were East German college students, members of the Frei Deutsche Jugend – FDJ – in effect, the Communist youth organization, and the pathway to career advancement. Each summer, the FDJ’s stalwarts “volunteered” to do socially useful work for the Fatherland. I was among roughly one hundred Westerners permitted to do the same, and naturally, we were deemed useful for propaganda purposes, although I must say that the impending exhaustion of the GDR’s ideals probably should have been evident from the absence of intensive propaganda instruction. They seemed positively bored with the whole idea.

Had I considered it, there was another clue as to the disintegrating state of the East Bloc. Whereas the FDJ’s annual Planterwald international volunteer brigade was supposed to include representation from the entire Soviet-controlled expanse, there were conspicuous absences in the summer of 1989. The Poles, infected with the contagion of Solidarity, had not been invited. Neither were the Hungarians, who unbeknownst to us had opened their border with Austria earlier that same summer – enabling the belching Trabants to stream through.

Granted, there were Bulgarians, Czechs and Romanians, and quite a few Cubans, the latter being among the most sought after targets on the part of unattached East German girls, of which there were many.

Me? Lie always, I was just happy to have a bunk and a beer.

(Part Three is tomorrow)

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part One).

It has been six long years since the last time I shared this story of drinking beer with Vladimir Putin, and given that the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s dismantlement approaches, a “rewind” is in order. First, a mild disclaimer.

This tale from 1989 has unexpectedly taken on a life all its own, with requests for clarification pouring in from near and far, and so readers need to be aware from the outset that my beers with Putin cannot be scientifically verified. It was the pre-selfie era, and there is no photographic evidence to prove our presence together, seated at the same table in the Dresden beer hall on that particular evening.

All of which effectively begs the question: Exactly how did Mr. Putin and I come to be located in the same approximate geographical vicinity in the first place?

Well, it’s all because I spent the first three weeks of August, 1989, buffing and polishing V. I. Lenin’s shoes, and this is where the account begins.

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More specifically, the footwear in question was attached to a gargantuan statue of Lenin, prominently located at the entrance to the Volkspark Friedrichshain in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic, henceforth to be referred to here as East Germany or the GDR. The ultimate objective of my voluntarily proffered shoeshine -- and tree planting, and landscaping -- was to make things look tidy and respectable in the Volkspark, which was cleverly reclaimed atop mounds of bombed-out rubble from World War II, and served afterward as the front yard for a hospital that often disgorged armless and legless pensioners into the summer sun for their afternoon constitutionals.

The stodgy and doctrinaire East German officialdom was in a summer deep cleaning mood of sorts that long ago August, because an important celebration was being planned for September, 1989, when the GDR would be throwing a party in honor of its 40th birthday. Among the prestigious guests expected to attend was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, progenitor of many socio-political trends that were not making the East German leadership very happy at the time.

In fact, there had already been embarrassingly public signs that ordinary East Germans were prepared to take Gorbachev’s attempted reforms seriously, and if unable to safely agitate for glasnost and perestroika within the GDR, then to do the next best thing: Vamoose. They were driving their tiny asbestos-laden Trabants to Hungary for sanctioned holidays, then disappearing across the only recently porous Hungarian border into Austria, where transit visas brought them to West Germany, sanctuary and immediate citizenship.

But none of that yet mattered at the beginning of August, at least not in terms of ultimate outcomes, and so there were branches to be pruned, trees to be planted, hedges trimmed and streets swept until they groaned with unfamiliarity. The GDR certainly tried its best to look the way its press clippings always proclaimed it did, although it generally didn’t, and perhaps somewhere in a declassified Stasi file there exists a yellowed photo of me with a shovel in one hand and a mug of raspberry infused Berliner Weisse bier in the other.

And that’s because hidden away in the center of the Volkspark was an Imbiss, a small sausage, snack and beer vending stand – usually with rows of wheelchairs parked in front – and while the recommended workers’ commissary back at the dilapidated main shop was cheaper, it served the same basic meal of sausages and soup every single day.

There wasn’t any beer there, either.

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Of course, we know today that the GDR’s birthday bash, while smashingly choreographed, didn’t entirely go over as planned. In fact, 40 proved to be as good (and old) as it ever got for Communism, Teuton-style. Behind the scenes, over champagne and cocktail weenies, Gorbachev sternly lectured the hidebound East German nabobs and all but disengaged the USSR from its surrogate’s future, setting crazy wheels into motion that culminated with a not-quite-as-old-Turk party upheaval, lapdog Erich Honecker’s sacking, the fall of the Berlin Wall (Honecker’s own pet project), and the abruptly disintegrated GDR’s unceremonious landing atop history’s scrap heap – all within an incredibly brief four-month period, 25 years ago.

That’s a hellacious hangover by almost any standard, especially for a whole country, but naturally I didn’t know any of this while enduring border pleasantries, and although hindsight affords the clarity to recognize that selected warning flags were beginning to fly, some already quite animatedly, there was no credible reason at the time to believe that substantive change was just around the corner.

Earlier that same year, Honecker had maintained the Wall would stand for 50 or perhaps 100 more years, so long as the conditions prefacing it remained unchanged. It seemed so, and we saw no reason to suspend the laggardly formation of an East German-American Friendship Society back in Louisville, and to prematurely renounce the junkets we imagined such an organization would offer us during the glorious proletarian future to come.

It turns out we were mistaken. What’s more, we weren’t the only ones.

(Part Two tomorrow)