Taking Bearings

December 28, 1991

For a thousand years the Russian people have suffered under autocratic or totalitarian rule. Despite hardship, they produced significant literature, art, music, and technical advances.

After centuries of Czarist neglect, the decimation of World War I and a bloody civil war, the Soviets bludgeoned an Ancient Russian empire into the 20th century.

Devoid of an industrial base, the Russian peoples labored through political purges and unworkable five-year plans in a desperate game of catch-up with the western world.

Suffering everything that befell them, the Russian devotion to their motherland remained strong.

The heroism and self-sacrifice of the Soviet peoples helped stop Hitler in his tracks. Yet for many soldiers returning from the West, reward for faithful service was a train ride to the gulag.

Twenty million people died. Stalingrad, Smolensk, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, and a hundred other cities lay pummeled. Galleries, libraries, and cathedrals were plundered or destroyed

The Russian soul endured.

From the ashes of world War II arose a country that in 20 short years stunned the world with daring feats of space exploration.

Bolshevism failed because it striped the Russia peoples of their dignity. It juggled the books when it came to counting the human cost for accomplishments in space or sports.

Mikhail Gorbachev was ultimately pushed from the world stage because he could never accept the total abandonment of the communist system.

“How do we tell our children that their grandfather’s struggles were for nothing?” Gorbachev often pleaded.

The recent political upheaval, unleashed by policies of perestroika and glasnost, culminated generation of agony.

We welcome the Russian voice into the diverse and often fractious dialogue of free men. Perhaps their perspectives on the human condition, and answers inspired from perseverance through the long Soviet night, will make the tortuous struggles of the past 74 years meaningful after all.