Courage
The snow kept falling like it would never stop. Three days straight it fell. At times whipping down, up and sideways on howling, wall rattling winds. Other times barely drifting,
Curtains of wafting parachutes obscuring everything, alighting in cumulative, muffling, vast silence. Thus, some 50 years ago, was Bucharest transformed. Give or take.
They used to say Bucharest had been beautiful, once. Glittering. Paris of Eastern Europe. Which was not so much incredible as incomprehensible. Inconceivable. Bucharest was pitch at night and grey in day. Brutal Stalinist architecture rotting, decaying every which way but gracefully. Whatever grand, glittering mirage they imagined -- it wasn't Bucharest.
Yet, when it finally stopped snowing, Bucharest indeed was inconceivably transformed. Every single jut, skew and contradiction of its broke-tooth grimace obscured, overlaid by flowing organic drifts more symmetric than waves, more geometric than dunes. Fractured roof-lines had become drumlins. Burst concrete patched, each deformity, discrepancy or notion of discordance smoothed to perfection. Piled debris, bricks, whatnot -- burial-mounded, unmarked, erased. All signs and evidence of evil turned not to divine but entirely natural, flawless, pristine innocence.
Out we went to gawk and wade. Everyone did. Most in doorways, braver souls a few steps out. Children covered to their chests, adults hip-deep, leaning on shovels. All standing silent, standing still. Doing nothing to mar the still, white, overwhelming silence. This is important, this crystal memory in my mind after fifty years. Give or take. None spoke. None moved a twitch to shovel. It wasn't just the standard adage -- they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work. It went deeper, the snow and what it meant. It was tangible reality breaching, cresting over and into lives otherwise crushed, smothered, extinguished by absurdity and permanent terror. We would, of course, have one-and-all been shoveling heroically had there been any Securitate people with their machine guns on hand. There is no insinuation that some well of courage had been tapped under the snow, that we stood in any anticipatory solidarity with the spirit of Lech Walesa, waiting defiant as he would three decades hence in Gdansk for the Russian tanks to arrive. Nothing like that. We just knew there was no Securitate immediately threatening in the halted, paralyzed city. Not at that moment made eternal by appreciation -- lesser yet viscerally greater than understanding -- that however eclipsed by iron curtain darkness, the real yet had reach enough to touch even us. There were no rays of sunshine -- only blessed snow. Blessed for providing that moment of existential reprieve when the iron curtain itself was curtained.
There would be no trudging to work, school or lining up for bread that day. We went in, scrounged at shelves, added whatever we found to the pot and turned to the television waiting it to boil. The pot, not the television. Though it would have made scant difference. What was in the pot, what was on television -- a tossup any given day which was less consumable or more toxic. That particular day it was feverish images of madly shoveling citizens. Lines of trucks, each arriving to get shoveled full of snow and replaced by the next in scant minutes. Never mind how any glancing out windows revealed the unmarred vista of Bucharest motionless, prostrate under snow. We did not scoff at the feverishly fake shovelers televised in a nearby neighbourhood. The camera platform surrounded by armed Securitate was not pictured, of course -- but we knew precisely where it was. Just as we knew that had it been our neighbourhood in the eye of the Party, under Securitate guns, then we too would have shoveled madly. It was the merely commonplace, everyday rule for surviving. Nor were the lies and bullets subjugating us unadorned or unvarnished. To the contrary. Foremost production values were reserved for official lies and bullets.
Berserk shoveling and roaring trucks were interspersed with hymns of praise for our triumphal workers. Beautiful, beaming little girls, none older than five, recited or sang personally composed odes and paeans to the visionary, glorious leadership of Ceausescu making it all possible. Which last was the most laughably sad, absurd lie of the lot. It wasn't Ceausescu's regime making it all possible. It was the Soviet Union.
*
Some argue that Putin's Russia isn't Stalin's Soviet Union. But that's precisely what Putin has been resurrecting these past 20 years. And by now -- what practical difference remains? If we compare Ukraine's Holodomor -- perhaps Stalin's single greatest evil -- with Putin's ongoing atrocities in Ukraine, which is the worse? At this moment Mariupol's remaining civilian population is surrounded, pounded by Putin's artillery and intentionally being starved to death. This fate awaits every Ukrainian city Putin succeeds in surrounding. And if Putin isn't stopped in Ukraine -- goodbye Baltic states, goodbye Eastern Europe. Hello again Berlin. No one can seriously suggest a triumphal, emboldened Putin will stop himself after succeeding in Ukraine.
Others argue that regime change can only come from within. That Russians must have the courage to stand up, speak out, revolt. But that is precisely where regime change cannot come from. There may be moments of reflexive resistance from relatively informed individuals when cognitive dissonance grows too intense to bear. However, their futures and very lives become forfeit. In Putin's Russia, just as in Stalin's or in Ceausescu's Romania, truth does not speak to power. To the contrary. Power dictates to truth.
It is not Russians who must have more courage to stand up. They, like Ukrainians, are under Putin's guns. It is we in the West who must have more courage. Ukrainians have done all the heavy lifting for us. They have either defeated or fought Putin's army to a stand-still. Now, as the slaughter of Ukraine's remaining civilian population begins, we must stand up to help substantively. It isn't a military challenge. Poland could do it alone. Heck, Moldova could do it. Just militarily, Ukraine has in fact already done it.
The challenge to the West isn't military. The challenge is to our humanity and values. For it is on the altar of our Western values that Ukrainians have sacrificed themselves to stop Putin's conventional military. High time we stop virtue signaling to appease Putin against pressing nuclear buttons. Appeasing can only embolden the world's foremost bully. He is counting on it. Now, as in Kennedy and Reagan times -- we must show some backbone before it's too late.
Time for a little courage in the West.
If not already obvious, here is what a little courage would entail in practice. First: stop asking what if Putin nukes us for daring to actively contribute Ukraine resistance. Let's have some trust in mutually assured destruction. However seemingly insane, Putin's goals are tactical and strategic. He intends to win -- not to ensure everyone loses by eradicating humanity altogether. His seeming insanity is simply the most effective tactic to keep us cowed. We have to stop confusing Putin's evil -- like Stalin's or Hitler's before him -- with insanity. He is no more insane than they were. Second: stop extrapolating worst case scenarios. We in the West are so not on the vulnerable side of this historic fiasco. Ukrainian heroism has already left Russia militarily exposed, undefended, ridiculed. "No fly zone" does not mean shooting into Russian or Belorussian territory at whatever gets launched from there. It just means help defend the Ukrainian sky. Again -- Ukrainians have already done the heavy lifting for us. Third: stop buying into Russian propaganda. Putin didn't attack Ukraine to keep it from NATO.
Ukraine sought NATO protection because Putin wouldn't stop attacking.
Time for us to toughen up some in the West. We don't need another hero -- Ukraine has already done the hazardous heavy lifting for us. We just need to grow a little backbone and show some courage.