(In which Manual Scan/Lemons Are Yellow vet Paul Kaufman finds himself back in the USSR.)
Here’s Part Two in a short series of examples of how my young self was Dead Wrong on some major issues of our time.
A defining event for our generation is that we were the last to come to adulthood during the Cold War. Remember the Cold War, kids? Soul-crushing, Gulag-filling Soviet dictatorship on one side, anyone-against-them-is-our-friend (nevermind the atrocities) NATO on the other, both armed to the teeth. This lead to deadly, pointless quagmires on both sides (Afghanistan for them, Vietnam for us). For all the vile waste of life and resources this arrangement created, it was a form of stability.
So, did anyone here think the Soviet Union would just sort of melt away like a wet witch, without nuclear holocaust, bloody civil war, or even hardly a shot fired? I didn’t.
Having seen the eerie and formidable crossing at Checkpoint Charlie and the larger than life Soviet military icons in East Berlin (with our dear Editor) in person in 1986, I detected no sign that in three years there would be gleeful crowds pickaxing it all down. Yet it happened, and I don’t think I’m alone in being unprepared for the consequences. (It’s pretty obvious that the U.S. has been quite adept in recent years at squandering its resources and good will.)
So, did you see this coming? What other earth-shaking events surprised you (or didn’t)?
— Paul Kaufman
Indeed, I paid a memorable visit to East Berlin as well as Yugoslavia with Paul and Robert Labbe. The Museum of Communist Martyrs in Zagreb rocked the farm equipment!
I also spent about six weeks in Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in ’82 and visited Poland in ’87, where I taught a Warsaw reggae band Noise 292’s “Eyesight for the Blind.”
Going to Eastern Europe in those days seemed freighted with geopolitical significance: Every move seemed like a potential international incident!
Growing up as a military brat (like so many Che-sters) in San Diego, I was deeply influenced by the military occupations that brought our Dads and Moms to “America’s Finest Target”. If growing up under the spectre of nuclear holucaust seemed to affect us, then it probably taught us mostly to enjoy our lives and friends every weekend and ‘party at ground zero…’.
For me, there was never a doubt growing up that I would enter the military in order to go head-to-head with the commies. Although I started in Navy JROTC at Orange Glen; I ended up taking my full-ride four-year Army scholarship to San Diego State University (which only cost $250/semester-basically I took a full scholarship to attend a free school….). Never did I feel ostracized by my peers, who although diametrically opposed to what Reagan’s military policies were, but were tolerant of my chosen military lifestyle. While in the Army, I can say I was one of the people in the 80’s/90’s who had there finger on the button of nuclear weapons (seriously). Thank god we and the Soviets had the restraint to keep from unloosing the Nukes, as the treaties and weapons agreement worked effectively to draw down these major weapons. Fast forward to the mid-nineties: the Soviets and their nukes largely go away; Russia is contained; and peace reigned over the world and we can all sleep easily at night….right?
I’m really enjoying this series of yours Paul. It’s the “now or later” candy for my brain. Have you read the book “Blowback” by Chalmers Johnson? Cold war consequences. I’ve known people who “escaped” from the other side of “The Torn Curtain”. Interesting how fences and boundaries change or fade. The Dalai Lama says: always treat your neighbors with respect, as they might someday be your people. Goes the same for strangers we see everyday -- you never know who’ll move in next door! or be your next best friend.
ok, enough philosophy out of this plebian. you know, when I was very little I thought that a “cold war” was a war that was in the ice and snow! And those Eastern Europeans were all bundled up with those big, furry hats. Ha! Remember “Helmut” and “Yo Yo”?
Yeah…Jerry and I took Russian language classes in high school instead of the usual Spanish or French. We had a Ukranian teacher who rather loathed the commies. I think she may have had a checkered past…she admitted to working for the Nazis as a “translator” when they came through.
She used to tell us “I haf liffed all over ze worlt, Switzerland, Ukraine, all over Europe…and the most beautiful place of all is…El Cajon”
We were a geek school for aspiring scientists so the logic was that we’d need to be in touch with the scientists on the other side of the political divide at some point…so we learned Russian. Silly but there it is.
Later when I moved to SF and my mom followed, she got an apartment in an all Russian building on Geary Blvd, and I was finally able to actually use my Russian to translate for her neighbors.
Da..Ugh.
Patrick Works
Fifth Columnist in Retirement
does anyone else remember the movie “the day after”? yeah, that defined the mood of reagan era cold war. fear based political media tactics at their finest. aka, propaganda. ugh. and the “duck and cover” stuff… kind of like the duct tape rummy told us would work against dirty bombs. it’s always something. right?
my most direct memories come from when karl irving and i went to europe one summer and decided to go to east berlin. it was unreal. when we went through the checkpoint they got all up in karls stuff for a perceived allegiance with insurgents. i was halfway through the maze of doorways when a woman grabbed me and told me they’d taken karl into an interrogation room. i flipped and ran back, found the room and busted in. started yelling something about consulates and geneva conventions. here i was, all 5 foot 2 of me, screaming at armed guards. they just shook their heads and let him go. it was obvs that i was ready to go to the mats for karl.
we spent the rest of the day walking around east berlin. it was beautiful and haunting. the way they kept the first buildings empty and “under construction” to keep the east berliners away from the wall. eating in a cafe where you sat wherever there was an open seat. the tomb of the unknown soldier. the museum where hitler had the steps of the acropolis installed in total. it was all so surreal.
then three years later the wall was down, glasnost, the pink floyd concert, and then ::poof:: no more evil iron curtain.
not a bang. a whimper. such an inauspicious end to the threat of all threats.
word. that bar was there when we were there, too. and yeah, what was that? the empty streets. karl and i were blown away by the “architecture”. i wonder if we were all there at the same time. we were there in 86, too. of all the places we visited that stands out in my memory very large. that and being followed in rome by a security guard who was carrying an uzi and had a scary leer on his face. thankfully karl came out of nowhere and the guy turned tail. ick.
paul, i think i still have some east german marks. i smuggled them out since they were weird about you taking them back across.
Ava: Nope, you were there in ’87, since you and Karl came by just as I was about to return to the U.S. after half a year in Hamburg. 🙂
ah! right. how is annette? have you ever heard from her since she moved back? (god, my memory is great in some areas and terrible in others!)
I think Anette is in West Virginia(?), using a Phd. to good effect in some sort of scientific-publishing capacity, and has a kid. All seems well in her hilly corner of the country. 🙂
i miss that lady. she was a smart cookie. m, i totally remember getting ice cream with you and paying in one pfennig coins.
Navigating Eastern Europe during the Cold War entailed all sorts of strange, unnerving encounters with security forces and the black market. Both were impossible to avoid, especially since we were at times meeting some intellectual types who were under fairly close scrutiny by the government.
I remember lunching with an artist named Milan Knizak in Prague in 1982 (ultimately general director of the National Gallery of the Czech Republic under Havel, but at the time a dissident artist). He cut an outlandish figure for the Warsaw Pact: tall, long-haired, dressed in ’70s hippie style. During our lunch, he gestured over to a nondescript guy in a suit sitting at the next table and said (rather loudly), “See that guy? Secret police … He’s taping this whole conversation!”
I got a bunch of wacky stuff like that … Eating a (horrible) dinner at Warsaw’s only Chinese restaurant with what might have been Poland’s only Zen priest … Helping a panicked expat Slovak friend after he’d lost his U.S. passport in Bratislava … Listening to some really ugly Serbian supremacist rhetoric from a really pretty girl I was crushin’ on in Belgrade … I’m glad I got out to those parts of the world when I did.
Oh! And my dad actually went down to Cuba in 1967 to meet poets there.
Circuitous route through Mexico and back through France, I think … Tore his one pair of pants on the plane and ended up meeting Fidel Castro in a long raincoat … And somehow ended up being taken on a tour of the country’s chicken farms for reasons I never understood.
only you and your dad, man. sheesh. you are my history book.
“It was twenty years ago today”! The wall coming down is one of the great feel-good stories during my life.
>>“It was twenty years ago today”! The wall coming down is one of the great feel-good stories during my life.
Paul: Oh, hey! Yeah, check it out. Time flies! Last time I was in Berlin was 1987 with Camper Van Beethoven, and the place still had an east and a west.
Paul took this photo of David Derrick, me, Robert Labbe and Jason Lane in Berlin in summer 1986. (Paul, Rob and I ran into David and Jason there by total freak chance.)