Russia: A New Seed Planted among Thorns

From The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Living in the Now

Every second of existence is a new miracle. Consider the countless variations and possibilities that await us every second—avenues into the future. We take only one of these; the others—who knows where they go? This is the eternal marvel, the magnificent uncertainty of the next second to come, with the past a steady unfolding carpet of denouement.

—JACK VANCE, THE HOUSES OF ISZM

I WAS IN THE SCANDINAVIAN AIRLINES TWIN-PROP PLANE THAT landed at about noon on a gray, blustery, raw-cold December day in Kaliningrad, Russia. The airport is about 20 miles outside the town, surrounded by now-unused barbed-wire fences and empty guard stations. Inside the terminal there was no heat, and only about half the overhead lights worked. Remembering the lengthy interrogations I’d been through when entering and leaving East Berlin years earlier, I was expecting rigid formalities on entering, particularly because Kaliningrad was a “special zone,” an area of secret military installations and one of the former Soviet Union’s most sensitive places. Even normal Russians aren’t allowed to travel into the region, but on this day the immigration inspector just looked at my visa, stamped my passport, smiled, and said, “Welcome to Russia.” Nobody was even checking luggage for contraband in the customs area: I just walked outside, carrying my shoulder bag and the 5 liters of water I’d brought from Copenhagen.

Outside, Gerhard Lipfert waited with the blue Volkswagen bus he’d driven from Germany. He greeted me with a huge hug, saying, “Welcome to Russia!”

Inside the bus was a man named Herr Burkhardt, who’d been a foot-soldier in Hitler’s army, captured by the Russians, and spent decades as a prisoner of war in Russia. He was finally released and returned to Germany, where he now worked for Salem as a Russian/ German translator. His face creased in a wide smile as he welcomed me.

The next morning we set out for an area about 200 kilometers from Kaliningrad, near the Polish border, where Salem has undertaken a project in Russia. It was bitterly cold, and the sky was so dim, the clouds so thick, that the world looked like an old black-and-white movie from the forties.

As we drove through the countryside, I watched the passing parade of fallen-down fences, broken-down houses, ancient cars, potholed pavement, and the steady stream of old men and women hitchhiking. (Horst Von Heyer, a Salem colleague, once remarked to me that you can tell the poverty of a nation by the age of the hitchhikers. I’ve found this to be so very true, all over the world.)

It was close to 10:00 p.m. when we arrived in a little town whose name I never managed to get straight. In the midst of rolling fields and gentle hills, the Russian farmlands, was this little collection of boxsquare houses, each identical to the other, each just a bit larger than a double-wide trailer home. There were perhaps 60 houses that made up the town, maybe five streets.

We stopped first at Erika’s house. It was her mother’s birthday, a little old lady with a scarf over her white hair, her face wrinkled with age and weather, and a birthday celebration was in full swing. Twenty people packed the house, 15 or so of them in the living room, where a long makeshift table that had been set up was covered with food and drink. There were potatoes and carrots next to a bottle of vodka. Beans and some sort of meat were next to another bottle of vodka. Several piles of Salem bread from Germany sat by a bottle of peach schnapps. Red beet soup and sauerkraut were next to the bottle of wine.

People were laughing; the women were singing long songs, rocking from side to side together, hugging each other. Each person wanted to shake my hand, and every time anybody walked by me, they put their hand on my shoulder or back. At first it struck me, a rather reserved American, as overly demonstrative, but I then saw that this was how everybody was with everybody. Here was the soul of Russia, the heart of the people: touching, laughing, kissing, hugging, singing maudlin songs while holding hands.

We were given places of honor at the table, and Lipfert gestured for me to eat the food. “This is a rare occasion,” he said. “And most of the food is what we’ve brought here recently. You can eat it safely, but don’t drink the water.”

I didn’t have to worry about drinking the water. First a glass of sangria was put in front of me; we all toasted, and everybody downed his or hers in one gulp. Next was a tumbler of straight vodka. Then the schnapps. Then back to the vodka. I was accumulating half-full glasses in front of me, to the great amusement of my hosts, but my explanation that I was sick from the airplane seemed to soften the blow of my lack of participation.

There was another surprise at the party: it was Horst Von Heyer, the Salem employee who had been shot in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq two years earlier, when Salem was trying to set up a program to help the Kurds there. Von Heyer, having survived the loss of his assistant in Namibia to a crocodile, and five bullets in his body in Iraq, was again up and around, a distinguished man in his late fifties who stands well over 6 feet tall and speaks perfect British English (and a half dozen other languages). It was great to see him. He’d taken me into Uganda the second time I’d gone to Africa, and we’d spent many an evening together talking long into the nights the year our family lived at Salem in Stadtsteinach. Now he was helping the Salem project here in Russia.

Around midnight the party broke up, people bundling up to trudge out into the cold, black night (no streetlights, dirt streets) back to their homes. Several liters of vodka had been consumed, along with the schnapps and the wine. I was amazed anybody could stand up much less walk home. Later, Lipfert told me that alcohol was a major problem in Russia. In this small town of 400 people, 22 have died in the past year from alcoholism. Two deaths a month in a town of 400! Vodka is cheaper and more readily available than bottled water; and, as Von Heyer said, with the “morale of the people so utterly destroyed, with nothing to do or strive for,” all they do is drink. Lipfert blames it on communism, Burkhardt says it’s part of the Russian psyche, and I just watched, observing it and trying not to judge it.

Herr Burkhardt and I spent the night in the house next door to Erika’s, inhabited by Olga; her husband, Sergei; and their two children, a boy about 13 and a girl around seven. The two kids share a room with a small bed on either side, and Olga moved them onto a mattress in the kitchen and gave Burkhardt and me their beds. I went to sleep, exhausted.

Saturday

The next morning I woke up around 10 o’clock, still a bit jet-lagged. I dressed and joined Olga’s family in the kitchen. They all sat on little stools around a small metal table with a new German-made tablecloth, and there was bread from the bakeries at Salem in Germany on the table, along with tea so dark it looked like coffee; homemade plum preserves were filled with large pits that you scooped around. I brought a liter of Danish bottled water and shared it with the table.

Twenty minutes later Lipfert and Von Heyer arrived from next door, where they’d been sleeping, and told Burkhardt and me to get dressed up to go out. In my jet-lag daze, I forgot to put on my long underwear and just pulled on a jacket, hat, gloves, and boots. Outside it was snowing so hard I couldn’t see more than 100 feet, and the wind was howling. We bundled into the bus along with an old woman who I soon learned was the “bookkeeper” for the Salem Russia operation, and we drove off along frozen, pitted dirt roads.

We drove for an hour or so through the countryside. For about a half mile, there was a high double barbed-wire fence on our right. “It’s the border with Poland,” Lipfert said. I tried to place it on the map in my mind but was lost.

The heater in the Volkswagen microbus was effective enough only to melt the snow that had covered my clothes, and I was now both cold and wet, shivering. We crested a hill and, pitching wildly from side to side, came down into an area in the midst of desolate miles of empty land, punctuated only by two houses under construction and a small wooden shed.

“This is the beginning of Salem here,” Lipfert said, turning off the bus.

We all climbed out and walked through foot-deep snow to the first of the two houses. They were two-story brick-and-wood homes with steeply pitched roofs. The outsides were covered with scaffolding, no windows or doors were yet in place, and the wind hooted mournfully as it whipped through the skeletal buildings.

In the first house we found four men bundled against the cold in heavy coats, Cossack hats, and thick black boots. One was listlessly driving nails into a wall; the other three were smoking cigarettes and apparently supervising the first man. All four were mostly toothless, with aged and lined faces, wind-burned skin, and thick and cracked hands—men in their thirties who looked like they were in their sixties, their bones and teeth ravaged by malnutrition, their livers and skin devoured by vodka and cigarettes.

Von Heyer became very upset when he saw their work. The wood boards didn’t fit together: you could see outdoors through the cracks in the walls. The carpentry looked like a kid’s tree house constructed of scrap wood. The electrical wires weren’t recessed into the brickwork or the walls but stapled haphazardly across walls and ceilings. And the chimney (as with most all the brickwork) had no mortar vertically between the bricks, only above and below them (and they were uneven at that). As I stood on one side of the chimney, I could see between the bricks clear through to the other side and get a glimpse of Von Heyer.

I shook my head and started to say something; Von Heyer put a finger to his lips. “You be the silent one,” he said, “and try to look upset.”

Lipfert and Von Heyer brought over Burkhardt and, with loud and angry tones, pointed out the deficiencies, waving their arms and hitting the flimsy walls with their fists. The workers yelled back, and it seemed that the winner wouldn’t be the person with the greatest logic but the loudest voice. Then Burkhardt pointed to me and said something in a low and menacing voice, and they all got quiet.

We marched out of the first house and walked through the snow, leaning into the wind, to the second house, where the scene was repeated, although this time the workers kept glancing furtively at me and didn’t yell back so much. I looked around, wondering if I’d been cast in the role of some sort of building inspector.

There was the same central heating with no room controls in each room as at Olga’s house. The walls were a crazy quilt of fiber-board, pine board, and plywood. The window and door frames were obviously prefabricated and put into place, and the wood was uneven, showing big gaps. In some places, where a piece of wood wasn’t long enough to complete a seal, smaller pieces were nailed into place, willy-nilly.

After the showing was over, we stood by the old stove and I said, “What’s going on with the houses?”

Von Heyer snorted. “The materials are pathetic. We have to buy them as prefab houses, because everything in this country is made in huge central factories. You wouldn’t believe the size of the factories or the ancient machinery they have in them. It’s pitiful.”

“So the walls and the doors are prefabricated?”

“And the concrete for the foundation—those big slabs of concrete out there with the holes running lengthwise through them.”

“But what about the assembly? The men putting the houses together? They don’t seem like happy workers.”

He shook his head. “They don’t know how to work. And even when you can get them to work, they don’t know how to do the job.”

“What do you mean?”

“The brickwork is all wrong; you saw that.”

“Yes,” I said. “Looked to me like the house would burn down the first time somebody started a fire in the furnace.”

“Exactly,” he said. “But when we pointed it out to them, they said that we should hire somebody else to redo it. And still pay them!”

“They don’t know how to lay bricks?”

“They said they did, but their work gives the lie to that. Same with the carpentry and the electrical work. One’s drunk and the other three are incompetent.”

“Why not fire them?”

“I already did that once. They work for a local contractor, and I fired him the last time I was here, last month. We hired another contractor, and he brought out these same men. They don’t care. The work ethic here has been totally destroyed. That’s the doom of this country. They’ve been ruled by kings, czars, or communist dictators for a thousand years; they have no understanding of individual initiative, of pride in workmanship, of climbing up through hard work.

“I suggested to the bricklayer that we could bring a master mason from Germany, or send him there for an apprenticeship. He asked how long it takes to become a master mason in Germany; and when I told him it’s a three-year apprenticeship, he told me I was crazy. ‘That’s impossible,’ he said. ‘Anybody can learn how to lay bricks in a few days.’ I tried to tell him that he doesn’t know about the subtleties of mortar, how to plan the bricks, how to select them, what tools to use, how temperature affects the way the mortar sets, and on and on. He just shrugged. There are no apprenticeship programs left here, there’s no status to being a craftsman, and they don’t care!”

Over in the corner, another argument had erupted. I moved a step closer to the stove, which Von Heyer eyed with consternation. “So, what do you do?” I asked.

“Well, first we yell and scream and jump up and down. That gets their attention. We threaten to not pay them, but they know that’s an empty threat because the government will back them up in their claim for wages. And finally we brought you in.”

“Me?”

“Traditionally in Russia, particularly under the communists, the ‘big boss’ was the guy who stood quietly in the back and said nothing. If he didn’t like things, he was very quiet, which is a very dangerous sign to the workers. They can’t imagine that somebody like Lipfert or me—who is out working with the people, helping plant the fields, getting his hands dirty, living in the houses with the farmers—could possibly be ‘big bosses.’ But you, you’re quiet. You stand in the back. You wear nice clothes and stay for only a day or two. And you’re from America. They know that Yeltsin has many friends in America. Maybe you have influence with the government, and that could be dangerous to them. We’re hoping your presence will encourage them to do the job right.”

I looked over at the workmen, who were again shouting and waving their fists, and saw now the fear in the way they glanced at me.

“Seems like a pretty damn poor way to have to get things done,” I said, feeling resentful about the role I’d been cast in without consultation.

“This is a pretty damn poor country,” Von Heyer said, his voice thick with frustration. “I had an easier time getting the native people in Uganda to help build our hospital. Straight from the bush, never a day’s school in their lives, but they were eager to learn and to work. But not these people. Their spirit has been totally broken.”

We went back out into the snow. My clothes were now soaking wet, the sky had darkened, and the wind had picked up. The snow had let up. Perhaps it was too cold to snow.

We piled into the bus, and Von Heyer put me in the front by the heater. Back on the rural roads, the windows closed and the heat on, I asked Lipfert to explain to me exactly what the Salem work in this area was.

“As you’ve seen, many skills have been lost,” he said. “These include not only construction skills but also agricultural skills. As when you went with us into Africa in 1980, you know that if people are starving, we will feed them, but our goal is to leave, to make them self-sufficient. We built the children’s village, the hospital, and the farm in Uganda, and now we’re turning it over to the people who live there. Here we’ll start with the farm, because in this climate that’s the first basic of survival.”

“You’re teaching farming?”

“Small-scale, organic, low-tech agriculture—what will work in a country like this with so little infrastructure. Seven families back in the village where we are staying are being helped by us. Herr Müller heard about their plight from one of their relatives, who wrote to him about them. When we arrived here, they had no food, no work, only the clothes on their backs. There was the very real risk that first winter that they might die of illnesses related to malnutrition. So we brought in food, blankets, clothing, and cooking utensils and helped them rent the houses they’re living in back in the village.

“Then we rented some land, and they farmed it last summer, using our techniques. The result was such a huge harvest, the largest in this entire state, that they could make a profit selling it, and the government came in and honored them with an award. In the past few months, 120 families have formally applied to us to ‘join’ our project. They still have this collective-type thinking, and we’re trying to tell them to just imitate what we’re doing, on a small scale, with only a few families at a time. It’s re-creating the family farm, which built Europe and America. Now Herr Müller has committed to build them seven houses on land that they’re buying and some land that we’ve gotten from the government to teach agricultural methods, and you saw the first two just now. We’d hoped to have all seven finished by now, but things take very, very long in this country.”

“I think I’m beginning to understand why.”

“It’s not just the workers,” Lipfert said. “It’s also the materials. If we could just truck materials in from Germany, it would be easy, but the government won’t let us do that. You saw what we went through just trying to bring in a busload of household goods. So we have to buy locally, with hard currencies, and what we get is so substandard it’s almost impossible to build with.”

“So what do you do?”

He looked at me with a grin. “We persist, of course. Nobody ever said doing a good work is easy.”

Back at Olga’s house, the TV was on in the living room. She moved a rug and raised part of the hallway floor, then lifted up a jar of pickles from the dirt crawlspace under the house. She brought out some bread and wine, I got one of my bottles of water, and we sat with the old woman and Herr Burkhardt and watched the TV. They were absorbed in the show; I was trying to warm up—and to pick up a few words of Russian.

When the show ended, a man’s face filled the screen. He was giving some sort of speech, and his face was twisted with an insane anger. He pounded his fist and shook his finger at the camera, then became soft and soothing in his voice, then began shouting again. He was followed by a news anchorwoman, sitting behind a desk, making commentary.

“What’s that?” I said to the room in general.

“Vladimir Zhiranovski,” said Olga. “He’s a candidate in tomorrow’s election, and he said that if he’s elected, we should work more closely with Germany, reestablish our old border with them.”

“Isn’t Poland in between you and Germany?”

“That’s what he means,” Olga said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Get rid of Poland.”

I shivered.

An hour later Lipfert and Von Heyer came over, having changed their clothes. “Tonight is another birthday party,” Lipfert announced. “Not one of the Salem families but another family down the street, and they’ve invited us to come. It’ll be very high status for them if we drop in, so we really should.”

So we set off through the absolutely black night to a house a few blocks away.

There a family was gathered: Mom and Dad and two sons just short of their teenage years. Von Heyer, Lipfert, Burkhardt, and I were the guests. Mom put a liter bottle of vodka on the table and poured shots for all of us, then gave a toast and downed hers in one gulp, as did her husband. The boys, who weren’t invited to sit at the table but only watched from the couch, observed the ritual with sad eyes.

The conversation over dinner, punctuated by rounds of the vodka (Mom was now drinking it out of a water glass), was mostly about the election. I got up to use the bathroom and discovered that, unlike in the houses of the families Salem was supporting, there was no toilet paper in this house. Instead next to the toilet was a pile of computer paper torn into four-inch-square scraps, and next to that was a basket for the used paper. When I tried to raise the toilet seat, it fell off.

Sunday

The next morning was Election Day. When I woke up, Olga’s family was clustered around the TV, watching Zhiranovski make another speech. “What’s he saying?” I asked.

Olga turned, shaking her head with an amazed look on her face. “He says that everybody who votes for him will get a liter of vodka and a turkey after the election.”

“People fall for that?” I asked.

She nodded. “Remember, Russia has been here nearly a thousand years. And this is the first democratic election ever—ever! People have no idea what to do, how to do it, or what to believe.”

I went into the kitchen and made myself some rice and lentils and finished off a bottle of Danish water. Around noon Von Heyer and Lipfert came by to collect me, and, my bag packed and a final water bottle under my arm, I said good-bye to my hosts. The 10 Danish chocolate bars I left for Olga and the small airport-bought toys for her kids brought tears to their eyes.

We drove through a blizzard for six hours to Kaliningrad, finally arriving back at the ship, Hotel Hanza.

We went out into the city, which was unnaturally dark. All the “official” stores were closed, but in the area around Lenin’s Square, a central park in the city, was a series of kiosks the size of New York City newsstands. All were open and doing brisk business. “These are the stores the Mafia runs,” Burkhardt explained as we parked the car. “Therefore this is the safest part of town.”

At the first kiosk was every imaginable type of chocolate—Swiss, Danish, German, French, Austrian … but nothing Russian.

The second kiosk had booze and cigarettes—Johnny Walker, Marlboro, Winston; again there was nothing Russian, except vodka. Even the maps and the souvenirs that they had were printed in German and referred to the town as Königsberg.

And on down the line we found toys, gum, candy, more chocolate, more booze, but nothing Russian. “The country is dead,” Burkhardt said as we climbed into the bus without having found a Russian souvenir of any sort. “Their only product is vodka.”

Monday

At six o’clock the next morning, we drove out to the airport. The airport gate was closed, but the guard station and the machine-gun turret were empty, so I got out of the bus and opened what was once the high-security gate myself; we drove through.

The building was unlocked. An old woman with a homemade broom of straw tied to a stick with wire was stooped over nearly to her knees, sweeping the floor. No heat, nothing open. There was nothing open except a small café off to one side.

A few minutes before the scheduled departure time, the flight crew arrived. Lipfert and Von Heyer left, and I went through security. The metal on my jacket fired off the metal detector, but the people at security just waved me through anyway. They didn’t even bother to watch the screen as my bag went through the X-ray machine: perhaps it didn’t work.

We walked out across the frozen and slick ramp to the plane and climbed ice-covered stairs. A de-icing truck came out, and two men began to listlessly spray something on the plane, blowing off the accumulation of snow and ice from the previous night. It took them an hour, and I cringed as I watched one of them walking on the wing, one foot on the flaps, walking all over areas that, on US planes, are clearly marked “NO STEP” and, on this plane, had a similar-looking marking in Cyrillic.

Finally, we took off for Berlin. The plane smelled musty and my seat kept falling back into the lap of the man behind me, but we wobbled up into the air and two hours later landed in Berlin during one of the heaviest blizzards I’ve flown through in years. Stepping into the Berlin airport, with all its shops and signs and products and well-dressed people going one place or another, I remembered the people back in Russia. How long would it take them to rebuild their country? Von Heyer thought it would be at least two generations; Olga was more optimistic and thought 10 to 15 years. And the politicians, of course, are promising to do it in two.

Traveling to Russia for Salem taught me an important lesson. I saw how the communist concept—once embraced by the Russians as the solution to the problems of the West—destroyed the human spirit because it detached people’s actions from any response. What happened in the Soviet Union, for generations, is that although people acted (did their jobs), it made no difference in how their lives went; whether they worked hard or not, there was no change in their standard of living. With no connection between initiative and outcome, their productive spirit died.

On my visit I’d seen people whose spirit was destroyed by centuries of repression, by alcohol, and by a total lack of hope. I’d also seen and come to know those who believed change was possible, that there could be a future for Russia if only the “older” wisdom of the peasants could be brought back and enough people could see and sense the possibility of success.

Salem is a start. The impact we’ve had on a small region is already startling, with 120 families going from being suspicious and skeptical to enthusiastically wanting to jump on the bandwagon. Because the media is so centralized and pervasive in Russia, it’s possible that once the Salem program is up and running at full speed it could be a model that will quickly spread across the country, teaching the basics of free enterprise, agriculture, food storage, and nutrition.

The next step, Lipfert says, is to help upgrade the local hospitals and change the way the orphanages are run, moving them to the Salem family model. With enough help, and if the government doesn’t turn in on itself or experience a total economic collapse like the one that in part led to World War II, I believe it just may work.

From The Prophet’s Way by Thom Hartmann,
© 1997, published by Inner Traditions International.