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A Trip to Siberia
| Article
# : |
19718 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
5,259 Words |
| Author
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Nikita Moravsky
Nikita Moravsky is a retired cultural attaché to the U.S.
Embassy in Moscow, former deputy chief of the USSR division of
the Voice of America, and former George Washington University
and American University lecturer. |
Stopping in Moscow recently en route to Siberia, where my father helped overthrow the Bolsheviks in 1918, my wife Carol and I were taken to the new monument erected in front of the KGB headquarters in memory of the victims of Soviet concentration camps. Our host was Iulii Anatol'evich Schreider, a doctor of philosophy and mathematician who works at the Institute of Parapsychology of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
He is of Jewish origin but culturally and psychologically considers himself a Russian. After being expelled from the Soviet Communist Party in 1984 for his religious views, Schreider became a Christian philosopher. He converted to Roman Catholicism and was recently granted an audience by Pop John Paul II. During our brief stay in Moscow, he registered his recently founded Catholic club, Dukhovnyi dialog (Spiritual dialogue), and is working on having the building of an old Anglican Church transferred to Moscow's Russian Catholic community. His wife, Tatiana Dmitrievna, is a mathematics professor at Moscow State University, and is active in the Russian Orthodox Church.
We were staying in their apartment through the good offices of Elena Alexandrovna Kuklina of Akademgorodok, who had arranged our program in Siberia. Iulii Anatol'evich took us to the monument in front of the infamous Lubianka prison. It commemorates all the victims of the Soviet regime, not of the Stalin era alone.
The massive, irregular block of stone at its center was brought in late 1990 from Solovetskii Island in the White Sea, site of the first Soviet concentration camp established under Lenin. Standing in front of the monument, Schreider and I took off our hats and recited the Lord's Prayer aloud in Church Slavonic.
The surrounding crowd of spectators fell silent. Most bowed their heads with us. I thought of my father; though he didn't die at the hands of Bolshevik executioners, he was forced by them to flee his homeland and died a homesick and broken man in an alien and inhospitable land.
My own first visit to the Soviet Union wasn't until 1963, when I spent eight months as an exhibit deputy director. Then I was a cultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow from 1965 to 1967. This was my first return after twenty-three years, and a first chance to see the Siberian land of my father, a land I couldn't visit during those previous stays.
The prisoner's
...
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