Syndicate: Fw: YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO

["Lipa" <lipa@pobox.com>]

[repostes from Johnson's Russia List via Mostovi list]

History Returns to the Scene of Its Crime
By YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO

Not long ago I received a letter from Israel from the parents of a boy they 
had named Babi Yar. Through their son's name the parents wanted people to 
remember what happened at that ravine near the city of Kiev in 1941. But 
today, from the photograph of their son, two dark eyes stared out at me like 
the smoking coals on television from Kosovo and Belgrade. Like Raskolnikov, 
history returns to the scene of its crime -- to the Balkans, where World War 
I began with a shot fired at Archduke Ferdinand. Today, it seems to me that 
this Israeli boy has either an Albanian or a Serbian face. Selective 
solidarity -- Western or Russian -- is blind. 
     I can hardly believe my eyes when I see some of Russia's most demagogic 
politicians express their knee-jerk one-sided solidarity. How can one trust 
their sincerity when they pound their fists on behalf of Serbia, yet show no 
solidarity whatsoever with Albanian refugees, nor even their own people -- 
war veterans with their hands out huddled in underground passageways, 
teachers and doctors who haven't been paid for half a year, miners crashing 
their helmets on the pavement without a response. 
     Still, for many Russians, beyond the two peoples' similar languages and 
Orthodox religion, and beyond the many Serbian-Russian mixed marriages, true 
solidarity with the people of Serbia runs deep. 
     During World War II, the feats of Yugoslav partisans in their struggle 
against Fascism inspired not only our soldiers but also our poets -- a whole 
anthology of Russian poetry about Yugoslavia could easily be compiled. 
Recently, when I heard a NATO spokesman placidly and icily name the city of 
Kragujevac as a target, I shuddered because this city was a symbol of the 
Yugoslav nation's heroic confrontation with Hitler's occupation. Yugoslavia 
was equally heroic in its opposition to Stalin's regime, but that resistance 
was never transformed into hatred toward Russians. 
     In the late 1940's, Soviet propaganda branded Yugoslavia a traitor. 
But this slur never took root with the Russian people. 
     In 1948, my father took me to the Moscow Circus, where a clown had an 
enormous dog wearing a Yugoslav Marshal's cap, a bundle of gigantic fake 
state dollars stuck in his teeth. "Hey, Tito, you mongrel, let go of them!" 
the clown screamed, laughing shrilly at his vulgar joke. 
    But the audience kept deadly silent -- the Russian people's respect for 
their 
Yugoslav comrades in arms in the struggle against Fascism was too great to 
laugh at. "How disgusting -- let's get out of here," my father said loudly as 
he got 
up. And suddenly, from every seat, fathers and mothers got up and led their 
children out. 
     In the 1950's, the writer Orest Maltsev received the Stalin Prize for 
his 
novel "The Yugoslav Tragedy," which lampooned the partisan movement in 
Yugoslavia. When Stalin died and Khrushchev made peace with Tito, naturally 
the 
reprinting of "The Yugoslav Tragedy" ceased. Maltsev became impoverished. In 
the 
store where he went from time to time for a bottle of the cheapest vodka and 
canned sardines, people would point fingers at him and say, "God punished him 
for 
Yugoslavia." 
    For a long time Yugoslavia was the most prosperous and independent 
socialist 
country -- or at least that's how it appeared to us in Russia. Only later, 
after Tito's death and the collapse of the Yugoslav federation, which turned 
out to have been held together only by his "anti-Stalin Stalinist will," did 
we begin to understand that not everything was so pure and just in the land 
of our Yugoslav brothers in arms. 
     Have today's NATO countries, which, like Russia, fought Fascism 
alongside the 
Yugoslavs, forgotten our common wartime struggle? If they have, they can rest 
assured that Russians have not. 
     No sooner had the NATO bombs begun to fall on Yugoslavia than the 
skeleton of 
the old war was awakened by the explosions. This was a remarkable gift to our 
cheap showman-nationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and other "professional 
patriots," who rushed to use the ribs of the skeleton like a war drummer's 
sticks. 
     The West should not be surprised when ideas like the science fantasy of 
a 
union among Russia, Belarus and Serbia take hold. It seems to me that the 
leaders of the NATO countries, in deciding to bomb Serbs in order to save 
Albanians, have inexcusably not thought through many of the realities of the 
Yugoslav situation. One such reality is that even if NATO troops succeed in 
kicking out Slobodan Milosevic's Government and installing a more obedient 
one in its place, the result might be an exhausting, partisan war, the 
traditions of which the Yugoslavs have preserved since at least World War II. 
     The shame of the Balkan situation lies with some political cynics, 
Russian, 
Western and Yugoslav, who play the Kosovo card, not on behalf of the Serbian 
or Albanian people but only for their own prestige, preservation of power or 
demonstration of hegemony. Take note that with rare exception many have a 
pro-Serbian or pro-Albanian position. But in my opinion the only correct 
position is simultaneously pro-Serbian and pro-Albanian; that is, pro-human. 
     We must not confuse people with extremists. During the conflict in 
Bosnia one 
charming Serbian woman, who teaches philosophy at an American college, ceased 
being intelligent in my eyes as soon as she began to speak about Bosnians: 
"These dirty Bosnians are all wild animals. . . . They must all be 
destroyed." Wolf 
fangs seemed to show from her beautiful lips. But within a month I talked 
with a 
Bosnian graduate student at another university and wolf fangs appeared when 
she 
began speaking about Serbs. 
    Do not demonize any nation because someone may begin to demonize your 
own. So 
be more cautious with the Balkans. 
    The endless procession of completely innocent Albanian refugees moving 
across 
the television screen appeals to the mercy of humanity. But the burning 
houses of completely innocent Serbs appeal to it also. It is tragic that 
Russia and America watch two completely different wars on television, 
although it is one and the same war. 
      In the American television version the Serbs are simply guilty of 
everything, 
and in the Russian version the Americans are. Years ago, when Aleksandr 
Solzhenitsyn spoke out against the Soviet authorities, his every half word 
was printed in the first columns of American newspapers. But now no one in 
the United States is rushing to print his words about the bombing in 
Yugoslavia: "A beautiful European country is being destroyed, and civilized 
governments brutally applaud. But desperate people, abandoning their bomb 
shelters, come out to the destruction like a living chain for the salvation 
of the Danube bridges. Isn't that a classic Greek tragedy?" 
    But the truth is summed up not only in this, but also in a barely alive 
old 
Albanian woman being pulled over the snow in a plastic garbage bag just to 
drag her out of the Kosovo hell into Montenegro, and in the old Serbian woman 
who stands at night on a bridge with a target on her sunken chest inviting 
bombs from the sky, and in the three American military prisoners with their 
quite little-boy faces beaten and bloody. Be more careful with the Balkans! 

--=--

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