Why I Knit, Part I

In lieu of a coarser term, I knit to anger persons.

By which I do not mean, I knit to annoy real human beings with the click-click-click of my needles. (They don’t click.) Or with the movements of my arms: as a “production” and public-transport knitter, I have taught myself to knit with minimal motion, and if the movements of my fingers and forearm muscles annoy people, that’s their problem. They can play with their smartphones. Nor do I mean that I knit to annoy real human beings by bragging about what I produce, although I love to reply to those who ask me where I bought my top, I made it. (Then there are those who recognize the absolutely outrageous quality of a good hand knit and confront me: You made this! What yarn? What pattern? What needles? What is the gauge, or stitches per centimeter or inch?)

No, I knit to anger the corporations known as persons, who have flooded the world with so much cheap junk we are drowning in it, be it junk food or junk clothing. I knit to make my own clothing (this is what I mean by being a “production knitter”, rather than a real production knitter) because the results are so much better than anything I can buy. My choice of pattern, my choice of colors and material, my measurements, for well under $100 for most garments—for materials. As for the cost of my time, let us just say knitting is entertainment and a channel for OCD as well. Is it cost effective? Not if my competition is Wal-Mart or Target or H&M. In fact, however, I compare my work to Chanel, Dior, Hermes, and Big Pharma. Compared to their prices, my work is incredibly cost-effective. I am, after all, uninterested in producing the cheap and the disposable; I am interested in producing the beautiful and durable.

I knit to also, as I alluded to in the previous paragraph, make a political statement. I knit to deny the persons who are actually corporations producing junk, my money. I knit to deny them legitimacy. I knit to say not only, I can do better, but, What do I need you for? I knit to prove to my fellow citizens that we do not need junk.

If every one of us decided to make just some our own clothing, if every man and woman alike—for I am not saying women should do unpaid labor as family knitters and tailors; in fact, I am saying the opposite—made just one beautiful garment each season, what would happen to the corporations that get rich by selling us the cheap and quickly outmoded? What would happen if a man who wanted a sweater decided that he wasn’t going to buy a fleece thing that pilled and looked shabby and instead decided to knit Ronaldsay out of a good, hard, durable wool? This is would be a fun knit: just difficult enough to be interesting, and the wow-to-effort factor is incredible. It wouldn’t take more than a few hours to learn to make, in fact, if you joined a helpful knitting group of enablers and addicts. Cast-on, bind-off, knit, purl, left and right cable crosses (it looks like 8-stitch cables) every few rows. That’s it. Well, you do need to count. Maximilian, Jade Starmore’s rather Landsknecht-y pullover, is also seriously covetable and far easier than it looks. I plan to make that for me.

What happened if we all did this? What happened if each of us chose to master an important craft: sewing, gardening, butchery, preserving, carpentry, pottery, cooking, metalwork?

We would each produce some of the things we need and use every day. If we bought some or all the materials we used from our communities, particularly from local merchants and manufacturers, we would keep our money circulating within our communities. We would also be able to better evaluate so much of what we are sold at places like Wal-Mart and the Gap, Macy’s and Target as what it actually is. Junk, produced at a terrible cost in human lives and dignity, be it of those exploited even unto death, of the unemployed and underemployed here in America and every other country where corporations and their profits are regarded as more important than human beings—including the human beings without whom no corporation can exist, much less be profitable.

Below is approximately a year’s production: I pulled stuff out of my closet, placed it on a white sheet and photographed it. I did not have the time to steam everything, the more so because it will just be folded back up and need to be steamed the next time I wear it.

 
 

Annie Modessit’s Corset Top, knit from a blend of cotton, cashmere, wool and viscose. I ought to wear it more often than I do—it is all that. I’ve never been able to photograph this properly; there is a certain sheen to the yarn that I think may not help.

I call this a Klingon Battle Dress Tunic; it’s actually a Vogue Knitting pattern knit from Schaeffer’s Susan, a sport-weight cotton in the colorway Althea Gibson. Handpainted yarns can pool in ways that are dreadful (known as Clown Barf) or delightful. I really ought to edge the arms with crochet; I love to wear this over a tank top and tight trousers or jeans.

This is a free Pierrot pattern knit from a blend of acrylic and cotton. I’ve decided that I really rather dislike soft yarns, like this one, because they pill too much. I’ll probably reknit this out of silk. I love to wear this over a particular green tank top and some really ugly cargo shorts.

A Jade Starmore pattern, Elizabeth the First; I ended up altering the off-the-shoulder neckline to something squarer and more in keeping with contemporary fashions. It’s knit from 50/50 silk/cashmere, which is soft but not that pilly.

These are my first pair of socks and my introduction to Noro, which I hate because of the knots. It’s an arch-shaped pattern that I had to alter to get right the heels, and my feet love because I have high arches; if you don’t, your feet probably won’t. I think there are more hand-knitted socks in my future.

I just finished this homage to Lilly Pulitzer. The pattern is Helga Isager’s Coral, and the body is 50/50 silk/linen; the accent is some nameless handpainted merino cashmere that I have about 40 g of scrap left. It’s a beautiful yarn that pills madly; for that matter, the silk/linen is more hairy than I like, but for a summer top, I can accept it. I thought this would be a tank top; it’s a mid-thigh tunic that I wear over loose culottes because it is very body conscious.

This is Carol Sunday’s Tapestry, modified to be a pullover rather than a cardigan. I knit in the round to the armholes and almost finished the back when my math went wrong, so I set it aside to do my summer knitting. The yarn was a really ugly flesh-colored, 50/50 silk/wool that I bought for $10/pound and overdyed a saffron red that is much deeper and browner than the picture shows.

Missing is a shawl, called Echoflowers, in a lovely orchid mercerized cotton and frosted iridescent amber glass beads that I gave to a friend before I thought to photograph it. Also on my needles is another Vogue pattern in a deep, dirty gold silk that is ribbed lace and cables. For details, I’m Warmare on Ravelry.

 

Bloodlands: What Happens When Nations Go Mad

I have been pondering the fate of Someone Else’s War—I believe it will be part of a trilogy—and so not posting further chapters while I sort out my thoughts. Instead, I decided to read a book I have wanted to, if you can apply “long wanted to read” about Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. I told my husband this and he replied, “Maybe it’s time we got a TV?”

Bloodlands is a history of political mass killing, often but far from always along ethnic lines, in what we now call Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine, between 1933-1945. Like any book on a comparable subject, Bloodlands is very tough to read if you have any human feelings at all. It is also a superb work of revisionist history, revising the historical record to take into account what we now know about the killings in Eastern Europe with the collapse of Communism. Finally, the language is extremely accessible.

But there is another reason Bloodlands is an important book that should be far more widely read in American than it is. Bloodlands shows what happens when entire nations go bonkers—as America is doing now, and I write this without once pretending that America is in anything close to the situation of Germany in 1932 or Russia or the Soviet Union in 1924, when Lenin died. The parallels are very far from exact.

America has gone bonkers before, although we usually do it overseas. The last time we really went full-scale, all-out bonkers on our own soil was our Civil War, and the savagery and cruelty of that conflict is something Americans have never really come to grips with. Revised estimates of its toll, from the traditional 620,000 deaths, range from 650,000 to 850,000; 750,000 is now an accepted central figure, out of a pre-war population of 31.4 million. The revised estimate may still be too low: Francis Amisa Walker, superintendent of the 1870 census, estimated male deaths as not lower than 850,000. In modern American terms, those 750,000 deaths approximately equate to 7 million male deaths in 4 years; in the terms of Soviet Russia in 1932, about 2.4 million deaths. (Table “Before WWII.”) This dwarfs the approximately 700,000 Soviets, particularly Poles and Ukrainians, shot during the Great Terror of 1937-38 and is more than 70% of the 3.3 million Soviets, mostly Ukrainians, starved in the Collectivization campaign of the Soviet Union of 1932-33. (Figures are Snyder, in “Numbers and Terms.”)

Moreover, the numbers citied for the American Civil War do not include the appalling suffering of African-Americans after the Civil War, suffering that was a direct consequence of slavery. It should also be remembered that Communism, including Stalinism, was a demented attempt to create a workable future for Russia because its Tsarist past was largely garbage. The cause of the American Civil War was the South’s insistence that some human beings be allowed to own other human beings. Yet our understanding of our Civil War is sanitized nearly beyond recognition: we have never really come to terms with the war in the West, the appalling suffering of newly-freed slaves and the near-immediate campaign of Southern whites to reimpose conditions on African-Americans that might best be described as serfdom. Some states still have the Confederate stars and bars, a banner of treason in an evil cause, as part of their state flag and “heritage.” Without mentioning three hundred years of Indian wars, or the horrendous destruction we let loose upon Southeast Asia, we have turned America’s episodes of madness into entertainment and psychobabble.

While there has been some serious historical examination of American insanity, that examination is not part of our canon—more Americans have probably seen and heard of John Wayne’s The Green Berets than have read Loren Baritz’ Backfire. Instead, America’s madness—and the huge number of bodies it, like any other nation, stacks when it goes mad—is nothing more than a cause of non-binding self-flagellation for most of the Americans inclined to attempt to understand these parts of our history, a source of unearned moral superiority. Most American opposition to our disastrous war in Iraq was not about Americans reasserting their citizenship and their right to demand that the Senate, and the Senate alone, could declare and commit the nation to war. The Anti-Iraq War movement was about people feeling good about themselves, nothing more elevated. (My husband was a conservative who lost his job for his kind of adult, serious opposition.)

The result is that not only does America not realize that it is living within sight of an abyss, with tens of millions of people out of work and tens of millions more with no realistic hope for a stable, satisfying career that allows them to live in dignity and comfort while contributing to their own society, American politics are not equal to America’s situation. The right is stuck with its own viciousness, the left a disorganized coalition of activists in search of unearned moral superiority as much as social and economic justice.

I find the greatest flaw in Snyder’s book, which is necessarily limited in time and geographic scope, is that it does not address the coarsening of societies through mass violence. The enormous scope of Russian losses during the First World War that led to the Revolution and the horrendous Civil War that followed coarsened Russians, who had a lower cultural level than Germans—themselves coarsened by World War One and their own nascent civil war that followed. You subject people to enough violence and what was once unthinkable becomes ordinary; people become coarsened and their souls intincted by violence. Some shut down; others, while remaining functional, even superbly competent, are also quite insane. Stalin himself was as insane as any senior (and perhaps not-so-senior) Soviet of his era, but he was considerably more intelligent than most of his comrades. Above all, Stalin understood how to use their common madness better than his peers and near-peers. When your nation’s past has produced nothing but garbage for quite a long time, insanity can look quite rational. Unsere letzte Hoffnung: Hitler.

The United States tolerates far more violence than we like to think, and this violence is not just gun violence. It is our rising suicide rate, our incredible tolerance of homelessness, of prostitution and pornography—all of which vomit out mountains of corpses; the use of nuisance ordinances to evict women attempting to prosecute domestic violence; the military’s tolerance of rape and predilection for retaining rapists and discharging their victims; the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans every year from preventable causes due to lack of basic medical care. It is the on-going attempts to deny women contraception and access to abortion in order to force them to bear children, and the only adequate term for forced pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood is slavery. And all of this violence has its defenders: those who make money off the porn and the prostitution and the warping of medicine from a profession into a consumer good, from housing as a basic right to a speculative investment by big institutions, to those who prefer women to be a safety valve for absolutely justified male rage and anger and hurt and humiliation—all of which are shared by American women—as well as those who just think that women are there for their sexual usage. There is also the violence of our immigration system: those who come to American, with or without legal documents, seeking a better life, have their hopes and dreams and aspirations used to expand the pool of desperate workers and depress American wages.

In 1986, the group David + David released their Boomtown album with these lyrics from the song “Heroes”:

Fifteen long years on a losing streak

And a lot of bodies unburied

And there comes a time

When you cannot turn the other cheek

The date on that was pretty good, because by 1971 it was clear that America had serious problems: except for 1973 and 1975, the US has run trade deficits every single year since 1971. Our politics have yet to equal our problems, in no small part because Americans do not demand serious politics. Indeed, we are a fundamentally unserious people. We prefer the right-wing politics of national exceptionalism and the left-wing politics of passive-aggressive temper tantrums and ideological purity. We have escaped serious violence until now because of many factors, one of which is that with all their human flaws and failings, Americans are very often the people or the descendants of people who came here to escape the cruelties of their ethnic and national pasts. But eventually time will run out for America: the Devil makes work for idle hands and above all, idle brains. Tens of millions of Americans are being told they are useless and worthless to their society. Eventually, they will take action against that. We are already seeing sparks of action in Europe. America and Europe today do not have to go mad in ways that parallel the madness of other countries, or even their own past, to do horrendous damage when and if they go mad again.

America desperately needs a politics of standards. We don’t need ideology. Ideology—the ideology of free-market capitalism, and a leftist ideology seemingly more interested in doctrinal squabbles than creating a coherent, humane alternative to capitalism—got us here. Besides, ideals have a habit of being transformed into altars upon which sacrifices are offered. Instead, America needs a politics of standards, a single humane standard by which every American can be judged and measured and treated, a standard to which we hold our government, a standard by which all of us have the right to live.

As for Bloodlands, which is a glimpse, no more, certainly not a mirror, of where America’s—and Europe’s—failed politics can lead us, it is a terrific book, an important new way of looking at and a better understanding of the greatest concentrated violence of the 20th Century.

 

Someone Else’s War, CH 3: Leaving Los Alamos

Having accepted General Getmanov’s offer to build the Russian Army sensors for use in urban combat in Chechnya, Olivia Tolchin resigns from her position at the Los Alamos National Lab. Her outprocessing includes a polygraph, in which she denies being approached by an agent of a foreign power. After she is cleared to leave, she drives across country, an trip she knows will be horribly painful for her. As she drives across the American heartland, is looking for some reason, any reason, no matter how trivial, to stay. She finds agribusiness, family farms being squeezed to death, corporate outsourcing and young wage slaves with no hope of the future. A veteran herself of the Cold War, it beggars her understanding that she is on her way to Russia—Russia!—for a chance to use her mind in a war against common enemies. She arrives at her engineer father’s home, built with her architect mother, now dead, in pain that is as much emotional as physical.

Erin Solaro blogs about politics, culture and military affairs and is serializing Someone Else’s War at The Woman Citizen for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer over the coming year. If you want Someone Else’s War now, it is free as a .pdf at Scribd and for a variety of e-reader platforms at Smashwords. She is the author of Women in the Line of Fire (Seal Press, 2006), which argued for lifting the combat ban on US servicewomen, based on both academic research and trips to Iraq and Afghanistan as a journalist embedded with combat troops. She is an alumna of Indiana University and Norwich University.

Chapter Two: Someone Else’s War

In which Dr. Olivia Tolchin, a Department of Defense engineer at loose ends, goes for a night walk with the Russian cultural attaché—and Military Intelligence, or GRU—officer. She and her expertise have been of interest to him for a very long time; he has only one chance and he’d better get his approach right at the start. He asks her for to lend her expertise in developing sensors for urban combat to Russia, on the verge of war in Chechnya, a war he places in the context of American history, a war it must win lest it become Russia’s own Bleeding Kansas. We are no longer enemies and we are not yet, maybe never, friends, but we do have enemies in common, so be our Walter Christie. Walter Christie, the US War Department tank specialist, who sold his suspension system to the Soviets after the War Department turned him down—and the Soviets used that suspension system in their best tanks to help defeat Germany. Getmanov knows Tolchin is not a traitor, but he is still startled and nearly undone when she accepts: not here, because doing it here would make me a criminal or worse. In Russia, and we skip the years of phony benchmarks to go straight to operational testing and evaluation in Chechnya.

Erin Solaro blogs about politics, culture and military affairs and is serializing Someone Else’s War at The Woman Citizen for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer over the coming year, but if you want it now, a .pdf is available on Scribd and for a variety of e-reader platforms at Smashwords, for free. She is the author of Women in the Line of Fire (Seal Press, 2006), which argued for lifting the combat ban on US servicewomen, based on both academic research and trips to Iraq and Afghanistan as a journalist embedded with combat troops. She is an alumna of Indiana University and Norwich University.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO, WASHINGTON, DC, DECEMBER 1993: A NIGHT WALK

Later that night, toward eleven, Getmanov lay on his hotel bed, talking on the room phone to his wife. The cell phone on the bed beside him rang. A woman’s voice. “I am sleepless. Come walk and talk with me. Perhaps we can get a glass of wine somewhere.”

“I will. Give me a moment to ring off with my wife. I am learning about her purchases of the day and that can be a time-consuming affair. Are you here at the Sheraton?”

“I am.”

“Go out to Connecticut Avenue, turn right and walk down to the traffic signal at the first intersection. Turn left onto Calvert Street. In about a hundred meters, you’ll come to a bridge. Cross it. Immediately on the left you’ll see a restaurant, the Mount of Olives Café. Walk past it. You will then pass a short row of town homes, new construction, and reach a large access driveway to parking behind the houses. Step into the driveway. I’ll meet you there in half an hour.”

She followed his instructions, walking purposefully, noting the four cars with diplomatic license plates parked around the restaurant, including one on the sidewalk. The drivers, dark men with darting eyes and folded arms, lounged by their cars, smoked, and assessed her. She did not feel the need to walk more quickly. As she turned into the driveway, she saw a fenced-in playground, heard noises of basketballs and gangs, and slipped a hand into the pocket of her overcoat. She saw Getmanov peek about from the rear of the house, his onyx eyes glittering as he walked towards her.

“Games,” he said happily. “Games for children and for American fans of bad spy cinema. But sometimes with adult consequences. I took a taxi to beat you here, just in case anyone might have been following you. Or me. Not to mention that little group outside the restaurant.”

“Friends of yours?”

“Occasionally. More often, enemies. Or to borrow and adapt an Arab proverb, sometimes they’re the friends of my country’s enemies. Shall we keep walking? It’s a pleasant neighborhood, this Adams-Morgan. Busy at night. Many excellent restaurants. Multi-ethnic, as they say. Diversity is celebrated here. Not so much during the day, when it’s the retail struggle of all-against-all. But at night when the—how do you call them?—Yuppies arrive to disport themselves, sneer at each other, and hope to encounter the diverse. Especially those of the opposite sex. Perhaps. What you Americans call singles life, it has sometimes seemed to me that the purpose is to humiliate others, not seduce them, and that the risk of humiliation is part of the price of admission to the scene. Or perhaps I am thinking of the discos of the 1970s.”

“You are a superb cultural attaché. You know us too well.”

“Perhaps. But enough sociological insight. Let us consider us. First, visibility. If you’re going to hide, it’s best to do so out in the open. So let us hide.”

They continued along Calvert Street toward Columbia Road.

“A good neighborhood for walking,” Getmanov observed. “So long as you stay with the crowds and avoid places like that playground. Safe even for women. Provided, of course, they don’t stay out too late.”

Olivia offered him a cold sidelong glance. “It was said of the Mongol Empire in the time of Genghis Khan that a virgin could walk from one end to the other alone with a bag of gold, and arrive with both her gold and her virginity. America’s empire is not that civilized. However, General, I am.”

“How so?”

“In my pocket. A .45 automatic.”

“Illegal to carry in your nation’s capital. Or even possess.”

“I know. I used to live in Virginia and came here often enough to make carrying a habit. If I’m ever arrested, I’ll explain to them that the Second Amendment establishes, constitutionally, the unorganized or universal militia. The Founders considered every free white male between eighteen and forty-five, not in the active forces or a member of an organized militia unit, a member of that unorganized militia. The descendant of that law, minus the free and the white, is still on the books, incidentally, although few Americans know it. The District of Columbia cannot lawfully disarm me. It’s an unconstitutional violation of the Founders’ original intent, as codified in the Bill of Rights.”

“But you’re not male.”

“Agreed. But the Fourteenth Amendment means that I and all other women are the legal peers of men, whether lesser laws say we are or not.”

“What precisely does this Fourteenth Amendment of yours offer you?”

“Equality. In a way nothing else in our Constitution does.”

“I will tell my wife about it. She’s something of a, how do you say it, a free spirit. She also carries, from time to time.”

“If she’s arrested, tell her to get a good lawyer and don’t count on diplomatic immunity. Your country might waive it.”

They came to a garish intersection. Knots and waves of people, not all of them well dressed or sober, some ostentatious in their ugliness, buffeted them as they waited for the light to change.

“We might well waive it. We no longer invoke immunity the way we used to. In truth, she’s been arrested before.”

“In the United States?”

“And elsewhere. She also has a magnificent collection of unpaid parking tickets.”

“Perhaps an unwise choice of wife for a senior officer of the FSB.”

Getmanov looked at her calmly. “Perhaps. GRU, by the way. Military intelligence. Major general, as I believe I’ve mentioned. As for my wife,” he said quietly, uncomfortably, “she is the wife of my youth and as our homeland has changed…” deep pain in his voice, “so has she. But she is still young and comely, and better than so many of my countrymen, who now seem to care for nothing but money, money, money, and all the cheap and vulgar things it buys.”

“Does she still love you?” Olivia asked. No need to ask whether he still loved her.

“Oh, yes,” Getmanov answered as the “Walk” sign came on and they moved forward with the rest. “I am worth it. But we were born into one world and now find ourselves living in another.” Then, to change the subject: “You know, all through the Cold War, in countries where there was blood war, whether you Americans won or lost or just watched it on TV, you always took in refugees afterwards. Your cuisine has benefited immeasurably. Many fine restaurants in this area, you would not have had otherwise. Korean. Cuban. Vietnamese. Ethiopian…”

“Afghan,” Olivia interrupted. “Also Russian. I’m sorry, but you were beginning to sound bitter and I think we agree about the vulgarity of bitterness. So which of these establishments shall we visit?”

“None,” he replied, recovering. Then he went on equably, “For my refusal, there are three reasons.”

“Go on.”

“The first. If you are wearing a wire, listening and recording devices work less well outdoors, in crowds, in the noisy street, and as we’re moving. The second. Neither of us should wish to be seen with the other sitting together, not in this block of many different restaurants patronized by persons of many different loyalties and professions. Too obvious. As I said, if you wish to hide something, keep it out in the open. Unless someone is following us, we’re hardly noticeable. And if someone notices, he would have to follow us very closely to learn anything.”

“And you do not think your cell phone is tapped?”

“I doubt it. We’re just not that important anymore. And even if some recording device is listening in, nobody will ever review it. Your FBI, CIA, and NSA people are, one hopes, deploying their limited resources against the terrorists.”

“I see. The third reason?”

He shook his head. “My expense allowance is not what it was. And I fear that soon enough I may have to pay a lot of parking tickets, if I wish to keep my wife out of jail. In this city, such infractions are a significant source of revenue and are priced accordingly, and my embassy no longer claims diplomatic immunity for its personnel in that regard. Something of a New Good Neighbor Policy.” Then he smiled, bitterly and openly. “You know, Doctor Tolchin, for me, it was never about…what was to be obtained. It was never about, as you Americans put it, getting and spending. For me, it was never about shopping and hard currency and the other privileges…”

“I know that, Yuri Mikhailovich,” she said quietly, wondering why she’d suddenly chosen to address him by his first name and patronymic, not wondering how he judged her indiscretion. His eyes, as they closed upon hers, told her of pained and taut acceptance. They walked in silence down Columbia Road. She wanted to take his arm, not erotically, but out of a strange sense of sudden kinship. He turned his head slightly to look at her, and it seemed that he wanted to offer her his arm. As a gentleman would.

“You are of great interest to us,” he said finally.

“Why?”

“We know of your work. Especially your Army work when you were at Belvoir. It is elegant. It is never more complex than it has to be. We also know that the real challenge in military sensor technology today is not Star Wars buffoonery. It is in tactical sensors, which your country has been developing and using since Vietnam but seems in no great rush to perfect. We know that Army project you were on. It had such potential, except that it didn’t cost nearly enough to make it worth anybody’s while to protect it. You were eased out because, to say it frankly, you were enthralled with developing an acoustic/infrared ground sensor, an item so simple that even a Russian conscript could use it. Throw it around the corner or into a building or a room, listen and look on your little hand-held terminal for what might be there, waiting for you. The sensor could give you a yes or no, and that could make all the difference. Invaluable in urban combat. Street fighting. House-to-house. But your project superiors did not want such a device because it conflicted with the desires and priorities of their superiors. Nor did any commercial vendors see the potential. Not complex or expensive enough, even though, if you’d completed your work, they could have been manufactured by the tens of thousands and the contractors grown rich from low mark-up but high-volume production. Nor did the Army project manager, a colonel close to retirement, much care for your design philosophy. Nor did he care to have you constantly begging for field time with the troops to test this, that, and the other.”

“To do this kind of work, one needs to understand the client’s needs and see how it works under field conditions. See with one’s own eyes.”

“That’s why you failed. The troops were not your clients. Two bureaucracies were. The governmental and the corporate. You failed and you paid for your failure with…” an ironic smile crossed his lips briefly, “a kind of internal exile. You were too serious and you paid for that, too.”

Olivia showed her teeth once again. “Yes, I’m serious. I’m an engineer who loves sensor design, and the military was where the action was supposed to be. I’ve never been a soldier, never wanted to be one. But I’m an American. To me, this was about war. This was about body bags. American body bags that we wouldn’t have to fill.”

“Now you know why we never approached you during the Cold War.”

They stopped. Getmanov took her elbow and guided her to a small space by a shuttered shop window. The flow of pedestrians guaranteed that no one could linger close to them without being noticed.

“Yes. I do,” said Olivia, realizing with a sense of violation that she had been of interest to him, to them, longer than he had admitted. Then the sense faded into an eerie wonder, the frightened yet calm acceptance of what she was about to hear, of knowing what he was going to say and knowing he meant it.

“You are a patriot, Doctor, in a country that reduces patriotism to bumper stickers, mutilating your impossible national anthem at sporting events, and proclaiming to the world…” he raised a mocking finger, “‘We’re Number One.’ You’re a silent patriot who takes your citizenship seriously and your country at her word when your country proclaims her deepest values. Even five years ago, had I said what I’m going to say, you probably would have brought out your pistol. But that was then. This is about the fact that your nation and mine have enemies in common.”

“Go on.”

“Our present enemies are not to the West. Our enemies are no longer the West at all. Nor are our present enemies to the East, no matter how irritating our Chinese comrades can become. Our current enemies are within, and to the South. They do not threaten us with their armies. They threaten us with their religion and their ideology and their willingness to resort to terror to advance them. They cannot defeat us openly. But they can cause us to disintegrate.”

“They are attempting to disintegrate you in Chechnya.”

“So they are. The question is, can they defeat us enough to cause us to disintegrate?”

“Go on.”

Getmanov looked toward the street. “You Americans,” he mused, “still have no idea what your Civil War was really about. Not even your President Lincoln could say it openly. The purists among you, the abolitionists so-called, their slogan back then was, if I recall, Erring brethren, go in peace. But Lincoln couldn’t let them go. To save the Union, he had to keep them in. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise,” Olivia interrupted, “anyone who wanted to could leave.”

“That is correct,” Getmanov nodded, still looking away. “Of course, no one else was interested in leaving, so the argument leaves something out. Namely—the West. The South would never have been content, harvesting cotton and tobacco year after year and keeping down the slaves, while the North grew ever larger and more powerful, admitting all those Western territories to the Union as states. The South had to extend slavery and compete for all those lands. If the South had survived, it would have meant constant insurrection, terrorism, war. Bleeding Kansas would have become the Bleeding West. We have our own Bleeding Kansas, you know.”

“Chechnya.”

He turned to face her. “Indeed. If we let Chechnya, our Bleeding Kansas, go, our Caucasus and Central Asian lands become our Bleeding West. And those who would do this to us, and those who would help them, mean you evil as well.”

Olivia nodded. Getmanov went on in the manner of a marksman, knowing his bullets were striking where and as intended. “Were America not so obsessed with sex and scandals, scandals and sex, SUVs and football, you would notice that some of those whom you trained and armed against us in Afghanistan are now using that training and those arms against you. Not on your homeland. Not yet. But that day will come. So I ask you, Doctor Olivia Lathrop Tolchin…” He faced her directly. “What do you want to do with your life?”

“I’m missing the connection.” Her voice was glacial and yearning.

“We—the Russian Federation—want to rip the hearts out of our mutual enemies, the Islamists or mujahidin
or jihadi
or whatever you care to call them, while minimizing our casualties and those of the innocent as well. That includes our own Muslims, many millions of whom do not share such insane desires. Not so long ago, our motherland was invaded by Germany. We received your aid and became allies for a time. Once before, we carried the burden of resistance until you had no choice but to join us. We bought you time to get ready. Bought it with our blood. So it is again today. And so I ask you again. What do you want to do with your life?”

“I want,” she said, feeling no further need to evade, “what I said I wanted. To do one thing in my life that really, really matters.”

“Then do it for us. With us. You would not be the first, you know. In the 1930s, an American helped us. He too was an engineer. His name was Walter Christie. You Americans no longer remember him. We do. He had brilliant ideas for the development of tanks. He’d been having them since the First World War. But his own government—your government—cast him aside, over and over again. So he gave his ideas to us and his ideas became the basis of our T-34 tank that ran the Nazis out of our country and gave us an empire in Central Europe.”

“For a while.”

“Yes, for a while. Frankly, my dear—a cinema cliché, you will forgive me—we’re better off without it. The point is, your Mr. Christie, by saving us, helped save his own country and the world. Unintentionally, perhaps. But it still happened that way. We remember. Now we worry about other enemies. But the same principle applies. So I ask you again, Doctor Olivia Lathrop Tolchin, would you consider becoming our new American engineer who brings us gifts that, someday, perhaps, all the civilized world will acknowledge and value? If you wish to do one great thing, I can give you that chance.”

They stood a few moments in silence while the crowds, some in fashion, some in rags, swirled and staggered by. Olivia listened to their conversations, the things that mattered to them, looked at them, guessed at their lives and what they wanted of each other, that night and beyond. The revulsion grew unbearable, and she said to Getmanov, “I am a citizen of a country that does not wish me to serve her. These are people with whom I no longer have much in common. Nor do I wish to be around them.”

“Or serve them?”

“Or serve them.”

“What is your desire?”

Olivia heard her words as from a distance, but knew that they were hers. The most surprising she’d ever uttered. And, in her world as it was, the most logical.

“To do my one great thing to benefit us all. But not here. That would make me a criminal and a spy, to use American facilities in such a manner. I would also get caught and have no desire to spend the rest of my life in prison. I’ll do it in Russia. In a properly equipped and funded laboratory, with no interference and a minimal staff, I can give you in a quarter, two at most, a working prototype of a cheap, disposable acoustic/infrared tactical ground sensor. There will be no need for years and years of phony tests and artificial benchmarks. There will be a need for me to test it under realistic conditions as soon as possible and make necessary modifications in the field. That means we skip the intermediate stages and go directly to use in combat. That means, Chechnya.”

Feeling himself grow faint, Getmanov abandoned all pretense of tradecraft to speak directly to her as a human being. “Do you understand what you are asking, Olivia Lathrop? Beyond leaving your country, probably forever. If your government finds out, they would welcome you home only in chains. Do you understand?”

“I am understanding. And I expect to find myself in Chechnya for operational testing and field development. Within the next year.”

Getmanov’s gaze now rested upon the passers-by, and he felt about them as Olivia had. He was standing so close to her that he could embrace her, were not physical propriety at that moment, of total importance. He felt her eyes lock onto his. He could see the myriad small scars, now that she had washed her face clean of makeup. The mint and salt of her breath, the cedar and violet of her perfume, were also clean. The scent, and the scars that she had a right to wear with more pride than even the most magnificent jewelry, tore through him. He’d spent years, too many years, recruiting foreign nationals to spy on their own countries. Americans, most recently. He’d felt contaminated always, but especially by the current crop of Americans, who cared for nothing but money yet demanded obscenely little of it. Until now, all he’d wanted was information. Stay at your job. Give us what we want. Get caught whenever. We don’t care. Never before, never even in his imagination, not even in planning this night, had he ever invited or wanted to invite any traitor to his country. But it was happening now. And he realized that it was happening precisely because she was not a traitor.

Then the thought assailed him. This is too easy. Perhaps he was the one now entrapped. If I ever discover that you’re playing me false…

Yuri Mikhailovich Getmanov, declared cultural attaché of the Embassy of the Russian Federation, Major General of the GRU, calmly took her strong, scarred hands in his.

“On behalf of my government and people, I invite you and welcome you to a Russia that needs you.” He paused. “So listen carefully, because no one will guide you through the next few weeks.

“Your first step, upon return to Los Alamos, will be for you to resign your position. Tell them you’re tired and that, with your present state of health and with the money you’ve received from your recent lawsuit settlement, you wish to spend some time pondering your future. Given your clearances, your debriefing will take several days, perhaps more. Co-operate fully. Put your affairs in order, though not as someone preparing a permanent departure from her country. Any large bank withdrawals can be done from Vienna. You make, what, $90,000 a year as an exempt civil servant?”

“Eighty-five.”

“We will pay you $100,000 a year—in dollars, not rubles, although once the ruble becomes a hard currency, you will be paid the equivalent in rubles. You will be provided with a reasonable flat. You will also be given, in time and as circumstances permit, a house of your own. Retirement pension will be pegged accordingly. The bulk of your savings here you will take out in the following manner. Go shopping, but only as you leave this country, perhaps at Tiffany or Cartier, and keep the receipts. These items you may sell at your discretion when you arrive. Russia is awash in money from organized crime, so you are going to make very happy the mistresses of some Russian Mafiosi while reducing their liquidity to some minor degree.

“Now, the Cold War is over, but because of your background you will still need permission to travel abroad. There will be an aerospace conference in the spring in Vienna. My wife plans to attend. Please arrange to attend as an independent researcher and acquire all necessary permissions and documents. I’ll meet you there.”

Olivia Tolchin nodded somberly, then withdrew her hands from his. “I’ll look forward to meeting her.”

“You two will enjoy each other’s company. With your common interest in aviation and similar outlooks, I’m sure you’ll become good friends.”

“I’m sure we will.” Then…”Is that all there is to it?”

“What more would you like? A ceremony here in this street?”

Olivia paused, then said, “Yes.”

“What do you have in mind?”

Olivia straightened and reached into her pocket. Getmanov flinched, then steadied. “General Getmanov. I am going to Russia as an American, to work against our common enemies. It will not be possible for me to travel armed. Therefore,” she drew out her pistol and offered it, “I am surrendering my lawful weapon to you. I ask that you return it to me in Russia.”

No one on the street seemed to notice the weapon. Or perhaps no one was surprised to see one appear in such a place. Getmanov accepted the pistol, looked at it briefly, then put it into a pocket of his overcoat.

“Agreed. As you Americans say…done deal.”

 

Someone Else’s War, Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE, WASHINGTON, DC, DECEMBER 1993: GETMANOV

It had started at an arms show, a military-industrial, hyper-globalized extravaganza, back in DC, in the cold and crystalline early December of 1993. A megalithic monster of an arms show, taking over both the Woodley Road Sheraton-Park and the Omni Shoreham just down the street, sponsored by a consortium of corporations and trade associations, with just about every arms maker in the Western World, and some from beyond, setting up booths.

There were no real weapons at the booths, of course. There were just glossy brochures and plastic models and posters touting “Freedom Isn’t Free”-type sloganeering and free tote bags with corporate logos, handed out by young women whose honed attractiveness was a weapon in itself. People wandered in and out, some in uniform, some government civilians in the professional attire of their agencies—between the neckwear and shirt collars and degrees of paunch and slouch, you can always tell who works where. Mainstream media betrayed themselves by notebooks and frenetic scribblings, by micro-cassette recorders, and by arrogance. Left-wing types exuded fastidious distaste, ineptly feigned to cover their fascination. Prime contractors seemed indifferently at home. Subcontractors and vendors seemed earnest. Others, Dr. Olivia Lathrop Tolchin among them, came and went nondescriptly. Some of them, you wouldn’t look at twice until after you’d looked twice. Some of them mattered.

Those who mattered didn’t spend much time in the exhibition halls. The real business occurred in the bars and restaurants, in the hotel hospitality suites, and in other rooms rented for other purposes, among people who, sometimes, would not or could not have met anywhere else. Arms shows specialized in fortuitous encounters, carefully arranged and rehearsed by at least one of the parties involved.

Olivia’s primary field, her scientific and engineering passion since graduate school, was sensors. Her fascination was with tactical ground combat sensors, with making them small and rugged and cheap. At least that had been her professional love until 1988, when she’d been eased out of her job in a sensor project at the Army’s Engineering Center, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, about twenty miles south of the capital, down Interstate-95. No clear reasons had been given, although there were hints of displeasure at the Department of the Army, i.e., the Pentagon level. The dismissal had come with another hint, one designed to head off potential future ugliness such as lawsuits or going to the media. There was an opening for her elsewhere, also working with sensors and at a significant salary increase, should she care to apply. She cared to apply, and had since worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a well-groomed, desolate place that had birthed the atomic bomb but now was given to What’s-the-hurry?

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The entire ebook is here.

Her current project, a venerable missile defense affair, legacy of Ronald Reagan’s crafty enthusiasms and of other moribund ventures, some dating back to the 1950s, was always six months from some significant breakthrough or other. It was, like most of the rest of the lab, a place that was always going to succeed, but never succeeding. She’d taken it
as an interim, as a possible stepping stone to something dynamic. Her hope was to be left more or less alone to accomplish some sort of technological spin-off, military or civilian, that would lead to serious work elsewhere. But in the manner of most American missile defense projects, it had turned out to be a place where real accomplishment was neither required nor welcomed. Young engineers were expected first to accede to and then to develop the bad habits of their elders. In time, this could make you unemployable anywhere else. But it hadn’t happened to Olivia yet, and she was determined that it wouldn’t.

Three companies had invited her to attend the arms show, one on the basis of a recent journal article she’d published, the other two because they knew of her work and had learned that the first had invited her. She held no great expectations for the trip, but why not? Washington DC, all expenses paid. She’d spent time in the city, but less than she’d hoped for, when she’d been at Belvoir. And nothing was doing at the lab. She wouldn’t be missed. Not professionally and not personally.

She’d spent part of the conference in those interviews, coming away unimpressed and wondering if she’d been too open about what she wanted most: a job with the freedom to think and create. But she’d seen enough of the for-profit defense technology world to know that she had no desire to give up the relative placidity of a national lab, which at least never had to worry about quarterly earnings statements, for the world of suborning and being suborned by the Pentagon.

Her interviewers had sensed it. She hadn’t been rejected or turned away overtly, just dismissed with a thin smile and a casual “We’ll be in touch” that reeked of “Smart, but doesn’t understand how these things work. Not a team player.” Dismissed three times. But also, she knew, still under consideration. The clowns they sent to do the initial screening had no hiring authority. And those who knew anything at all about where sensor development was going, or should go, knew of her.

Interviews over, she worked at killing time. The exhibition halls were garish, the lectures simplistic, the male clientele on its ludicrous best behavior regarding women. The officers in uniform, especially. Tailhook, the notorious 1991 naval aviators’ convention where women by the scores had been harassed and assaulted, was still in deadly legal and political aftermath. The military had instructed its men to avoid anything that might lead to anything that might lead to anything that might be actionable, or give the appearance thereof. Civilian agencies had done the same. The men at the arms show, the American men especially, seemed terrified of her.

Their problem. Not hers.

Late afternoon of the third and final day. Olivia was tired and bored. The touristy things she’d planned, hadn’t happened. Most notably a trip to the Holocaust Museum. Her father had donated money to it, and some unspecified memento, in memory of his family and in some small tribute to the fact that he’d survived. But Olivia hadn’t gone, if only because the trip might have answered some of the questions she’d never dared ask. It was also now too late in the day. She was hungry but unwilling to subject herself to the bars or fight the crowds at the local restaurants for the pleasure of dining alone. Room service depressed her even more, as did the occasional waiter who suggested that if she were in the mood for company…

So she roamed the hospitality suites, not caring whose they were, looking only for a decent glass of wine and something to eat. She found one suite, half-filled with middle-aged men wearing large stomachs, Rolex watches, and expensive suits. She helped herself to wine and a plate, picked up a few things from the buffet, then found a corner seat with a tiny table. The wine she recognized as a passable Washington State merlot. Cheese and crackers, she realized somewhat later, while chewing. It was cheese and crackers. She was wearier than she thought. Some kind of cheese and some kind of crackers.

Olivia let herself stand down, let the wine infuse her with lassitude. The pain from the Cessna crash was still there, would always be there, but she was beginning to realize that it simply was what it was. Abstractly, she realized for the first time that she could, in fact, be OK with the pain. It didn’t have to translate to suffering. It was a pleasant realization, she thought as she watched the stout men with the Rolexes or, even worse, preposterously complex watches more useful on a Green Beret mission than at a Beltway sales fest. Several new men, younger and taut, wandered purposefully in. Colonels, still on active duty after the Cold War’s demise and the military downsizing, still hoping for jobs in the civilian defense sector. A shrinking sector, Olivia knew. Not good if you’re suddenly decreed an excess colonel, still paying child support from the first marriage and wondering how to send the second batch of kids through college. She smiled inwardly, giving silent thanks for all the problems that she didn’t have.

She was not expecting the harsh, imperious man who sat down in front of her, across her tiny table. He was older, not tall but massively built, with a body that should have gone to fat but hadn’t. His face was granite, with deep brown eyes that were alive and twinkling. It was not an American face. He didn’t have to open his mouth for her to know that. His eyes weren’t American eyes. Not smooth, not suave, nor glaring as though everything in the world that wasn’t his, constituted a personal affront. Nor did he seem interested in wine or lassitude or female companionship. He was blunt and commanding and he looked at her very, very steadily for a long time, obviously sizing her up, though for what purpose, she could not tell. She feared neither him nor his purpose, felt only an abstract respect, sensing that, whatever else this man was or turned out to be, he’d earned that respect.

It had been a while since she’d had that response to a man. It was…pleasant.

Olivia was a tall woman, five feet, eight inches. She had the lean, muscular build of a life-long weight-lifter and runner and was very angular, especially in her lower back and pelvis, which since the crash were as much metal as bone. She wore a man’s navy pinstripe suit, tailored to fit, over a pale ecru silk blouse. Her hair had once been her mother’s sun-through-honey brown, falling in loose waves to her shoulders. Two weeks in the hospital had leached so much color from it that it was now the finest platinum, and there was a hard, worn beauty to her face and eyes. Not bitter, not unkind, not challenging or angry. Just very, very hard. In her own way, she knew, hers was a face as hard as his.

“Have we met before?” she asked courteously, eliding the sir that she knew he was accustomed to and deserved. Then she held his gaze with a waiting patience.

The man knew, too. And a strange feeling returned, from when first his wife had told him about her and he’d read the dossier she’d prepared for him and determined that this meeting would come to pass someday. The strange feeling was sorrow. Sorrow for her. In a just America, she would be loved and respected and loaded with honors. In her world as it was, she was a reasonably well-paid, utterly marginalized pariah, working for a worn-out national lab on a pointless Defense Department project. And yet she bore it with nobility. How she might bear that which his own country might someday inflict upon her, should he succeed with her, he chose for the moment not to consider. He only knew that as soon as he opened his mouth, she would be able to place his accent. And just as clearly, he knew that games, any games, any attempt at Cold War James Bond shaken, not stirred seductive insincerity, would get him a glacial smile and a contemptuous dismissal.

So Yuri Mikhailovich Getmanov simply put his business card, English side up, on the table between them.

Cultural Attaché
Embassy of the Russian Federation
2650 Wisconsin Avenue NW
Washington DC 20007
Phone 202/298-5700
Fax 202/298-5735

She flipped it over. The same thing in Russian. She read it aloud in Russian. He smiled at her American training, awkward accent, and the rhythm that told him she knew the language, but had never really used it in life.

What the card didn’t say in either language: Major General, Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, the GRU.

Getmanov could see her considering the missing information. Then he felt her eyes on his face again, eyes the most unfair shade of blue he had ever seen, her grim, sensuous mouth fighting to suppress laughter before she addressed him. “You may be the only man here who is willing to be seen with me in public. Tailhook seems to have inhibited them.”

“But you are being courted. By companies looking for engineers. Are they offering you the sun, moon, and stars?”

She paused, astonished that he should know that, yet also not astonished. Astonished that he should be so direct. But also not astonished. Alarmed, but also curious, she chose to accept the conversation that had begun, as though it were entirely proper and unexceptional. She would play along. For now. “They’re offering nothing at the moment. The initial interviews were a pain. I guess they weren’t ready for me. But I suspect they’ll be back and the offers will come.”

“Offering a lot?”

“A lot more than I’m making now. Probably.”

“Including autonomy?”

“Heavens, no,” she answered, thinking that this conversation, in some ways so utterly preposterous, also seemed so natural. This had a quality of dignity, of two serious people speaking to each other with genuine respect. How attractive to someone starving for seriousness. Startled by her words, yet no longer surprised, she responded, “This isn’t about hiring me to be free to produce. It’s about buying me out. It’s about they’re thinking they’ll be able to use me someday to sell to the government for zillions what I would give the government for far less, right now. It’s about having me to sit on.”

“Sit on?”

Olivia smiled a bit. “Having me in private storage.”

“Are you going to let them buy you out?”

“I’m considering it. Easier. More money. Better labs and staff. But as I said, the first contacts weren’t exactly according to their script. We’ll see.”

“And you’re considering selling yourself to the highest bidder? I know from your published record that you’re well-regarded. Professionally.”

She nodded at what he didn’t add. Then she chose, no, found herself doing something she almost never did. Talk about herself. “At thirty-three, I have done this work since I first fell in love with sensor science in graduate school, and I have even seen some progress. Unfortunately, government contracts are not always awarded to those who want progress, or who want successes that might endanger other projects. Defense contracts these days are regarded as manna from heaven, and are nearly as rare. If you have one, not succeeding too fast can be worth a lot.”

“And you could help them in that endeavor?”

“I could.”

“So that’s a way of telling me you can almost name your price with any of them.”

“Almost. Maybe.”

“But a better life than your current employment?”

“I have been with four projects at Los Alamos, one killed, one stillborn, one aborted, and one that refuses to die. I say, ‘OK, now what?’ They say, ‘Don’t worry. Now please go back to your office.’”

“And you say?”

“Nothing, usually. Tormenting the weak gives me no pleasure. I just sometimes wish they’d be more honest about it. I’m primarily an engineer, not a basic researcher or theoretician, although I do some of that, too. I just want to look at something real someday and be able to say, I did that, and it mattered. I can see myself becoming a very hard, bitter woman if this goes on too much longer. I don’t really care to end up like that.”

“Hardness and bitterness are not the same things, Doctor Tolchin. Bitterness, like cruelty, is never a virtue. Hardness, almost always.”

The gaze she fixed upon him was so piercingly intense that he found himself blinking. By the standards of his craft, of any initial approach, he had been too forthcoming. He’d revealed something of himself. But so had she. She had told him nothing specific about what she did, only assumed that he had some idea, and then had shown him her morality. For that, he had offered the essence of the morality that had sustained him through thirty-five years’ service to his country during the Cold War and its bewildering aftermath, to which he had so far adjusted.

“I didn’t say that,” he murmured, almost to himself.

“About the differences between hardness and bitterness and cruelty? I am afraid you did. But we will forget that you did.”

“Why should we?”

“I could say that we’re both getting a bit too open. But let me answer a question with a question. Does your wife know where you are and what you do for a living?”

Getmanov smiled warmly. “Yes, of course she knows what I do. As for where I am, before I came, she made me promise not to dally with such American women as I might by chance encounter.”

“This is not a chance encounter.”

“No, but the promise still applies. I love my wife very much. I am also afraid of her. However, I repeat myself, as she is a Russian woman, even if somewhat too taken with the American habit of, I believe you call it, shopping. But no matter. She deserves it. As a Russian woman, she is not always given the honor she deserves. Professional as well as personal.”

“What does she do?”

“Did. She abandoned a promising career as an aeronautical engineer to follow me into the diplomatic world some years ago. She was also a pilot, a believer that one must experience for oneself that which one creates.”

“And she still reads Aviation Week.”

“Cover to cover. What makes you ask that?”

“The magazine is a legendary purveyor of sensitive, sometimes highly classified information. Does she send you memos about what she reads?”

Getmanov made his decision. “Not to me personally. I wouldn’t understand them. However, her memos do find their way elsewhere.” He leaned forward and noted she did not move back. “One of the great advantages of being married to an engineer is that they speak plainly and expect the same. I know your work. You’d be surprised how many people do. Your reputation, as they say, precedes you. You’re known for coming in under budget, ahead of schedule, and exceeding the specs. For which you are not always liked. I know that you took Russian to fulfill a language requirement, way back in college, because it was a challenge, in a way French and German no longer were. I know you stayed with it through graduate school and beyond. I know you started reading our technical literature when you could barely master your own and now are very conversant in that aspect of my language. I know you were badly hurt in a small-plane accident. I know you were told you weren’t going to walk again and a year after finishing rehab, you’re not yet running again but you are hiking. I know you settled out of court for several hundred thousand dollars from the Santa Fe attorney who was your student pilot and who falsified his flight physical by neglecting to mention to you or your Federal Aviation Administration that he was epileptic. You’ve flown a few times since, just to prove you could, but no more. I also know that your lover of several years left you because of his unwillingness to tolerate the damage caused by the accident. He was a moral coward and you are well rid of him.”

She offered him the bright, defensive smile you might offer a somewhat dim child who has said something unexpectedly and painfully astute. “So you read the profile on me in Defense Weekly. Good for you.”

“Also the article from which it was plagiarized. The inspirational—pardon the cliché, they meant it as such, no doubt—piece in the Los Alamos National Lab’s Connections. The bit about your boyfriend, we surmised from that nasty notation about your being ‘newly available.’ Tolstoy, I believe, once wrote that every happy family is alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Los Alamos seems uniquely unhappy these days.”

The only thing that bothered her, she thought with some detachment, was that he knew that she had stopped flying. That hadn’t been printed. But that no longer mattered. “Why do you say I’ve stopped flying?”

“Because you have. Would you also like me to tell you what your present clearances are?”

Olivia showed her teeth a little. It was time to return to reality. “I’m going to assume that if you know my clearances, you also know that I’m legally and morally obligated to report this conversation.”

“I also know that, at your level, you’re entitled to exercise a certain discretion in taking this conversation where it may go. The better to report it later, of course.” He gestured contemptuously at the room. “I could probably find out at least as much about any man here.”

“If you wanted to.”

“If I needed to. But I don’t want to and don’t need to. Why bother? Look at the officers who clutter this ridiculous little party. Colonels looking for jobs, trading on their contacts. You know as well as I do, a colonel’s contacts are good for about five years. If that. These men get hired, used up, and thrown away because contacts are all they have to offer. Your brain is good for the rest of your lifetime. Most of these colonels know little. You know a great deal.”

“I know that, if I chose to be melodramatic, continuing this conversation may change my life.” She paused, feeling what she had just said, start to sink in. Then: “What do you want…General?”

Getmanov nodded slightly. “How did you surmise?”

“You look like you should be wearing a uniform.”

He nodded again. “Major General Getmanov. By present posting, which shall also be my last before retirement, cultural attaché and, if I may add, graduate of the old Soviet Institute of USA and Canadian Studies. What do I want? Something quite simple, really. The Cold War is over. We Russians are not going to fight you Americans. Perhaps we always knew that it would never come to that. I did. I sometimes think that we had an agreement. Only one side could go crazy at a time. You did in Vietnam. We did in Afghanistan. But our countries have never fought—not seriously—and it is to be hoped, we never do. However…” he paused, “however secure you may feel yourselves to be, now that we’ve deprived you of your most beloved enemy, we are not secure. We are far from secure. We are, indeed, in great and serious trouble. We need people to help us rebuild the military that we will never use against you or your friends. We are decades behind you in miniaturization and precision guidance, not to mention sensor capabilities. Items our military now desperately needs. That means, we need persons such as yourself. Desperately.”

“And why?” Olivia asked in a low, deliberate voice, “should I wish to respond to your desperation?”

“Because we have enemies in common. You’ll realize they’re enemies only on the day they force you to it. We haven’t any such luxury.”

Getmanov took out a fountain pen, bulky yet elegant, wrote a number on his card, then pushed it towards her. “I say again. We’re no longer enemies. We’re not yet friends. I hope to God that someday we are. That’s my cell number. I live in Chevy Chase, but I’ve taken a room here for the night. My wife knows I won’t betray her. Call me if you want your work to matter.”

Olivia said nothing. Getmanov nodded courteously to her, rose, and walked away.

Someone Else’s War: A Novel of America and Russia

Today I am publicly releasing my first novel (that I admit to anyway). If you want to buy it, buying options are off on the side. If you only want to read extracts of it, no problem: go to my Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog, The Woman Citizen. I’ll be posting little bits here from that blog, but not all of it because this is a tough read. The subject matter is tough: it’s set in the Chechen War and some of the action takes place in Chechnya, especially Grozny. That said, I’ve kept the language as decent as possible when writing a few scenes that by their nature are either indecent (such as combat and a very brutal interrogation scene) or extremely intimate (sex). But the larger issue is also very tough and for those of us who have had to make such choices, very painful. The protagonist is a woman who has a future in America, but can’t stand her country’s trajectory. If you think this is a commentary on President Obama, it’s not. Although she would probably call herself a conservative, this woman leaves for Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, collapsing into the chaotic horror of the Chechen War.

This post begins the serialization of a novel I finished almost 3 years ago, in February 2010, then didn’t know what to do with for almost three years. (Step 1: 1 year later, I permit my husband to cut approximately 70,000 words from the initial length of 240,000. I didn’t look while he did it, just gave him a copy and when he was finished, made my own changes. Very interestingly, while we did not discuss the cuts, he cut everything I thought should be cut, while touching virtually nothing I thought should remain. When he was done, I simply read it and put in the small pieces I thought he should have left.) Not knowing what to do with this affected my writing in a lot of ways because this was written under conditions of great personal hardship and political grief. When you don’t know what to do with the product of such an intense process, it do tend to bollix you up.

I stopped trying to place Someone Else’s War commercially when I sent it to a female agent and she responded that it reminded her too much of Ayn Rand. I am rather transparently not an Objectivist; if you want to stuff me into a political box, the ones where I fit are Theodore-Roosevelt-era-progressive or a feminist-social-democrat; nevertheless, Rand had a real sense of civilization and the necessity of its preservation, and understood the concept of economic treason—unlike most of her followers! However, rather than argue literature with her, I wanted to write back, Well then, what’s your problem? Because Rand sells more books dead every year than most living authors do in their lifetimes! But I didn’t because what was the use? You can’t engage in conversation, someone who uses their own personal definitions of words and names and terms. Language has to have a common meaning.

Now I’m releasing this book here for two primary reasons.

1. Russo-American relations could use an infusion of new ideas. What is happening in Russia is fascinating from both a historical and humanitarian perspective. I’ll be writing about that more than I have, because I think what Putin may be doing in Russia is profoundly relevant to America now.
2. Women deserve more fictional choices than are typically offered us. Anyone who has picked up a novel marketed as a woman’s novel and put it down thinking, Either I’m a man or I don’t exist knows what I mean. I think that’s one reason why The Hunger Games and Stieg Larssen’s trilogy sell so well. At the same time, this is a novel meant to be enjoyed by men, too.
3. I know I only wrote “two” but I think this is a pretty good read. Certainly miles better than a lot of the stuff out there selling for more.

A final disclaimer? I did my homework but this is fiction. Please read it as fiction, not history, military or otherwise. If you start ranting to me about stuff I either didn’t write or cannot be reasonably inferred from what I’ve written, I’m probably going to be pretty rude. Actually, if you rant at me at all, I’ll be pretty rude. And if you start screeching at me that it’s not historically accurate. Because? Really, it’s fiction. Read it as fiction, enjoy it as fiction, critique it as fiction. I’d love to hear from you.

 

What President Putin Can Teach Us About Citizenship

There is only one real standard by which a national leader can be judged: did you leave your country better than you found it? By that standard, President of the Russian[i] Federation Vladimir V. Putin was, along with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, one of the great leaders of the 20^th Century. Khrushchev exhibited enormous physical and moral courage in initiating his country’s long, slow, very painful recovery from Stalinism. Putin took control of Russia when President Boris N. Yeltsin’s policies had brought it to the brink of an abyss such as America has not looked into since the aftermath of our Civil War. He has managed to more-or-less end a simmering war in Chechnya and stabilize his country. But stability within sight of an abyss is no way for a country to live, and so Kremlin-watchers have always wondered what Putin’s second-tenure agenda might be.

We now have an idea.

On 12 December, Putin delivered the President of Russia’s Annual Presidential Address, outlining priority targets for national political and economic development. Analysis of the speech was minimal and very superficial in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, to the point that even though the reporters use recognizable quotes and talking points from the speech, you have to wonder if they even read the thing. (You should, even though it is 11,000 words.) For it is a speech that in its broad outlines any serious American politician would have been proud to give, did he hold his audience in any respect.

It is always possible that this is the completely cynical speech of an utterly corrupt man who will say and do anything to achieve and keep power. But I doubt it. And this is why.

Within the first ten short paragraphs, Putin refers to two individuals by name, references which should have sent any responsible journalist running off to Wikipedia, asking Who are these people? The first name is of Soviet historian, ethnologist and anthropologist Lev N. Gumilev. Lev spent most of the years between 1938 to 1956 for the son of the poets Nikolai S. Gumilev, murdered on 25 August 1921, on the completely fabricated charge of participating in a monarchist conspiracy, and his ex-wife Anna A. Akhmatova. The second person Putin quotes is the writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn served 8 years in the gulag and during the Brezhnev years was subject to intense KGB pressure, culminating in the seizure of his drafts and a botched assassination attempt. He was awarded the Nobel for literature in 1970 and deported from the Soviet Union and stripped of his citizenship in 1974. (He returned to Russia in 1994 and was buried there with honor in 2008.) These references are not tainopis, or secret writing: any half-cultured Russian high school student knows this history.

Putin was a lieutenant colonel in the KGB, the direct, lineal descendent of the NKVD and the Cheka, the secret police of Stalin and before him Lenin that inflicted such harm on Russia during its madness, while the KGB did its own damage under Brezhnev. For such a man to mention those two writers there in the equivalent of a State of the Union speech, is to acknowledge the role your organization played in your country’s madness and all the horror and human waste that followed from that madness. In that context, one of the few positive points of the speech is a mention that the Russian population is finally starting to grow, that births are finally starting to exceed deaths. This has a cultural meaning Americans don’t really grasp. It means that Russians are starting to turn away from all the death and suffering of their recent past. It means that Russians, especially women, believe their children might have a future. It means that more Russian women are finding more Russian men worth breeding from. In Russia. Here in America, a Republican party that supposedly believes in human freedom has attempted to force American women to bear children by resisting equal pay for equal work and restricting women’s access to abortion and contraception. Putin’s policy recommendation to increase female fertility is better, more flexible jobs for women and more and better child care: in short, to increase women’s life options. And he isn’t very subtle in his call for Russians, particularly middle-aged men, to stop killing themselves out of self-pity, which is what eating, drinking, drugging and smoking yourself to death amounts to.

The speech is neither an anti-American rant nor a paean to his past accomplishments at stabilizing a country in chaos. It is a sober, straightforward speech that lays out what Russia will have to do to survive. “Either right now we can open up a lifelong outlook for the young generation to secure good, interesting jobs, to create their own businesses, to buy housing, to build large and strong families and bring up many children, to be happy in their own country, or in just a few decades, Russia will become a poor, hopelessly aged (in the literal sense of the word) country, unable to preserve its independence and even its territory.” That last word means: China. American meddling in Russian internal affairs is an annoyance, an affront to national pride and self-respect. Chinese meddling is a matter of life and death, of territorial integrity and national survival.

When Putin says that “Russia’s unity, integrity and sovereignty are unconditional” he is not particularly referring to the rags of Chechen and Dagestani separatist movements. He is speaking of the Russian Far East: Russia and China fought a border war in 1969 and neither country has forgotten it. Although President Obama would do well to steal Putin’s words, “Any manifestations of separatism and nationalism must be completely removed from the political agenda,” and use those in a speech to Americans. We’ve been there once, we don’t need to go there again and those who propose doing so are not engaged in civilized dialogue.

Speaking of civilized dialoque, Putin says, “Civilised dialogue is possible only with those political forces that make, justify and articulate their demands in a civilised way, defending them in compliance with the law. The change and modernisation of the political system are natural and even necessary, but I have said in the past that it would be inadmissible to allow for the destruction of the state to satisfy this thirst for change.”[ii] This is not a man who says: shut up. This is a man who says, speak like a citizen, in words of meaning and dignity. It is one of Russia’s tragedies that with all the ways Russians now have to communicate with each other and its great literary history, it is a long and graceless distance from Akhmatova to Pussy Riot. And when Putin concludes his words on civilized dialogue by saying, “The whole history of Russia screams about it,” he is saying, we are not going back to people dying screaming. Not even in the name of political change and modernization.

It is a fact that the collapses of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union happened at a time of increasing liberalization. And you don’t have to hold a brief for either the Tsar or the Premier Gorbachev to understand that those consequences had very real, very bad consequences for a lot of human beings who deserved better. Like the collapse of the Kerensky government, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an unmitigated catastrophe. Everything that should have happened—Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe, the independence of the Baltic Republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and renegotiation of the status and boundaries of the former Soviet Republics (except for the Baltic Republics and Georgia, they are now loosely organized into the Commonwealth of Independent States)—could have happened without the collapse of the Soviet state. When the state collapsed, whole industries vanished, people lost their entire life savings, life expectancy fell due to the collapse of the medical system, as well as people drinking and drugging themselves to death in despair. A massive upsurge in organized crime cost more lives through contract murders and human trafficking, as did a vast increase in disorganized crime—and tolerance thereof—such as street crime and domestic violence. There was also serious ethnic violence ranging from pogroms to border wars.

Few Americans know or care about this. We were too busy congratulating ourselves on the Soviet Union’s collapse. America always maintained that it wasn’t anti-Russian, it was only anti-Communist. And if Russia ever got rid of that damned Communism, we could be friends. Well, they did—and we were very pleased to see them humiliated, powerless, on the verge of famine, an object of our pity and scorn. Western financial institutions also served as a conduit for the wholesale looting of Russian resources.

Putin knows all this. He also knows that—all the screeching by conservative commentators aside—in Western Europe, Marxism helped create the welfare state but the attempt to import Marxism into Russia led to the Gulag, the famines, the purges. The issue, then, was not Marxism but Russia: Putin may love Russia and Russian culture very much, but even a child’s understanding of Russian history leads one to realize that as Solzhenitsyn himself once very uncharacteristically admitted, this wolf comes from our own blood. One significant reason for Russia’s descent into Communist madness was that while it was liberalizing before the First World War, serfdom’s very long, slow abolition, the power of the nobility and the collusion of the Russian Orthodox Church with the nobility meant that its intellectual and material culture was very low. A good education, sincere appreciation for genuine beauty and a life of material dignity will prevent an awful lot of moral trouble and those were missing from the broad base of Russian society, urban or rural. Add to that cultural background Russia’s dreadful losses during World War One and the savagery of the Civil War, and you have a recipe for catastrophe. That much killing and suffering coarsens and brutalizes people—in any culture. And it takes a long time for that culture to recover.

So any attempt to modernize and liberalize Russia means that Russia has to look within itself, cultivate its best and deal with its worst: it can borrow from other cultures and political systems for its own use but those any cultural borrowings must be viewed through the prism of its culture. Russia cannot be a cheap knock-off of America; these years, America these years is a cheap knock-off of our past and what we could be in the future and it’s been very bad for us; our model would be an unmitigated catastrophe for Russia. In her New York Times op-ed, “Backtracking in Russia,” Lyudmilla Alexeyevna—who is the grand old woman of Russia’s human rights movement—writes, “I am absolutely certain they mean to send a signal across the country that we should all re-grow our forgotten Soviet instincts of fear and wariness of foreigners.” But as much harm as foreign invasions and financial institutions have done to Russia, and as great a threat as China poses to Russia, one significant concern any half-decent Russian president must have is the real harm Russians have done to other Russians—including in the aftermath of Communism. While China in particular would be ready to exploit that harm. A little fear of that is wise, prudent, humane.

The means Putin says he is choosing to modernize and liberalize Russia are, in the context of recent American history, conservative. It is an article of faith in political science that a large-broad-based middle class is the key to democracy. It has long been gospel in the Republican Party that education, hard work and home ownership made people more conservative, natural Republican voters. Putin says he want to greatly expand the Russian middle class by creating some 25 million good jobs and making decent housing affordable to people of average and below-average means. He also wants to strengthen Russia’s educational system by supporting “the revival of provincial intelligentsia [“doctors, teachers, university educators, workers in science and culture”], which was once Russia’s professional and moral backbone.” He is, in short, proposing to make good education and a materially dignified life widely available to average Russians, including in Russia’s vast and often poor provinces.

This is not about creating a new Soviet man. This is about raising the standards by which Russians treat each other and live. This is about creating a broad, deep foundation for a serious civil society upon which a democracy can be built. And for that reason, Putin explicitly proposes moving away from Russia’s current extractive economy: “A lopsided raw materials economy, as has been pointed out on many occasions, is not just vulnerable to external shocks. Most importantly, it does not allow for developing and putting to adequate use human potential; it is incapable of giving most of our people the opportunity to make use of their strengths, talents, labour and education, which means, by definition, that it breeds inequality.”

So far, I’ve pulled quotes from the speech in a rather linear manner. Now to loop back to the second way Putin proposes to build this civil society.

He says that ordinary Russians must make common cause against “poor government efficiency and corruption”: “Public opinion must become the main criterion for assessing the effectiveness of state bodies that provide public services as well as institutions in the social sphere.”

A model of bureaucratic reform is laid out, reform that includes “limiting the rights of state officials and politicians [as well as “their immediate families”] to hold foreign accounts, stocks and shares” while “the ownership of foreign real estate…must be declared in accordance with the law, and the official must submit a report on the cost of the property and the origin of the funds used to purchase it.”

Not only did Putin provoke a number of small heart attacks with that statement, he earned a number of deadly enemies. He proceeds to make more when he spoke of reducing the number of people exercising regulatory oversight, introducing public reports by oversight agencies, and “monitoring the expenditures and major acquisitions of civil servants, executives of state companies and their close relatives”. He did not even need to discuss tax reform and reversing the off-shoring of Russia’s economy, although he does. The sums at stake are worth killing over.

Generally speaking, sane politicians do not make the number of deadly enemies Putin acquired with those passages, in order to score cheap political points. To read this speech is to enter the realm of meaningful language: Russia is not America, where we can say anything we want, provided it is sufficiently outrageous. And there are a lot of things you can call Putin—ruthless, cynical, perhaps not a nice man the way Americans wish to be nice—but stupid and naive are not two of them.

And yet the reactions to this speech have been—demonstrations. One of the leaders has been Aleksei Navalny, who founded the website Roszkh, which simplifies the process of complaining about the wretched maintenance of the public areas of apartment buildings. (In America, these areas would be covered by home owner’s association fees and while Russians also pay fees to maintain them, these areas are public, state, property. The flats themselves are private property.) As Mr. Navalny likes to point out—and quite rightly—this means that broken light bulbs and the like are the problems of United Russia, Putin’s party. (Source here.) His website has helped significantly improve building maintenance in the few weeks it has been in operation and Putin devoted an entire paragraph to this: “Active civic participation and effective public monitoring are necessary conditions for effectively fighting corruption. Today, many citizens are already building a system of public control at the municipal level on their own initiative, including for the housing and utilities sector. We are obligated to support this this type of attitude. Just recently, the day before yesterday, we spoke on this topic at a meeting with election campaign activists.”

In American terms, this is the equivalent of inviting Navalny to attend the State of the Union speech, then telling his story: it’s not an olive branch, it’s an entire wreath of olive branches. To quote Navalny: “We are trying to attract people who can fight corruption together with us…It’s clear that an ordinary person has a hard time helping us fight corruption at Gazprom [the big state energy company]…[b]ut unfortunately in Russia, corruption surrounds a person everywhere. We are trying to create a mechanism for people to fight corruption themselves.”

The problem is that corruption cannot be fought with demonstrations. It has to be fought the way Navalny himself is doing: the daily pressure of ordinary people on other ordinary people to do the right thing, one thing at a time. It’s not sexy, it’s not glamorous, it takes energy and drive and determination and sometimes shouting at people. It is not only refusing to take bribes, it is refusing to pay bribes. Or as was quoted in the article liked to above, “People long ago stopped coming to these because of euphoria,” said Zhenya Devyatkina, 30. Instead they show up now out of a sense of duty, she said, “sort of like going to work.”

But that is what government is: work, not euphoria. Especially the work that goes into the constant refusal to accept—or pay; this cannot be stressed enough—bribes. And if people were to take Putin’s speech seriously, “opposition bloggers” like Navalny—a real estate lawyer—would be out of a job in the sense of, they couldn’t mug for cameras. They might have a real job, running a serious department of civil servants—but that’s a different thing altogether. Or to quote Chekov, Any idiot can meet a crisis, it’s the day-to-day living that wears you out.

When Putin delivered this particular speech, he was operating on the premise that a lot of Russians would be willing to face the day-to-day living. Might be cynical enough and compromised enough and tired enough of corruption to find the day-to-day, wearing-out of integrity a way to recover themselves and begin the process not of stabilizing their country—that has been done—but making their country and their lives what they ought to be. We do not know. Pundits risk little—and doubt it not, Putin risked his life when he made that speech. People died for far less in the Yeltsin years. In other words, for all the work Putin had to do—the gathering of resources, the making of alliances, the deal-making—just in order to be able to deliver that speech and have a chance of implementing it, his agenda has no hope without widespread, day-to-day support by average Russians. Putin may realistically think he can bank on that support, he may think it’s a risk he can survive, he may be straight-out gambling, but there is no serious media coverage of Russia for us to be able to estimate that.

We only know two things.

The American left, when it thinks of Putin at all, does not like him: he is too tough, too plain-spoken to go down easy. He stabilized his country within sight of an abyss, prevented Chechnya from breaking away, brought Russian organized crime under some measure of control, and reestablished the Russian state. These are not the accomplishments of a saint or anyone likely to ever be admitted to their communion. Also, he’s just a tiny little bit arrogant. While the American right hates him because—for all the unsavory things implicit in those accomplishments—he is not a monster. He just might be the best tsar Russia has ever had, determined to bring his country into the modern world as part of civilization.

There’s a third thing we know about this speech. It’s worth reading, highlighting the parts that apply to America, and sending to our elected representatives. Because its subject is: how to create a democracy of citizens from a nation that has been through the depths.

 

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[i] Throughout this essay, I use the term Russia or Russian in several ways. The first is to refer to the Russian federation and before that the Russian empire—or a resident of the Federation or that empire, regardless of actual ethnicity. In that sense, I also refer to the Soviet Union as a Russian state because it was not only the successor to the Russian Empire, but also very Russian in terms of the dominant ethnicity.

[ii] All spellings are in the original, using British rather than American English.