It’s Complicated: The Tangled Relationship Between Russia and Eastern Europe
Diplomatic brinksmanship belies the reality of life on the ground
When I was growing up, my surrogate grandmother, “Mac,” used to say, “Russians are evil. They’re bad. You can’t trust anyone who is Russian.”
I asked her, obviously, “Why do you hate the Russian people so much?”
She shook her head and started to explain, “I grew up in Germany, in what is now East Berlin, but back then it was all one Germany, and at the end of the war, the worst thing was to have the evil Russians come to your neighborhood. They were like pigs. I remember that the Russian soldiers had never seen indoor plumbing, and they were scrubbing and washing potatoes in our toilet.” Mac made a foul face. “They are terrible people. They dug holes in our backyard, stealing our valuables, everything we owned, and they kicked us out of our own house.
“Then, the Russians put up a barbed wire fence and later a wall, and they shoot people, any people who want to be free, all because the young German people, people like me, were running away, trying to be free of Russia. Who wants to live behind an iron curtain?”
She would start to blink to stop the tears from coming. “My cousins are behind the Iron Curtain. If I want to talk to someone, my phone call has to go first to Moscow and then to East Berlin, and there is someone listening, always listening. The Russians are the best liars. They claim that they have to put up this Berlin Wall to stop Westerners from coming to East Berlin, but in fact, everyone who is smart and young was going as fast as they could, just like me. And they leave everything behind. Like me.”
After the Iron Curtain fell and the Berlin Wall came down, Mac was able to go home, to see her cousins in person and what was left of her city, a city she hadn’t seen in 30 years. She didn’t hate the Russians any less. When Americans started adopting babies from Russian orphanages, Mac said, “I wouldn’t even trust a Russian baby.”
I’ve heard from many victims of Soviet oppression, “I don’t like Russia or Russians.”
For my entire youth, the United States was in a cold war with the Soviet Union, and we were told that they wanted us killed. Russian stereotypes included hulking, hairy women and downtrodden farm workers. At the same time, similar propaganda was fed to the Soviet Union’s populace. They were told that the United States might drop a bomb at any time.
A Russian friend of mine from the town of Samara told me that when she visited Lithuania, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the people were rude to her. They pretended like she wasn’t there, and even though they knew Russian (they’d been occupied and forced to speak the language for 50 years), they refused to speak in her language. She was understandably upset.
As I wrote my novel, Above Us Only Sky, I wanted to give voice to multiple perspectives. I wanted to tell the complicated story of an old man’s desire to teach his granddaughter about their homeland and her birthright, while simultaneously providing the larger context necessary to understanding Lithuania’s resilience in the face of tyranny.
In order to do this justly, I had to write from several different perspectives. One of my favorite characters is Lukas Blasczkiewicz, a Russian born to “a giddy Bolshevik in 1914. Few people know that there were giddy Bolsheviks, but there were, men and women with a fever for revolutionary change.” Stalin purged Lithuania, murdering the nation’s landowners, sending teachers and doctors, anyone educated, to Siberia, and transforming churches into warehouses and garages. His idea was to Russify the nations he’d conquered by eradicating their cultures and sending Soviet citizens into the newly occupied Baltic nations.
Lukas Blasckiewicz was one of these Soviets.
Through Lukas, we learn that in Russia, “Thousands were shot on suspicion of being enemies of the Bolsheviks and then ‘enemies of the people.’ The numbers were printed in the newspaper as a warning.” Lukas’s father tried to justify these murders by explaining that Lenin couldn’t have another revolution, but when Stalin came to power, the secret police, who weren’t so secretive, came for Lukas’s father. Even giddy Bolsheviks wouldn’t escape the growing reign of terror.
Through Lukas, we discover that the Russian people were not unlike the people of the conquered nations. They, too, were conquered, intimidated, tortured, and eventually silenced.
Today, as Putin and his government wage war on the people of Ukraine, it’s important to know that the people within Russia are also victims.
As their economy suffers from international sanctions, they are told to “eat less for Putin.”
Anyone inside Russia who speaks against Putin and his actions is imprisoned indefinitely. The Baltic nations — Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — face a real danger, but it’s not from the Russian people. It’s from Russia’s leadership.
Although Above Us Only Sky is about a Lithuanian family, I knew that it was important to show the larger picture. At the same time, as a fiction writer, I’m not writing history. Thus, I had to learn everything I could about Russia’s presence in Lithuania, and then try to forget everything and let it live and breathe in my characters and their stories.
Through two characters, Lukas and Olga Grishin, I tried to tell the Soviet story how a novelist tells a story — through the personal. Olga was born in a Soviet gulag, raised by a prostitute on the banks of the Moskva River, and eventually made her way to Lithuania. Unlike my Lithuanian characters, Olga never had a real family to lose. “The Siberian winter of her birth had been tattooed on her bones. She was always cold, never satiated. Never enough wool. Never enough bread. Never enough anything.”
As the nations bordering Russia ready their militaries, preparing for pro-Russian insurgencies from within (a fallout from the Russification of conquered nations) and Russian planes and tanks at their borders, they are once again prepared to fight for their freedom. Anti-Putin voices inside Russia have been silenced. The oligarchs who helped Putin rise to power have either been stripped of their wealth, imprisoned, exiled (or all three), or have fallen in line. Europe holds its breath, wondering what will happen next. All the while, behind the big headlines, are Russian people, men and women who want to speak up, but who have everything to lose: their livelihoods, their families, their lives.
Michele Young-Stone is the author of Above Us Only Sky, which Simon & Schuster will publish on March 3. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent.
