The Waters of March

It rained in Astana late last week for the first time this year, but today, March 27, there is a new layer of snow as the long continental winter reasserts itself.  The clouds thickened yesterday morning.  The snow began falling heavily by noon and so continued into the night.  Such is spring on the frozen steppe nearly a week after the Vernal Equinox.  What else should one expect when one is living at the same latitude as the northern tip of Newfoundland?

View Over the Frozen Esil' River on March 20

But unlike the snows of February, this new snowfall will not last.  Daytime temperatures hover near freezing now.  Bare spots had begun appearing in the blanket of white before yesterday's March surprise, and for the first time this year, birds could be heard singing in the branches of the trees in Presidential Park.  The Sun now warms the skin and is setting after 7pm in this land of perpetual daylight savings time.

Last week was the spring holiday of Nauryz.  With the Embassy closed for three days plus a couple of days' leave, I rested without guilt for a full nine days.  Winter here is tenacious and hard, and the coming months will bring long hours of work with the coming of the Astana Expo and other events that will bring many a Washington visitor.  The week of Nauryz was a time to rest up and rest forward, a time for the first long walks of 2017.

With the coming of spring also comes the first hint that my time here will be ending.  I arrived in Astana two and a half years ago today.  I remember standing on my balcony sometime after midnight after my Embassy sponsor had dropped me at my new home.  I looked out on the Akorda Presidential Palace and the Esil' River and wondered how I would survive three years in a new job in a city where I knew no one.  "May these years go quickly," I thought.

Fast forward to last September 23.  NN and I had just landed back in Astana after five weeks in the US.  I felt conflicted.  On the one hand I felt ready to call an end to the work career right then and there.  I am tired, and my new home in Maine beckons.  The policies of the new administration in Washington are at odds with my beliefs and values.  All of this tells me it's time to go.

At the same time I never want to leave.  I said to NN that day last September that for as long as there is ice and snow on the ground, my time on the frozen steppe is as eternal as the Astana winter.

And why, as tired and opposed to new Washington policies as I am, do I not want to leave?  In part it's the knowledge that this will be the end of my overseas life, over a dozen years that have seen me living in Moscow, Tashkent, Bucharest, and now Astana, the fulfillment of a lifetime dream to live and work in countries where Russian is at least a second language.  It will be the end of a time that freed me and let me at last live the life I was born to live.  But more than anything else, I don't want to leave the people I have come to know and love.  I have family here.

On that night in September 2014, my apartment seemed cold and empty, devoid of life and love.  Now I joke that it's the young women's hostel of Astana.  First there was NN whom I met in my first week.  By December she was my official member of household living in my guest bedroom.  Then there was UE, my dearest friend whom I came to trust in everything.  I didn't even realize that at some level I, like many, was in love with him until he was taken from us far too soon, leaving me and dozens of others bereft and lost.  I cried more than at any time since my Mom died ten years ago.  The day UE and I paddled a kayak up the Esil' River with NN walking along on the embankment will always shine out as my best day in this country.

My Happiest Day in Kazakhstan

And through UE there came LB, LN, MU, TN, and many others.  Through NN there came XP, who spent many a night sleeping on the living room couch.  I could go on with a list that would stretch to two dozen or more, all of whom have filled my apartment with laughter, tears, and life.

Later, just one year ago, there came LT, my young soul sister who reminds me so much of myself at her age with the difference that she has an inner strength at her age that I did not.  LT now shares the second bedroom with NN as we work to secure her future.  I have linked my life and fortune to hers.  And with LT there came her most wonderful Mom LO who could be a role model for us all in her acceptance and caring for her daughter.  Together, NN, LT, LO, and I have created a family.

During Nauryz week we took long walks, shared lazy meals, and supported LT as she prepared for the TOEFL exam.  When she took the exam last Saturday, we all went with her and were as nervous as she was.

That's why I don't want to leave.  Astana has become home, and now the coming of spring reminds me that the time to go, still some five or six months distant, will come quickly.

But there is also hope.  Before yesterday's snow, we had already seen the first light rain of this year.  The waters of March and April are coming and bring a promise of joy and continuation.  As it was with Bucharest, I have put down roots here that I will nurture and cherish in the years to come.  I will be coming back.  More than that, I am seeing to it that part of my Astana life goes with me and puts down roots in the US.

My last winter in Astana has ended, but the seedlings tended through the long winter will soon bear fruit.  Spring, summer, and the future beckon.  The love goes on.

* * * * * * * * * *

The Waters of March, written my Antonio Carlos Jobim and performed here by him with Elis Regina, is my favorite Brazilian song.  "The waters of March close the season and bring the promise of life in your heart."

Yes, We Can!

On January 21 I felt hope and optimism for the first time since November 9.  Like many liberal, progressive Democrats, I had been complacent in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.  Whether we elected Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton, I would have been happy and content.  (For personal reasons, I supported Hillary and still consider her one of the greatest women I have known and, in my professional role, worked for.  A European socialist at heart, I loved Bernie's call to the progressive Left.)  What was absolutely clear was that a narcissistic demagogue with an authoritarian streak could not possibly become President of the United States.  Love does trump hate, and we could not elect as our President a man who denigrates women and call out all the worst traits from the dark reaches of the soul.

Except we did.  As I have already written and as many a better observer has written more eloquently, we awoke on November 8 to find out faith in an inclusive, progressive America shaken to the core.  Getting a grip on ourselves in the midst of our shock, I and others wrote that Resistance Is Not Futile!  Over the coming weeks we grasped at straws, hoping against hope that the Electoral College would deny the Presidency to a demagogue.  We watched as the hours separating us from the fate we wanted to deny dwindled to a precious few.  We had tears in our eyes as we listened to President Obama's farewell speech and heard his call not to lose faith in the power of working together to achieve a future to believe in.  Then it happened,  On January 20 at noon, our country turned a page and swore in as President a man who is the antithesis of all I and, as witnessed in the popular vote, over half of the voting public believe in.

January 20, Waiting at Checkpoint

January 20 found me in line at 7:30am to pass through the 7th and C Street, NW, checkpoint to join the one permitted protest along the inauguration parade route.  It took over four and a half hours to inch forward and pass through the checkpoint.  I made friends with my line neighbors.  The young woman next to me had flown in from California for the protest and gave me her second sign to carry.  We broke into chants and cheers, drowning out the few Trump supporters who, likely not knowing that this was the main checkpoint for protesters, were also in the line.  Once in, I met up with a friend from a sister agency and her partner.  We sat in the raw weather under occasional drizzle, using a transgender flag to warm ourselves.  Sometime between 3 and 4pm, we moved as close to Pennsylvania Ave. as we could and jeered and taunted  loudly as the Presidential motorcade passed by.  Then we turned and went home.  Our protest may not have changed anything, but at least we had shown up.  Sometimes “just showing up” to make a statement is important.  This was one of those times.

The next day was different.  I felt the difference as soon as I arrived at the New Carrollton Metro station.  The line for fare cards extended out of the station into the kiss-and-ride area.  Even those of us who already had fare cards had to wait patiently in line to pass through the turnstiles.  The train was full, and pink and red pussy hats were in evidence everywhere.  At each stop, more and more women and many men joined us.

I got off at Eastern Market.  I still had a walk to the Hirschorn, the designated meeting point for the marchers from my home state of Maine, but I wanted to get a feel for the day.  The streets were already heavy with foot traffic, everyone headed for the Mall, people saying “Hello!” and waving to each other.  Smiles were everywhere, people asking each other where they were from.  By the time I got to the Mall, it was clear the women's march was going to be the largest protest event I had ever participated in.  Then I saw the Hirschorn and a woman in blaze orange, the chosen color for marchers from Maine, on the corner giving directions.  I joined the group behind our banner as we cheered the Maine motto Dirigo! We Lead!  The group leader called the roll call of Maine counties, and I proudly shouted out when Penobscot was called.  Then we marched as a group to the rally site.

For four hours we stood.  It was already clear that far more people had turned out than anyone had expected.  I could not hear the speakers where I stood, but we could see them on the projection screen.  I could see Gloria Steinem, Michael Moore, Janet Mock, and the many other heroines and heroes who had come to speak to and join us.  (Later I listened to many of the speeches on YouTube.)

Around 2:00 pm the crowd began to move.  We marched at a snail's pace across the Mall, holding our signs high and chanting.

“We're the popular vote!”

“What does democracy look like?  This is what democracy looks like!”

“We're not going away.  Welcome to your first day!”

“We need a leader, not a creepy tweeter!”

“This land is your land, this land is my land!”

“No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!”

The mood was at once defiant and joyous.  We were the popular vote majority of the U.S. population who had rejected hate, and we had found our voice in a sea of pink and red pussy hats, the newly minted symbol of our progressive revolution.  As we passed the Old Post Office, now a Trump hotel, we raised our fists and yelled “Shame!”  Our voices reverberated off the buildings surrounding Freedom Square.  Never will Pennsylvania Ave. look the same to me after that day.  I doubt it will look the same to anyone who was there that day.  Together we made history.

I now sit in a United flight ready to take off for Europe.  In a week, after visiting friends in Romania, I'll be back on the job in Astana.  But life has changed.  I am now with Mainers for Accountable Leadership and began my day with calls to the offices of Representative Poliquin and Senators Collins and King.  Complacency is over.  My life as an activist has begun.

As President Obama said, “Yes, we can!”  And so we will.

What Would George Kennan Say?

The attention being paid to possible Russian efforts to influence the results of the 2016 U.S. election brings me back to an earlier time.  It was 1946, and much of post-war Europe lay in ruins.  The war alliance between the US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union was unraveling as one Eastern European country after another fell under Soviet domination.  Free, fair elections, and self-determination were giving way to an order dictated by Moscow, the iron curtain coming down fully with the suicide/murder of Jan Masaryk and the Communist coups d'état in Czechoslovakia in 1958.

Washington was slow to react.  It is the job of diplomats to report on political developments, but years of cables written by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow were getting scant notice.  Then, in 1946, the Embassy received a cable from Washington in which it was asked, in effect, to "tell us what, after all, Moscow, is after."  Ambassador Averell Harriman was away, leaving his deputy George Kennan as chargé d'affaires ad interim.  The very question from Washington must have frustrated Kennan, demonstrating as it did that the Embassy's reporting had been largely ignored.  Kennan, sick in bed with the flu, nevertheless set to dictating his reply in what became famous as the 5500 word long telegram.

George Kennan (1904-2005)

Kennan's long telegram fell on fertile ears.  The response from Washington was swift.  Within days Kennan was ordered home to brief top decision makers who were trying to decide how the US should respond to expanding Soviet dominance in Europe.  Kennan's career was made.  He became both a diplomatic celebrity and one of America's top foreign policy analysts.  He became the State Department's first Director of Policy and Planning.  After retirement, he went to a distinguished career as elder statesman and historian, dying only in 2005 at the age of 101.

So what did Kennan say in his long telegram and in his subsequent 1947 Mr. X article in the journal Foreign Affairs?  Kennan's main points included:

• Moscow is "committed fanatically to the belief that with the United States there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted." 
• Moscow will therefore exploit all opportunities to foment disunity in Western nations, to generate conditions under which “poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents, etc.” 
• Moscow “does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, . . . it is highly sensitive to logic of force. . . .”  
• Soviet expansion can be thwarted if the United States and other Western democracies act with “cohesion, firmness, and vigor,” making use of “adroit and vigilant application of counter-force” to oppose Soviet expansionism and pressure against “the free institutions of the Western world.” 
• “The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” 

I have myself spent years in the Soviet Union, Russia, and in post-Soviet space.  I first visited the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev years, was there during the time of glasnost' under Gorbachev, returned during the optimism and frustration of the Yeltsin years, and have spent most of the past dozen years in post-Soviet space.  I can speak only for myself, not as a State Department representative, but in that private capacity I can say I do see similarities between Russia-West relations today and post-war Soviet-West relations.  The difference is that today there are methods in the foreign policy toolkit that are much easier to deploy.  Influencing elections and policies in the West via disinformation is much cheaper than deploying an army.  It just could be the biggest bang for the buck for anyone or any government seeking to achieve its ends at minimal cost.  And it can be quite effective.

The Long Telegram (Source:  Truman Library)

For Americans living in countries where Russian media dominates, looking at state-controlled Russian news is a dose of alternative reality.  The US is backing fascists in Ukraine, and Russian soldiers are heroes in Syria.  Most people believe what they see and hear.  For them, this is reality.  Once my cosmetologist, while getting ready to inject my face with a needle, asked me, "Why is the US waging war in Ukraine?"  That is just one of many such examples of how people whom I count as friends see the US.  Our own media presence is minimal and consists of re-runs of old U.S. sitcoms and goodwill tours by American performing artists.  The contest in the information wars isn't even close.

Knowing the line between my official role and my life as a private citizen, I will stop here.  Suffice it to say that George Kennan figured large in my decision to join the Foreign Service, and I offer his words, penned in 1946-47, for consideration today.