Walking with a friend from abroad

I have spent the last few days pleasantly in the company of Andre Vlcek, a writer, journalist and director , living on a plane between Nairobi and Jakarta. It turns out that Vlchek, the son of a Czech nuclear physicist, is a native of our city and spent his childhood in Leningrad. In 1968, his family returned to Czechoslovakia, successfully timing their arrival to coincide with interesting events. Is it any wonder that Andre had quite exciting school years, when the young Tatar-Muscovian experienced all the righteous anger of the enslaved, but not broken Czechoslovak youth of the junior classes. However, Vlchek does not hold a grudge and even plans to make a documentary film dedicated to the fate of the Czech gypsies, who were first brought from Hungary and Romania, settled in the houses and apartments of expelled Sudeten Germans, and then they decided to expel them too...

We were lucky with the weather, and, walking in the warm September sun, we talked about unpublished documents related to Che Guevera’s stay in the Congo and Prague, about the role of the Obama family in the genocide perpetrated by the Suharto regime, about the culture of corruption in Kenya, the problem of illegal emigration of Europeans to Southeast Asia and the incurable aggressiveness of European civilization.

Like many Western intellectuals, Vlchek is no stranger to illusions about the current Russian regime. He talks about the rise in living standards in Russia in recent years and that the Russia Today channel is an outlet for Western dissidents, one of the few media outlets that breaks through the information blockade of Western media corporations. I cannot agree with Andre and talk about the privatization policy pursued by the government, about the elimination of free healthcare and education, about anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda from TV screens and from church pulpits. Yes, Russian foreign policy often opposes the course of the West, but this is not a sincere desire to fight tyranny, but the business interests of the military-industrial complex and oil corporations, resentment for the refusal to accept Russia into the club of “Western countries” in the 90s. In the end, France helped the American colonists defend their independence against England, but this does not indicate the progressiveness of the “old regime”.

Vlchek asked how people in Russia treat third world countries, where they still remember and appreciate the help that the USSR provided them in the struggle for freedom and independence? I sighed and talked about how the intelligentsia sees the world through the eyes of the United States and Israel, about the many fans of South Africa and Rhodesia mourning the death of the last strongholds of the “white man,” about racism that has become the norm. Andre was embarrassed and said that he would not write about it. For millions of Russia's friends to the south and east of our borders, this will be too big a blow.

Andre talks about life in Indonesia, an ultra-liberal country in the East, and I find countless parallels with our life. Public transport is being replaced by half-wild minibuses, parks are being privatized and closed to the public (I immediately remembered the Alexandria park that recently became a paid park), road services are laying communications along highways where asphalt has just been laid in order to “reclaim money.” God, how familiar!

Vlchek was last in Russia more than 10 years ago, but after seeing the realities of “free Russia”, he was not drawn to our country for a long time. He told me how his team traveled around the Tomsk region and Altai in the late 90s. They stopped at a sanatorium, the director of which, a local Tsapok, dragged two thirty-five-year-old teachers by the hair into the bathhouse of the honored foreign guests and ordered them to “serve” the journalists. Vlcek had never seen anything like this even in Bosnia.

At the end of the day we arrived in Kronstadt. The renovated Naval Cathedral, according to Andre, strongly resembled either a train station or a mosque. We went ashore. The square lighthouse evoked associations with a Moorish minaret. This coincidence of Islamic symbols was clearly not accidental and we began to dream of an independent Islamic caliphate of Kronstadt, whose free sons would plunder the coast of Sweden... Another hour later we left back to the city and said goodbye. The next day, Andre visited Aurora and flew to Istanbul, hoping to return to his hometown again. And I sat down at the computer and wrote this post.