Experimental Blog # 210

Notes and quotations from "Bears in the Streets - Three Journeys across a Changing Russia" by Lisa Dickey

The author, Lisa Dickey, first went to Moscow in 1988, where she lived at the American embassy compound for 7 months. It is interesting that her mother, who was married to an American military serviceman{the author's father}, took an arranged tour of Soviet cities in 1976. Then in 1994 Lisa Dickey moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, hoping to make her living as a writer.

This book is a highly informative account of three journeys that the author made in 1995, 2005, and 2015. The first two journeys she made with a partner, but the third journey she made by herself. All three times she went to the same places: Vladivostok, Birobidzhan, Chita, Ulan-Ude, Galtai, Baikal, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Kazan, Moscow, and St. Petersburg; and, as much as possible, she met with the same people.

"In the late 1920s, < > Joseph Stalin decided to create a Jewish homeland in Russia. < > the government's decree designated land "near the Amur River in the Far East" < > the Soviet government in 1934 designated the area as the Jewish Autonomous Region, with Birobidzhan as its capital. < > by 1948 the region's Jewish population had swelled to 30,000. < > By the end of 1992, fewer than 5,000 Jews were left there. < > and "official figures showing just 1,700 Jews living here now ...", apparently in 2015.

"Lake Baikal < > holds one-fifth of the earth's freshwater - about the same amount found in all the Great Lakes put together, although they have eight times the surface area."

A conversation:
    "Generally speaking, it's not good for Russia when a Democrat is president," Sergei told me. I asked whether they liked George W. Bush better, and both of them puckered again.
    " So, which American president did you like, then?" I asked. "Assuming there were any."
    "Ronald Reagan," they both said, to my amazement. The "Mr, Gorbachev, tear down this wall" president, the man who took credit for destroying the USSR - this is who they liked? "He stood for something," said Sergei. "He said what he believed. He wasn't sneaky."