As I was going through my old journals, I found a couple of verses I wrote in 1993 when I was host to a teacher visiting San Diego from Vladivostok on the far eastern edge of Russia.  The Soviet Union had collapsed in the last days of 1991.  A “Commonwealth of Independent Republics” was formed. The Commonwealth was composed of the independent republics of the former Soviet Union.  On his first trip out of far eastern Russia, Pavel in some ways  changed my life. I would never again be able to ignore the fact that many people from specific ethnic, racial, and economic groups in the United States, my own country, do not enjoy the freedoms, the liberty, that I had mostly taken for granted.

FREEDOM IS A VERY COMPLICATED THING

“Sometimes freedom is a very complicated thing,”

the teacher from Vladivostok says,

looking at me with hopeful eyes.

“We are people acquainted with winter,

but we never cease to believe in spring.

We live more on hope than on remembrance.”

He settles back into the chair and looks at me

asking with searching eyes

what it is I think of him.

I see across the room a man

who looks and thinks and acts a lot like me.

Is it possible that he knows more about freedom than I do,

his having known by experience so little of it

that he’s had to work at learning what it is?

Is it some affirmation he wants from me

that liberty which I wear so casually

is a far more precious garment than I acknowledge

in the comings and goings of my life?

Russia was the principal and most powerful of the Soviet republics the first time I visited Moscow in the summer of 1971.  At that time Vladivostok was not open to anyone from the West and was closed off to most of the general population of the other republics of the Soviet Union. Since Pavel’s visit to San Diego in 1993, I’ve been back to Russia several times, but I’ve never traveled east of Moscow.  A few years ago one of the closest and dearest friendships of my life began with visits to a school near Smolensk, a beautiful, historic city close to the western edge of Russia.