To All My American Friends
This article was published also in Romanian in Liternet.ro
About two years ago, before the pandemic, I was walking the floor of the Travel Show in the Javits Center in New York. While walking and admiring the colorful posters of exotic places I almost bumped into a guy standing in the middle of the aisle who pushed a brochure toward me blocking my way. He was young, tall, and quite handsome and it took me a bit to realize that I was right in front of the Russia travel booth.
“You should come and visit,” he said. “It’s a great country with very welcoming people. If you’d come you’d be able to dispel the bad impression foreigners have about the Russian people”.
Quite an advertisement for visiting a country! Come and visit our country because we are not as bad as people say!
“Wait, a moment” I responded without a pause. “What are you talking about? Nobody that I know has a bad impression of the Russian people. They are fine. But everybody has a terrible opinion about that mother*&^% of Putin. We hate that guy with a passion and we’d like him dead. And Russian people would be better off without him,” I said.
His smile turned glacial and a deep sigh came out of his entrails. Behind him, I could see an older guy in a suit that was most probably the travel bureau chief turning around and walking away hoping not to be part of this conversation.
I was almost to leave but I turned again to him.
“And please have in mind, I don’t make this statement as an American but mainly as a Romanian. I was born in that country and we lived our lives under the spectrum that Russia will invade anytime. So don’t expect to have any endearing feelings about your Putin when we see how he behaves. However, if you Russians come to Romania or America as peace-loving people we will have nothing against having drinks together. People are great, leaders suck.”
The conversation haunted me all day. What made me retort so strongly without batting an eye, without any planning, to that guy who just happened to make a stupid statement. Of course, there were many reasons; Crimea, Politkovskaya, Nemtsov, and Navalny, the last yet not arrested at that time. Russia’s hand could be felt everywhere in the world, from the Brexit to the election of Trump in 2016, from the courtship of the authoritarian Orban to the campaign sponsorship for Madam Le Pen in France. After decades of living in the United States where I never had to worry that paratroopers from New Jersey would land on the Long Island’s beaches to conquer the ice cream shacks, I forgot the chagrin I had for these invaders and usurpers of Europe who terrorized my childhood dreams. But the fears that happened while growing up refused to fade from memory even if apparently were stashed away wrapped in veils of forgetfulness.
These days when Putin kills innocent children and commits crimes against humanity in Ukraine the dialog with that Russian came back to my mind.
I read the news from the front which made me remember what my grandparents whispered in my ear while I was a kid, about the brutality, the primitivism, and the cruelty of the Red Army. How the Soviets were entering households hauling everything that could have been carried away, stealing people’s watches and with them the time pinned to their lives that stopped at that moment to flow to any kind of future.
In a war, no sides are better but while the Russians were stealing, the Germans, almost as cruel as the Russians offered to buy the food and the household goods. The grandparents never forgot that and wanted me to know this piece of banned knowledge, no matter that they probably would have liked to forget everything about those times as well.
When I listened to their stories as a kid I was terrified but I thought that the fog of war and the dire poverty of destruction caused that. However today the sons and nephews of those Red Army soldiers act the same as their forebears, killing indiscriminately, terrorizing the population, bombing hospitals, kindergartens, and schools and stealing from people’s houses, bragging to their family about the loot or selling it in flea markets in Belarus, another European pariah. Each time my grandparents told me about the Russians I envisioned the terror of a locust invasion which I learned also at that age. In a way, this invasion of Ukraine reminded me of Romania and how I grew up there.
When I came to America people asked me about life in Romania. Was it like in “1984”? They could not understand how the country became communist. Couldn’t you guys take care of yourselves and ask the state to do it? Did you really vote the communists into power?
Nowadays on your living room’s TV, you can see live how the scenario of regime change plays out wrapped in a different label. The “communist” label is out of fashion and the new one of “illiberalism” is making waves. People unhappy to have too many rights are looking for authoritarian figures to save them from themselves. These “illiberals” who are nothing else than brutal dictators are the new hope of the stupid people of the world in the name of inexistent freedom and false patriotism.
Overwhelmed by the novelty of America, a place that is hardly understood by newcomers, I tried to cope with the changes that immigration brought upon me but at the same time, I strived to explain how my country became communist.
“Tanks rolled to Berlin from both sides. Through Romania rolled the Soviet tanks – bad luck – and decided to stay. In a country of 15 million, there were at the time 400 declared communists, most of them in jail. Many had only four-grade education; some were high-profile intellectuals fascinated by the left movement. The uneducated were propped up in power by the Russians while the intellectuals were thrown in jail and killed.”
But such a transition was not done at once. First, they had to pauper the people who were influential in the society and the communist knew very well how to do it from their Russian teachers. First, they destroyed the economy and devalued the currency that pauperized the entire population. A bit later they closed the businesses of the ones that did not cooperate and took them over. Later they took everything else they still owned, houses, apartments, and all belongings, and arrest them indiscriminately. If they protested, they were labeled as “enemies of the people” and they were shot.
However, Romanians fought against the Soviet invaders one of the longest resistance in Eastern Europe. A guerilla war started right after the communist takeover. Fighters retreated to the mountains and fought valiantly against the Russians and the Romanian communists’ army. However, they had just guns, not cannons, horses, not tanks, and tree branch cover against the diving bombing planes. But they had on their side the hearts of the Romanian villagers who protected them and kept them fed. The propaganda machine of the Romanian communists freshly imported from Russia was amplified by their West European sympathizers, ardent fighters against the “dying” capitalism sitting and chatting in chic cafes protected by a democracy they decried. They all tried to taint the memory of these fighters but their spirit still prevailed in Romania and around. In the end, after about 15 years of resistance, they were defeated. They had guns but could not fight long-term the tanks and planes of the communist government, a good lesson for staunch supporters of the Second Amendment who like to shoot guns and drink beer dressed in catchy T-shirts imagining that this is the way they fight a war against an oppressive regime. Instead of hoarding arms of all sorts in the bathroom they better vote for a strong democracy that would really protect their rights and everybody else’s around.
If you watch today the images from Ukraine you can see exactly this scenario adapted for the new medium of communication of today fit for the new illiberal formula. The Russians did not change at all, and neither did their leader, the same type of bully who terrorized a continent and fought in disguise around the world for decades. The only difference is that nowadays the crimes are broadcasted live on TV and the Internet and the only thing the Russians can do is label everything as “Fake News”. A lot of sold souls, mercenaries without pay, as a friend of mine named one of his articles, adopted their rhetoric condemning the West for Putin’s creed of death. To call them idiots would be a compliment.
Meanwhile, the Western European bureaucrats looking less like leaders and more like a bunch of CEOs looking for a good quarter report to be handed to their constituents tried to engage Putin gingerly and talk to him like with a normal guy. Macron at least started to look more and more like Chamberlain waving his useless piece of paper after his meeting with Hitler in 1938.
I was relieved when Biden uttered the famous “nine words” in his phenomenal speech in Warsaw. Finally a head of state who said what was on our minds all this time. But the reaction was of total shock. In the elevated salons of Paris or Berlin, you must use only euphemisms and not call a killer by his real name. You may hurt his ego and he will increase the gas and oil prices and “the people” will not be able to spend their vacation in Ibiza.
Biden was right and everybody who really cared understood the idea of those nine words. It was emphatic and heartfelt and he had the strength of not backtracking on his statement: “For God’s sake this guy cannot remain in power!”
Roaming the world 
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