Closing the Circle (part 1)

One is always at home in one’s past
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

In my beginning is my end
T.S. Eliot, East Coker

They Desire a Better Country
Title of poem by Christina Rossetti

The poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was a devout Christian. The title of her poem, named above, derives from the New Testament, from Hebrews chapter 11, verses 13-16, where the ‘better country’ is identified as the heavenly one that awaits all believers at life’s end, but the poem itself makes no explicit reference to the source of the allusion. Thus it may be read as a wish for deliverance from suffering by means of a journey to a promised land free from persecution, conflict, hunger, destitution, and sorrow—a refugees’ poem, or a poem for immigrants fleeing oppression. In my years as an ESL teacher, I taught many such teenage immigrants, among them South Vietnamese forced to leave their country by Communist invasion, Iranians driven out by Ayatollah Khomeini’s puritanism, Iraqis displaced by civil war, and refugees from conflict in the Middle East. They and their families sought a better country.

Canada has been a safe haven for such people for two centuries, ever since Loyalists fled the revolutionary zeal of rebel Americans for the security of the Crown and the protective power of the Royal Navy, and escaped slaves from the republic to the south later followed the Underground Railroad to safety in a colony where slavery was outlawed. I myself am an immigrant, and am familiar with the heartache and homesickness that all too often accompanies socio-cultural dislocation. Undoubtedly many Canadian readers have had similar experiences.

What follows below is the true story of a friend I have known for more than forty years. Olga, with her mother and grandmother, were forced to leave Harbin in China by Communist usurpers during the era of unspeakable evil that was the regime of Joseph Stalin, the psychopathic dictator Dyugashvilii, who changed his name to “Stalin,” (‘Man of Steel’ in Russian), to indicate the stuff he wanted all to know he was made of. Between 1924 and his death in 1953, Stalin was responsible for the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1933-34 in his attempt to force kulaks, so-called ‘rich’ peasants, to give up their individual farms and submit to agricultural ‘collectivization.’ He caused the ‘Great Terror’ of 1937-38, the ethnic cleansing of Poland once it was divided up between Hitler and Stalin, the mass shootings, brutal forced labour, the ‘show’ trials, deportations to Siberia, and anonymous ‘denunciations’ of innocent people, the imprisonment of the intellectual elite, and the persecution of churchgoers, the destruction of churches and monasteries, and the murders of priests. Stalin enjoyed it all, and yet, like his partner in genocidal crime, Adolf Hitler, he was alleged to have a ‘sentimental’ side.

Russia is a nation of gifted musicians, artists and thinkers cursed with centuries of autocratic and repressive government, yet during World War II its citizens, outgunned and starving, were willing to die for their sacred motherland in their thousands in a brave show of resistance to the invading Nazis, an enemy that regarded them as “subhuman” Slavic vermin, and were eventually to drive the ‘master race’ back to Germany for their long-delayed Gotterdammerung, and the world’s verdict on the evil of their Third Reich. Winston Churchill, reflecting on how little the West knows of Russian history and culture, and how much less it understands it, once said, “Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” I have always admired, but cannot explain, the lure of this extraordinary culture and its people any more than Churchill could. I loved Arthur Ransome’s Old Peter’s Russian Tales as a child, thrilled to the novelty of the Cyrillic alphabet while learning Russian in high school from a gifted Ukrainian teacher, and marvelled at the splendour of St. Petersburg as a visiting adult, but I can at least do justice to my admiration for her culture by telling Olga’s story of hardship, determination, and ultimate reconciliation in her adoptive homeland, when the hurt of loss and exile was ultimately healed. Her complex story requires contextual knowledge for which some explanation is required.

City of Harbin in 1930 (image from Wikipedia)