Thirteen Coats, A Translation (from Russian)
Serge Kotlar and I (Yay!, Merrill, Wisconsin) translated Thirteen Coats from Russian to English as research for the next book in The Long War series, The Executioner’s Son. I read and speak Russian and have studied the country and its culture since my 17th year on...
Leaving Boulder
Tomorrow, the Rocky Mountains eastern slope and the Boulder, Colorado, Flatirons, disappears. I am glancing over my task list, which in the nature of task lists, is endless; however, there are strike-thru’s up there at the top. Patrice has been teaching; I...
Что Делать? What is to be done?
Nickolai Chernyshevski and Vladimir Lenin wrote essays fretting over What is to be done? As do I; fret, that is. Their ambition was to remake Russia; mine is somewhat less, merely to tell you what my plans are, or specifically, what I will publish over the next two...
Codes, Ciphers and Cryptanalysis
Justin A. Day (pseudonym) with Jan Weeks published The Centerville Code forty-two years too late for me. It is a 10-13 year-old boy adventure book where the heroes require facility in cryptanalysis––the reading of codes. It is the type of story I read as a...Featured Books
Thirteen Coats
Evgenii Belodubrovskii's Thirteen Coats is a recollection and meditation on Leningrad–St. Petersburg from his birth in 1941 on the eve of the German invasion to the present.
Russia's twentieth century traumas––two world wars and the long civil war that endured from the October Revolution in 1918 until Stalin's death in1953 (we can include the collectivization of agriculture, the Great Terror and Gulag as part of this long civil war).
Numbers empty tragedy of meaning. Stalin noted that one death is a tragedy, but ten thousand deaths is a statistic. If there is a big picture, perhaps it is contained within the pages of The Black Book of Communism that enumerates the tens of millions murdered in the name of that twentieth century religion of Communism.
If there is any sense to be made of the madness, it will be in the single individual story. Longevity tables suggest an American will on average live ninety-three years. Self-medicating trauma with alcohol, drugs and tobacco, my Russian male cohort has now been dead ten years, his statistical lifespan fifty-three years. Memorial is a Russian movement to tell the story of Russia's twentieth century tragedy one death and one story at a time. Here, perhaps, there is some hope for Russia's recovery rather than in longing for its 'Black Book' greatness.
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