KARELIA -- VERMONT

by Valentina Fedorovna Khoteeva, a veteran of the women's movement

I remember listening with interest to my l5 year-old grandson, Victor, when he returned from America where he had been for a month with a school group in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts. His impressions of what he had seen in the USA, of wonderful encounters with his peers, and especially the warmth and sincerity and hospitality of the family where he lived touched me deeply. I recalled my own distant wartime childhood when we would meet the trains of American and English soldiers. In the brief minutes of the trainstop we hurried to give them letters to our friends in faraway America and England. In those days we spoke with pride the word "allies." I was then living with Mama in the small settlement of Chupa on the banks of the White Sea near the Arctic Circle. Four kilometers away was the railway from Murmansk into the interior of our country, close to the warfront lines. The railway often got bombed. When the alarm sounded, they would shunt the railway cars onto a dead-end sidetrack leading to our settlement. We children and our mothers would rush out to the train with boiled potatoes and our last piece of bread and a mug of milk to welcome our allies. Language was no serious barrier -- we knew a little English from school and mostly we and the Americans would say words like victory, peace, and friendship. The victory was achieved with huge losses and the yearned for peace began, but the friendship was for many years chilled by the cold relations of our politicians. Our children grew up and our grandchildren too, and the good thing is that today they are lifting the barriers of alienation, suspicion, and lack of understanding. Those barriers, alas, are tenacious. Even back in Soviet times Karelia and Vermont had "brotherly" relations. I had the good fortune to be part of establishing these relations, and meeting a remarkable woman who was then the governor of Vermont, Madeline Kunin. We carefully prepared for the coming of the guests in the tradition of Russian hospitality. We had arranged an interesting program for this high delegation's planned stay in Karelia of almost a week. But problems arose from the moment we met them at the station. It was a cold early winter morning. The governor had not been comfortable in the four-bunk compartment of the Leningrad-Petrozavodsk train. We had planned to house the American group in a guest house some ten kilometers out of Petrozavodsk in a picturesque place. From Madeline's mood, I sensed that she was discouraged and upset about something. As we later learned, while still on the train she had expressed a desire to return to Leningrad that same evening. I didn't want this to happen, not only because we had prepared for this official visit, although at the time we did not suppose it would lead to the signing of an agreement on "brotherhood." Mainly, it was sad to think that the guests would not get to meet with our children and our women who were all waiting for them. I told this to Madeline. I persuaded her to stay at least 24 hours in order to visit the children's center where she would also meet with the women activists of Petrozavodsk. Without exaggerating I can say that our guests were really amazed by our children, the girls in national costumes greeting them with "bread and salt," the young musicians and dancers and singers and puppeteers, and the young masters from various technically oriented hobby groups demonstrating their talents. And then around the samovar we had a frank and thorough talk about our women's problems. Madeline Kunin had already been governor for more than one term, hence her great concern for children and families and the resolution of social issues. A young woman lawyer on the governor's staff, Amy Davenport, told us about the many interesting actions and forms of work with children and women in Vermont. Our guests in turn were interested to hear about our women's councils in factories and apartment houses which were at that time rather active. In the evening, influenced by her impressions of the day's encounters, Madeline decided that the group would not go back until it had completed the planned program. We then went to the university where the governor met with students and professors, to the Academy of Sciences for meetings with scholars, to museums and enterprises, and to the Supreme Soviet where it was decided to establish the Karelia-Vermont link. Quite some time has passed since then and we've gotten to know one another better. We can hardly keep track of how many delegations of school children, university students, doctors and teachers and lawyers and government people have visited from both sides. I give her credit and I admire this remarkable women -- a wise public figure and stateswoman, a wife and mother of four beautiful children. We talked about our children that evening in the cozy guest house outside Petrozavodsk; we recalled those distant days when we wartime children created those first threads of friendship, later broken, with our peers. May our grandchildren be more intelligent, more farseeing than we were, and create a peace without barriers.