Gulf War; East European Trip

1991

“OPERATION DESERT STORM”

On January 15, 1991 President George H.W. Bush demanded that Iraq withdraw its armed forces from Kuwait. By that date, Coalition forces amounted to 750,000 troops, including 540,000 Americans and lesser numbers from Britain, France, Germany, USSR, Japan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the largest assemblage since Vietnam. Iraq had 300,000 in Kuwait. On January 17, Bush ordered the aerial bombardment of Iraq which destroyed much of Iraq’s military capability on the ground. After five weeks, on Feb. 24, ground troops entered the fray destroying most all enemy resistance in Operation Desert Sabre. Saddam was driven out of Kuwait and large swaths of Iraqi territory occupied when Bush announced a cease-fire on Feb. 28. It was all over. Iraq forces lost between 20,000 to 35,000 troops killed, while Coalition fatalities were only in the hundreds. However, Bush didn’t press his advantage to march on Baghdad and drive Saddam out of power as that would have led to even greater problems in the Mideast.
 

ANTI-WAR RESISTANCE IN THE BAY AREA

San Francisco Federal; Building Seige

The response of the antiwar movement in large US centers like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles was immediate. People were out on the streets 24.7 in all of them and I can recall being part of a 100,000-person march in San Francisco early on. I and thousands of others were in the streets from morning to night in downtown streets marching and in blockading the Federal Building in the Civic Center. It was pandemonium. I’ve read in researching for this item that there was actually quiescence in many parts of the country and even support among American people for our imperial adventure. But here the Bay Bridge was shut down for hours by crowds occupying it in the middle of commuter rush hour. One evening I joined in with a march from the Civic Center into the Haight, participants urging people to join us along the way. As we were matching up Haight Street hill from Divisadero I turned and noticed a large contingent of hundreds of police following us but keeping at a constant distance. As we were moving along occupying the whole street, there were people in our ranks talking into cell phones some of whom were undoubtedly plain clothes cops staying in contact with our uniformed followers.

As we came over the crest of the hill I looked to my left and saw the lights on in the anarchist Bound Together book store, and thought of leaving the ranks for a moment and seeing what my comrades were up to inside. Just then our IWW GST Jess Grant and Melissa Roberts came over the hill crest and we joined ranks to move on. They had been working in our new headquarters getting things in order following our move and decided to quit for the evening and join the march as a priority. A warm feeling, marching beside my Fellow Workers. As we approached Masonic on our right we saw a group peel off and head down toward Oak Street and the Panhandle. “Traitors! Saboteurs!” were the cries of our crowd, as the “renegades” turned right at Oak headed back toward downtown, As our part of the marchers crossed Masonic and on down Haight we saw the reason for the apostates’ manoeuvres. Half-way down the block we saw a contingent of wall-to-wall cops blocking the street ahead of us. Meantime the large squadron of cops behind us was moving up fast to trap us from behind. Too late to escape back to Masonic and down the hill! We were increasingly squeezed into a vice! What to do??? Melissa, Jess and I spotted a TV rental store with the lights on to our left (That was before Netflix made TV cassette rental outlets obsolete.) We and a half dozen others ran into the store before its management shut and locked the door behind us. Blinds were drawn and lights were doused as we crouched down in the precarious safety of the store. But at least we were out of the street. We just spoke in hushed tones, wondering what would come next, breathing the stuffy air of the shop. We heard muffled shouts and noises from the streets, wondering if the cops were clubbing the hell out of our trapped brethren. We just didn’t dare move. Finally, the store management told us we’d better try to leave as we couldn’t stay all night in this cramped space. The door was unlocked and we cautiously proceeded to exit. Apparently the cops didn’t consider us part of the protestors they were arresting in the streets but just unfortunate customers trapped in the TV store. So they set up a path for us on the sidewalk to our left, as we furtively moved single file out of harm’s way. At the first street intersection we hurried into a side street and freedom. I wound through the streets in the dark until I found myself home at my apartment building at Sanchez and 14th Streets.

After a hurried breakfast the next morning, I headed back downtown to join the demonstrating protest movement on Market near the Civic Center and all the way downtown in the direction of the Ferry Building. Pretty disorganized all the way around but we kept moving back and forth as we had a war to stop! Eating hurriedly at small cafes here and there all day long near the Federal building, night again approached. I saw Reeva Olson, the wife of my old Local 21 President, sitting in a circle in the middle of the street with their arms linked in nonviolent Gandhian resistance, with some beefy steel-helmeted cops standing threateningly over them but not busting them up. Nightfall arrived and I decided to make one more foray down Market Street and back and going home. A few blocks along I ran into Selden Osborne, now an elderly retired longshoreman and longtime socialist and pacifist, stumbling around the street in apparent confusion trying to make one more attempt for the cause of peace, when the best thing for him was to go home and his bed. I had known Selden since my early days in San Francisco when he ran the literature table at the First Unitarian Church near Franklin and O’Farrell. He had been a principled opponent of the mighty Harry Bridges while on the docks who had dismissed Selden’s efforts as a lone opposition union rebel with sneering contempt. I urged him to go home as he was in no shape to be out on the streets any more, and moved on. I walked with the crowds further down Market until the march turned back before reaching the Embarcadero and began to plow on back toward Civic Center as we crowded the street with our numbers. There was a large bank with a plate glass window as we passed it in the Financial District. At that point a young man all dressed in black with a bandana to mask his face dashed out of the crowd to throw a brick shattering the show window of the bank before retreating back into the crowd from which he had emerged. This is something I couldn’t have done reflecting my own stance of nonviolent resistance. But yet a thrill travelled through me to see someone with the nerve to attack an institution of the finance capitalist “class enemy” with a lone daring display of direct action in the form of a brick. But we kept on surging up the street and I got home that night satisfied that I had done my bit to challenge an imperialist war fought with the weaponry of modern armament where a brick thrown by someone else symbolized more to me more than their instruments of death which murdered thousands in the Middle East. But the marching soon stopped as Bush had declared his cease-fire and his brief overkill war had secured the Arabian desert for Western imperialism until next time.
 

1991 FLORIDA FINNFEST AND EASTERN EUROPE

Early in the year my long-planned distance itinerary began. First stop was the FinnFest at Lake Worth, Florida where Paula Erkkila and I presented her play on the Kalevala hero Lemminkäinen in the Kalevala rune where his long-suffering mother rescues his wayfaring son from death by the Tuonela River. We had rehearsed it for some weeks in San Francisco. A minor problem was that Paula played the mother, and I her errant son and in real life I was thirteen years her senior! But no problem. Theatrical facial make-up did wonders to recreate me as the epic’s young warrior lover-boy and Paula wore a rubber mask that made her an old wrinkled crone that had her looking more like Lemminkäinen’s grandmother than mother. But our FinnFest audience loved us and some asked whether we planned to go on tour with it in Finnish-American communities, but no such prospect ever materialized. We were a one-performance stand as we got out of Dodge. The FinnFest was an enjoyable experience and wasn’t to be my last show on the Kalevala theme.

After FinnFest I flew to Boston for a visit to my early hometown of Westminster where I stayed with Ardy and Irene (Tuomi) Kamila, old friends from the town’s still-sizeable Finnish community. I paid a visit to my parents’ grave with a floral tribute and saw a few people I still knew. Ardy and Irene then drove me to a highway restaurant near Fitchburg which served as a stop for Boston-bound buses. It seemed like I was at Logan Airport in no time to catch a flight to New York. Arriving at Kennedy Air terminal I boarded a flight to Luxemburg on an airline the name of which I’ve forgotten. It was a long, arduous flight and I was pretty bushed for the lack of sleep when we landed in that postage stamp-sized nation. A cab ride took me to what was probably the only youth hostel in the country and a large one at that which was crowded with passengers in transit from all over the world. Next morning I was on the Amsterdam train.
 

AMSTERDAM SNAPSHOTS

In those days I thought if the United States ever turned fascist my favorite place of exile, besides Finland, would be the cosmopolitan friendly city of Amsterdam which was a joy to see once more. I checked into a hostel, roamed around, smoked a joint in a “coffee house,” visited the famous show window red light district in the canal area, looked up an anarchist staffer at a book store with English language books I had met on an earlier visit, Melaina Feenstra, and spent some hours at the famous International Institute of Social History research library where I had once read Alexander Berkman’s “Russian Diary” in his original handwriting. It may have been on this visit I found a short handwritten letter by Mme. Aleksandra Kollontai, (1872–1952) then longtime Soviet envoy to Sweden, to American anarchist Emma Goldman telling her that the happiest days of her life during the Russian Revolution were those that she had spent in Moscow visiting with her (Goldman) and Alexander Berkman in their hotel quarters along with fellow Russian revolutionary Angelica Balabanova (1878–1965), an anti-war left socialist who broke with Lenin and returned to Western Europe in 1922. Her “My Life as a Rebel” is worth reading. (Kollontai, on the other hand, briefly headed the Workers’ Opposition to Lenin within the Bolshevik Party in the early 1920s, but fell into line and was never purged by Stalin while ambassador to Sweden.) She was also a noted feminist and supporter of sexual equality and freedom.

BERLIN SNAPSHOTS

Statue in Marx [sitting]-Engels [standing] Plaza

On the train trip to Berlin over the drab former East Germany countryside, now united with the West; I remarked to a fellow American passenger how dismal the Soviet-style apartment housing looked in the old Eastern zone as we passed through it. His bored remark was: “I’ve seen worse in Philadelphia.” (I’d momentarily forgotten about our own substandard housing in which our urban poor continue to live.) On May 8 I took the old rattletrap elevated train that plunged into the depths of the recently accessible East Berlin as we left the Brandenburg Gate and the glitter of prosperous bourgeois West Berlin behind. I got off at a station marked by a intersection with the street names of Luxemburg and Liebnecht, the two revolutionary martyrs of the 1919 Spartacist revolt, Rosa and Karl. I walked further and saw Rosa Luxemburg Park. Berlin was usually governed by a Social Democratic municipal government which still paid honor to the two great libertarian Marxists although these had been much farther to the left than the SPD’s own political icons like Karl Kautsky. (The Communists had also claimed Luxemburg and Liebnecht as their own, with some justification as Luxemburg was an original founder of their party in 1919.) Yet statues and monuments for the recent Stalinist rulers of the now vanished DDR after the destruction of the infamous Berlin Wall in 1989, such as Erich Hunecker and Walter Ulbricht were surely scrapped. Next I proceeded to walk on foot back up Unter den Linden toward the Brandenburg Gate. The streets were almost deserted but I saw some small shops with people in them, an enormous contrast to the modern hectic commercial retail environment of West Berlin. I much preferred this quieter scene. I stopped to buy some postcards and a sandwich. Walking along, I hear a street band playing. On the left was the Marx-Engels Plaza where I saw a large statue of Marx sitting and Engels standing next to him. It was only a week past International Workers Day and apparently there had been a celebration of it in the park, with wilted flowers still scattered around its base. A hand-drawn graffiti was scrawled along it: “Wie sind unschuzdig.” Since I don’t read German, later a Finnish comrade translated it for me. The photo I took of it was the best one I’ve ever shot. (See photo.) The authentic spirit of the working class was still alive and well in Berlin!

Arriving at the portals of the magnificent Brandenburg Gate, I saw the most fascinating flea market of my life. Along the tables were mounds of bric-a- brac and clothing of the Soviet military occupation from back in 1945. Military uniforms galore, even be-medaled ones of high-ranking Red Army officers, helmets, boots, bayonets with scabbards, sun glasses, binoculars, leather gloves, scarves, war maps, and other tables full of medals and lapel pins with enough images of Lenin with which you could equip a regiment, a lot off stuff in mint condition, all at rock bottom prices! Trade was brisk as the tourists went wild. The only thing I bought was a supposed genuine chunk of rock from the demolished Berlin Wall for only one deutschmark. For all I know it might be any old piece of rock somebody found on the ground. It still sits buried in one of my desk drawers at home.

But the day was far from over. Wandering around the streets I found a short stretch of the Berlin Wall still standing and on the sidewalk next to it was a young bearded German hippie at a table, which was the entryway to an urban anarchist commune. Old jerry-built scrap metal shacks adorned this little village along with abandoned school busses and other vehicles that its occupants had converted into dwellings for themselves, with some tending to little vegetable garden plots to raise food for themselves. Dogs and little kids all over the place. Not much different from similar little communities we see in Mendocino and Humboldt Counties in California. Our venerable gatekeeper also had an official East German state’s rubber stamp with which he’d tag your passport for five marks which allowed you to roam the little encampment and see how authentic Berlin anarcho-hippies lived. I allowed him to stamp a blank page on my US passport and also bought a bottle of warm orange soda to quench my thirst and sat on an old car seat before commencing my tour of the commune. Our passport stamper pointed out a high-rise going up on the other side of their wall in the new Berlin that was to be a modern state-of-the-art department store. Its mega-capitalist developer was the son of a Berlin mayor. Nepotism? Not a chance. Ha!
 

PRAGUE SNAPSHOTS

Late one night I picked up an overnight train to Prague from a nearly deserted drab, cavernous railway station in East Berlin. I shared a sleeper car with two elderly gay American men travelling together in Europe. Upon arriving in the Czech capital around daybreak the next morning I was directed by the trainmaster to a convenient hostel in the city. There I enjoyed the heartiest breakfast table I’d enjoyed in Europe so far on this trip. Among my room mates was a group of boisterous male Finnish university students exploring Central Europe during their summer vacation. “Voi, perkele, joka paikasta niitä suomalaisia löytyy nykyjään!” (Oh, fuck, we find Finns just about any place nowadays!), one of them jokingly complained. Soon I was off to the center of the city. Czechoslovakia had jettisoned Communist rule during the Velvet Revolution in 1989, led by liberal Catholic intellectual Vlaclav Havel (1936–2011) who was now the popular president of the country to 1992 when Slovakia broke off as a separate country and he became head of the Czech Republic until 2003. Havel broke his country off from the Warsaw Pact for which I don’t blame him, my being an opponent of Cold War military alliances, but not supportive of bringing his country into NATO in the US imperial orbit. Prague is a picturesque modern city with medieval architecture in abundance, castles on the hills and all. I headed for Wenceleas Square downtown, site of many a mass demonstration. There I spotted the memorial to Prague University student Jan Palach (1948–1969)who had immolated himself after Soviet tanks had crushed the Prague Spring of 1968 which then dissident Communist Czech leader Alexander Dubchek declared would have resulted in “socialism with a human face.” During my visit the Palach memorial was lighted by a flame planned as eternal.

The Velvet Revolution itself occurred between Nov. 17, 1989 through December 29 and ended the rule of the Communist Party. The International Students Day march was organized by the Socialist Union of Youth for Nov. 17 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the murder of student of Czech student Jan Opletal by the Nazis. Participating in the march were 15,000 students which went beyond its planned limits and continued toward downtown Prague chanting anti-Communist slogans and similar signs where it was confronted by riot police at Narodni Street blocking all escape routes and then brutally attacking the crowd. Fortunately, there were no deaths but 200 students were injured. This only escalated a growing public revolt which went on for days, including general strikes in factories, theaters closing down and people demonstrating and marching in the streets continuously. One of the prime demands by an emerging Civic Forum in which Havel had a hand, was the abandonment of the “Communist Party having the leading role” in the government. But by December 29 “the streets” had won, the government capitulated and a democratic republic replaced Communist rule. Yet Havel wasn’t a hero to everyone and while it’s a capitalist economy but with a strong social democratic features, even the CP still has a strong representation in Parliament. In my brief stay in Prague I enjoyed the vibrant optimism of the people and their cheerful hospitality.
 

WARSAW SNAPSHOTS

Before I left San Francisco for Europe, Rafal Klopotowski. my Polish director in the Tennessee Williams play “Summer and Smoke,” wanted to cast me in a French comedy he was directing in Marin County. When I told him I would be unavailable as I was leaving for an extended European trip which would include his hometown of Warsaw, he insisted that I stay with his parents and said he’d phone his father that very night about it, and it became a done deal. So after phoning his dad from downtown Warsaw he picked me up and drove me to his home in a posh neighborhood in the city where he lived with his wife and a young son. Dr. Klopotowski was prominent scientist in the field of chemistry and was also a senator in the Polish national legislature, elected on the Solidarity ticket. His Jewish wife was a medical doctor. Rafa’s brother was a bright little lad in grade school who spoke passable English as did his parents. I had some great conversations with the mother who told me the hectic story of her childhood in Poland during the WWII Nazi German military occupation. As the war broke out her Jewish parents placed her with a Polish farm family in the country’s south disguised as the family’s daughter while they returned to Warsaw only to face the gas chambers. Her adoptive guardians did an excellent job of hiding her identity so she emerged from the war safely except for the emotional scars that stayed with her for life. She cried the entire time she told me her story.

I soon made contact with a group of young anarchist college students at the University of Warsaw whose contact person Dariusz had been listed in an annual Slingshot Organizer directory published by the Long Haul anarchist info shop in Berkeley, CA. These wonderful young activists were on summer hiatus from the University and did a lot of partying at Dariusz’s spacious parents’ home to which I was invited during my stay. Only one of the group spoke some English, a stylishly-dressed beautiful young woman, Dobrochna Bejnakowska, majoring in Spanish who acted as my interpreter. Even as a much older person and an American I was fully accepted as an international comrade and I’ll never forget their hospitality. They mostly came from well-to-do middle class families, some of whom may have been Polish Communist bureaucrats who had lost their children to the free spirit of anarchism. I also contacted Malgozata, national secretary of Amnesty International in Poland, whom I had met at a party of Eastern European students in the States earlier who called themselves the Neither East Nor West group at a university conference sponsored for them under that name. I’ve forgotten her family name but I had told her that I wanted to visit the Gdansk Shipyards where the mass working class Solidarity movement of millions had risen in the early 1980s. She had planned to visit her mother in Sopot, a few train stops beyond Gdansk (formerly Danzig) and invited me to come along for the ride and she’d find me a place to stay in Gdansk. My other contact was one of Rafa’s Polish actor friends with whom he had studied at the Polish Film-Theatre Institute. I’ll call him Slava as I’ve forgotten his name, as well. A kindergarten teacher by day, he was performing evenings in Federico Garcia’s Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” on stage at the time of my visit and offered me a complimentary pass to one of the performances.

The play was in Polish and an excellent innovative performance that I had seen performed in English earlier in San Francisco. It was performed in a theater built during the Communist rule in Poland, which did invest in the arts quite handsomely, provided the Party line was not violated in the content of the plays, which usually were safe traditional classics. As an accomplished actor Slava performed in many of them but was also involved in the “politically incorrect” avant garde underground plays of the samizdad period in people’s apartments which were always in danger of being raided by the political police with the artists arrested. But young actors and playwrights were willing to take the risks in their desire for unfettered artistic freedom.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

During a late evening dinner in a restaurant by the University, Slava pointed out that now that Polish Communism was history and complete freedom prevailed in theatre presentations there was a danger of losing the performances spaces where “Blood Wedding” was shown as the theaters were no longer state-owned and government financing unavailable for their upkeep. Commercial theatre like on Broadway was unknown. I know so-called free enterprise was not the answer as ticket sales alone will not keep theatres afloat anywhere. Throughout the modern world of theatre there is no reason public financing cannot be a factor. In Finland, for instance, most cities have their own professional municipal theatres which receive support from the taxpayers from several levels of government, plus patron conscription and some commercial forms of fundraising like in the United States. I hope Poland has found sound ways of supporting the arts since the 1990s that reflects at least a mixed economy.

Soldiers in Warsaw, Sept., 1944

Slava told me the perilous story of his parents, a pair of 21-year-olds active in the Warsaw nationalist underground when it rose up against the Nazi occupation during the siege of Warsaw by the advancing Soviet armies toward the end of WWII. While the ill-armed urban revolutionaries took on the impossible task of confronting the Germans, the Red Army camped in the outskirts awaiting the result of the impending slaughter of the rebelling Warsaw citizenry. The uprising was by the wrong people in the eyes of the Soviets so they allowed the Wehrmacht to crush the citizens’ uprising before their own troops commenced their attack to take the city. Slava’s parents-to-be only saved themselves by plunging into the sewer system of Warsaw and escaping through its maze of underground tunnels.

[Editor’s note: Harry sent me this photo (click on it to view full-size), from the other Warsaw uprising. It deserves mention, from Wikipedia: “The uprising in 1943 was an  act of Jewish resistance that arose within the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland during World War II, and which opposed Nazi Germany's final effort to transport the remaining Ghetto population to Treblinka. It started on 19 April when the Ghetto refused to surrender to the police commander SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, who then ordered the burning of the Ghetto, block by block, ending on 16 May. A total of 13,000 Jews died, about half of them burnt alive or suffocated. German casualties are not known, but were not more than 300. It was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II.]
 

GDANSK SNAPSHOTS

Lech Walesa and the Gdansk Shipyard Strike

The morning arrived when Malgozata and I took the train north to the Baltic Coast and Gdansk. On the way up she told me that as a feminist and member of Solidarity she was having problems with the male leaders of the Union in Warsaw. Being a religiously conservative country heavily influenced by a patriarchal Catholic Church hierarchy, these liberated feminists of Solidarity had some difficult times claiming what should be normal women’s equal rights inside their union. After forcing some concessions and demanding more their Solidarity brothers became frustrated. “We’ve given you everything you’ve demanded. What more do you want?” This became evident toward the end of my visit when thousands of Polish women picketed Parliament when under the pressure of the church hierarchy it was considering passing legislation to bar abortion in Poland which had been allowed by the former Communist government. Abortion rights were popular particularly among younger women as being one of the few progressive policies of Communist rule. So, Parliament did what happens in Western governments when an issue gets too hot, it’s buried in committee. Pope John Paul II, the first Polish pope in R.C. history, who was coming for a visit about the time I left Poland, was furious. Only some time later was the Church able to manipulate Polish government politics so that abortion was once again outlawed.

Malgozata got me a place to stay with the Amnesty International’s Gdansk chapter secretary, a young woman I’ll call Anna. Since it was too late in the day to visit the Lenin Shipyard where Solidarity’s worker revolution had exploded a decade before, I had supper with Anna at her apartment. She was a sweet, beautiful young woman who had a recent master’s degree in art history but had been unable to find any work in her field. So the only job she was able to find in the city was with the education department of the Solidarity Labor Union in Gdansk, the home of Lech Walesa, its national leader. She hated the job and the union bureaucrats she worked for. They were an arrogant overbearing lot who she saw as corrupt and awful as the Communist leaders who had held sway before them in Poland. They had no real respect for her as a modern, educated sensitive young woman.

I was greatly disappointed when I visited the gate of the shipyard where Walesa and his workmates had had their uprising that shook the world. The monument commemorating the historic happening was covered with Catholic Church symbolism that had made one of the greatest demonstrations of workers’ power in Twentieth Century working class history seem like a religious revival rather than a class action. That and the knowledge that George Meany’s AFL-CIO had sent millions in CIA financing to corrupt Solidarity and to subordinate it and Poland into the camp of Western capitalist imperialism during the waning years of the Cold War. I recall that back home that shortly before martial law was declared by General Wociech Jaruzelski on Dec.31, 1981, the de facto leader in Poland, I read that Solidarity had held a national conference in Poland where the majority voted in favor of worker self-management in the economy. I’ve never been able to verify that point. Also, the argument that Gen. Jaruzelski used that the USSR ordered him to impose martial law, or else its army would invade the country was controversial. Premier Yuri Andropov, who led the Soviets at the time, denied his country had ever issued such a mandate. So I leave it to professional historians to decide the historic truth over these claims in light of a plethora of contradictory arguments over the issue even today. Also, Lech Walesa is no great hero of mine although he showed huge courage in leading the initial revolt at the Lenin shipyards. He was a mediocre one-term early president of non-Communist Poland and became more of a servile pawn of the Catholic hierarchy than anything else. An admirer of the union-busting Tory prime minister Maggie Thatcher, he’s come a long way from being a militant shipyard union electrician. In fact, my Polish anarchist friends thought he had a few screws loose upstairs.

During my last days in Warsaw, my comrades from the university had received word that a group of blue collar working class anarchists from a Warsaw factory had heard there was an American Wobbly in town and wanted to meet me before I left. So a get-together was arranged at a facility near campus. Dobrochna agreed to serve as interpreter. Two earnest young men came and gave me a few copies of their anarcho-syndicalist newspaper, all written in Polish. After finding about the class collaboration of Solidarity, it was refreshing to meet these factory youths. Neither knew any English but I promised to send them copies of the IWW’s Industrial Worker, eventually buying them a one-year sub upon returning home. In writing this section I found a letter my interpreter Dobrochna sent me in the early 1990s. Apparently, I had sent her some radical English language literature from home which she had translated into Polish which her group had printed at a facility founded by her comrade Dariusz. One was entitled “Paris 1968.” Another was a pamphlet written by American ecologist-anarchist Murray Bookchin. She was also excited about a discussion her group had held about Antonin Artaud. My time spent with the Polish anarchists was one of the highlights of my Eastern European trip.
 

BALTIC TRAVELS
VILNIUS SNAPSHOTS

Next, I took the train from Warsaw for my Baltic journey with Vilnius, Lithuania my first stop. At one point when we hit the Lithuanian border, our entire train was hoisted into the air for several hours so it could be settled to the wider Russian track width. Winship Travel had arranged with the Soviet Intourist Bureau of placing me into its sanctioned Vilnius hotel. The Baltic states were still controlled by the USSR with strong military presence, although the enthusiastic independence movements were rapidly gaining ground in them. My Intourist prepaid guide took me on an automobile tour of downtown, visiting mostly old grandiose Catholic churches. I wasn’t particularly interested in them except for their impressive classic architecture. I was more intrigued by the evolution of politics in the country, but Western tourists were deliberately kept away from this kind of exposure, which would have amounted to a bunch of Stalinist lies anyway. In the evening Intourist encouraged us to attend a concert and program presented by Vilnius grade school students in one of the city’s schoolyards. It was the only ball game in town and I accepted. They were like school programs anywhere in the world, except for the traditional national costumes worn by the kids and the Lithuanian language that was spoken or sung. There was a bit too much religious content to the show for me to enjoy.
 

RIGA SNAPSHOTS

Lenin Statue in Riga

Riga, the capital of Latvia, was the next stop on my train itinerary. A grossly stout, short Russian woman of 50 got on at Vilnius and sat in the seat opposite me with her wardrobe of overcoats and blankets and a huge basket of food for the trip with Riga as her destination. She was a jolly little fuss pot who tried to swamp me with a steady stream of Russian conversation I didn’t understand. I did find out she’d never been married and she wondered why I wasn’t. I bought some food from the club car, although she was trying to share her chicken legs and sausages from her ample food basket the whole trip. At one point I began to get sleepy and stretched out on my double seat. Seeing me with my eyes shut she covered me with one of her blankets although it was a warm summer day outside. When we got to Riga and watched her struggle down the platform with her short thick legs and all her baggage I sort of missed her for no one had ever fussed over me so much except for my mother in my infancy. Checking into my Intourist hotel in the center of Riga, I saw a huge statue of Lenin in a large park outside my window. Riga was already the site of a popular citizen’s nonviolent rebellion against the grim conformity of its Soviet overseers so I wondered how long that statue would stand before it was toppled by an angry people. Already taggers had covered the street names bordering the park with graffiti calling them either “Independence” or “Freedom” streets. (I was already home in San Francisco when the entire Soviet empire collapsed later in 1991 with their satellite countries freed of their Iron Curtain entrapment. I saw a front page article in The Chronicle with a large photo of the aforesaid Lenin statue in the park lying on its side!) As in Vilnius and in Tallinn there were jerry-built cardboard and wooden barricades at intersections covered with flowers, posters, photos and Gandhian symbols evocative of gentler forms of revolt. Flower-strewn portraits of Madonna were not those of Catholic sainthood but of American pop singer Madonna. Portraits of Beatles celebrity John Lennon replaced those of Vladimir Ilyitch. Counter-culture humor was the theme rather than bloodcurdling cries of grimmer rebellion. Russian tanks could have mowed down these colorful expressions of a hippie uprising in moments but authorities were letting things ride for now, puzzled by this nonviolent resistance. I drank coffee on café stools seated next to bewildered teenage Red Army rookie soldiers wondering what they were doing in a foreign place like Latvia, a country they’d probably never heard of before their military service.

My Intourist guide was a large forty-something Latvian woman with her breath still smelling of her previous night’s tryst with alcohol as we cruised the city in her chauffeured agency car. She was as bored as I was in resignedly lecturing to me about the sainted symbols of the Riga’s church culture. She was the first of my Intourist guides in the fading spectre of Soviet occupation that evidenced the slightest hint of political criticism. With her livelihood hinging on her paychecks from Moscow, with cynical disdain she laconically pointed across a river to a huge printing plant which was guarded by the special troops of the dread Omon, the most feared disciplinary unit of the Russian occupation force.

Once I was stopped by a teenage boy of about 14 as I was leaving the lobby of my hotel. He spoke fairly decent English, and offered to show me around central Riga. I noticed a homoerotic flair to his manner but went along with his ostensible offer. On finding out of my Finnish ancestry, he said he knew of a library that had Finnish language newspapers on their shelves. Starved for news I went along with him to the place. We attracted stares from some onlookers near the hotel as he appeared to be a familiar figure around the area. The last thing I wanted was to be picked up as an aging foreign tourist contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The library was a dismal little outlet some blocks away. It did indeed have some dated Finnish-language newspapers available. But to my surprise they were old copies of Työmies-Eteenpäin, the old Finnish-American Communist newspaper published in Superior, Wisconsin. Apparently, T-E had sent this paper to libraries of Eastern Bloc countries under Communist control. The content of these copies included articles praising the old politics of the USSR. With all the political turmoil portending an end to Stalinism in the Soviet bloc, the T-E had gotten a bit nervous lately about what to write about its old politics. In fact, in 1991 T-E’s Finnish language editor was a young journalism school intern from Finland, a broad left but non-Communist writer named Kristiina Markkanen, who I became friends with subsequently. As they were somewhat dated I spent little time perusing these old copies much further. We wandered back toward the hotel trying to fend off my guide’s flirtatious manner. Finally, as we neared the hotel he asked me for money toward “buying school clothes for his little sister for her fall classes.” I did give him a few rubles for taking me to the library. I preferred Riga to Vilnius as the atmosphere was more secular.
 

TALLINN SNAPSHOTS

Tallinn Old Town

A tall, stately, blonde woman in her Intourist official’s dark blue uniform greeted me on the platform when I disembarked from the train in Tallinn. She noted my Finnish surname on my US passport and wanted to know whether I preferred to talk in English or Finnish, as she was multilingual including in Estonian. She had her state car take me to the huge bulky Hotel Viru in the center, walking distance from Tallinn’s picturesque Old Town. She said I would be assigned a guide to take me on my tour the next day. The massive Hotel Viru had been built by Finnish contractors during the reconstruction of the city following WWII. The old Finnish name for Estonia is Viro (hence the Hotel Viru) and more recently it’s also called Eesti. The hotel was popular with younger and older Finnish men for its lavish gambling casinos and drinking facilities and its ready availability of ladies of the night. Tallinn was only four hours away by ferry from Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland and easily available to those who come to pay and play. It’s not simply Sin City as Finns also come to buy liquor and cigarettes from Tallinn as they are much cheaper then in Finland as are meats and eggs and easily worth the ferry ride. At the time Finnish and other capital was starting to come into post-war Eesti to invest in manufacturing facilities as labor costs were much cheaper with a weak labor movement contrasted to that of Finland where unionization was historically formidable.

I enjoyed wandering around Tallinn’s picturesque Old Town during daytime hours but the ill-lit streets downtown were no place to be hanging around at night, because being a poor country, mugging was commonplace. The first night in town I went for an evening walk and buying a soda at an outdoor snack bar proved threatening as a gang of footloose young men and women made ominous remarks and gestures around me. I quickly retreated to the hotel to spend the evening hours listening to the Finnish state radio YLE in Helsinki with its excellent news and entertainment programs in my room. I didn’t try to make contact with the heavily made up women in mini-skirts who were smooching it up with often drunken clients in the hotel bars and elevators.

I had an excellent guide for my Intourist tour. She was a young married Estonian woman with a Masters degree and a good command of English who took me around in a prepaid taxi. She filled me in on the inhumane treatment of the Estonian people by their Soviet occupiers, besides showing me the officially-approved features of the tour. She cried bitterly as she told me that once the Russians took over the country they shipped all its school teachers to an unknown fate in the Soviet Union. The constitutionally-elected President of an independent Estonia was arrested and died as an inmate in a Russian insane asylum. My guide was especially chagrined at the Soviet policy of transporting countless poverty-stricken Russian workers and their families into Estonia and Latvia to swell the Russian population in those countries at the expense of its natives to ensure keeping them in the Soviet orbit and control forever. At its height the Russians constituted half the population of Latvia. This didn’t vary from Stalin’s program of populating Russian Karelia with many thousands of its own to undermine the Finnish control of the republic in the 1930s under Edward Gylling who had recruited 8 to 10,000 Finnish-Americans and Canadians with their work skills to industrialize Karelia in the early 1930s in what was known as Karjalan Kuume or “Karelian Fever” because of the initial enthusiasm of its North-American Finnish leftist recruits prior to the Stalinist Terror of 1937–’38. My guide literally hated this alien influx into its midst to challenge the jobs of its natives. She considered the Russians brought into the country as an “uncouth inferior breed” in her hatred of these “ethnic interlopers.” I can’t blame these new immigrant workers themselves as it was a step upward for these ordinary people who were being used as pawns in the Soviets’ population politics. Like immigrants everywhere they have kept their own language and identity in the new countries in which they were settled whatever the political motives that brought them there. As a sports fan, whenever I’ve read of the accomplishments of Baltic athletes, they often have Russian surnames to indicate they may possibly be descendants from this Stalinist engineering of population controls a generation or two before their appearance on the scene. Despite her ethnic prejudices, I appreciated my guide’s frank expression of feelings about her tiny country being swallowed up in the not-so-saintly power politics of its giant neighbor.

It was soon time for me to conclude my Estonian visit as I prepared to embark on the ferry from Tallinn to my ancestral homeland. I had previously notified my cousins of my ferry schedule to Helsinki so they would be able to meet in the late evening at dockside on our arrival.
 

TURKU INTERLUDE

The Gulf ferry was a water-bound casino reminiscent of the gaming opportunities of the Hotel Viru where its passengers could gamble away any money they had left after their trip to Tallinn. Also, plenty of drinking opportunities were aboard as “a hair of the dog” to bring their bacchanalia on the south shore of the Gulf of Finland to a soggy conclusion. I sat on the benches of the passenger galley below for the whole trip amid my baggage and the Finnish mummos and vaaris (grandmas and grandpas) who had gone to Tallinn for the cheap food, booze, and clothing to save a few Finnmarks. The inner bulkheads of the galley were lined with batteries of slot machines to separate you from the last of your money. Not one penny from me! I just ate food items from the automats and drank water the whole trip. It was dark when we docked at Helsinki Harbor and since my documents were all in order I was waved ashore by the Finnish authorities without a hitch. Tervetuloa Suomeen (“Welcome to Finland”) was their only comment. My Helsinki cousins Pirkko Hellgren and Pertti and Seija Kuokkanen were waiting to whisk me away in their car.

A few days later I was off to Turku where I would be an unpaid volunteer in the offices of Paavo Nurmi Stadium helping with the paperwork for the forthcoming World Masters Track & Field Championships which would bring thousands of older athletes to Finland in a few short weeks from all over the world. I stayed in the marvelous Turku City Hostel across the Aura River from the Stadium up on the hill. I’d spend mornings at the Stadium offices shuffling through athletes’ application forms or sorting tee-shirts for the Games. Afternoons I’d spend in the archives of the National Migration Institute or the General History Department at the University of Turku which stood on a high hill overlooking the Migration Institute below by the Aura River. I had wonderful rapport with Dr. Olavi Koivukangas, then director of the Migration Institute and his staff who assisted me with any research on immigration studies that I wanted to explore. At the University of Turku campus General History Department Professors Reino Kero and Auvo Kostiainen, specialists in Finnish immigration in North America, were of similarly valuable assistance to me in my research into old Finnish language stage plays of the early immigration period in North America. One of particular interest to me in the departmental archives was a copy of Karl Poti’s play Iloinen Harbori (“Merry Harbor”) which had been badly charred in a fire. It was about the lives of Finnish immigrant longshoremen in Ashtabula, Ohio on the Great Lakes about the turn of the 20th century. I spent hours piecing the script together, copying it laboriously by hand from blackened pages during my two stays in Turku that summer. I typed it on my manual typewriter when I got home later and sent one copy to the Turku University archives as a gift and kept the other to possibly translate into English which unfortunately I never did.

At the Migration Institute, I also met then Duluth journalist Laurie Hertzel who with Mayme Sevander had just recently co-written the first printing of Mayme’s experiences in Soviet Russia: “They Took My Father — Finnish-Americans in Stalin’s Russia,” which I had just read. Mayme was the daughter of a Finnish-American Communist organizer Oscar Corgan and recruiter of fellow Finns to emigrate to Soviet Karelia to “build socialism.” In 1934 he decided to move there himself with his young family which included his wife Katri, his 11-year-old daughter Mayme and a younger son and daughter, Paul and Aino. Oscar was snatched up in the 1937 purges of Stalin’s Terror and was never seen by his family again. (It was only in very recent years that his execution was confirmed.) After growing up in trial and tribulation in the USSR, things eased up after Stalin’s death and she was able to pursue a career as a language teacher, and married Karl? Sevander, another American emigre with whom she had two children. When I was in Turku she was employed as a Russian language teacher at St. Scholastica Unversity in Duluth.

I soon left Turku as the Masters’ Games were still a few weeks away, and I had booked a trip to Soviet Russia through Windship Travel for this interval, my first ever during this reform government of Mikhael Gorbachev which was giving the country more political breathing room for its people. I boarded the crowded Lev Tolstoy Express Train from Helsinki to Moscow, which I had booked only to Leningrad, as I was scheduled after my visit there for a short sojourn to Petrozavodsk in Soviet Karelia where the Karelian Fever North-American Finns had gone in the early 1930s to develop its economy and build socialism, only to fall victim to Stalin’s Terror. I particularly wanted to meet and interview some of the survivors of that deadly period that had killed their utopian dream. So I’ll talk about my Russian experiences in Chapter 32.

End of Installment 31