Drop and Duck

Really? While attending elementary school, all students were asked to engage in a bomb drill at least twice a month that required us to fall to the floor, hide beneath our desks, and cover our little heads with our arms. This practice was, of course, in anticipation of the Soviet Union dropping an atomic bomb directly upon our school. Apparently, some brilliant adult decided that by rolling around on a filthy classroom floor beneath a wooden desk where its underside was plastered with peanut butter, random petrified pieces of bologna, and intermittent hair or boogers stuck in dried chewing gum would protect us from being disintegrated, or the very least, shelter us from exposure to radiation burns. (The peanut butter and bologna were remnants from our brown bag lunches eaten at our desks because the concept of a cafeteria in an elementary school had not yet been introduced. I suppose we were trusted to be hygienically tidy at seven or eight years old.) The teachers dutifully followed protocol and everyone went home feeling well prepared for nuclear fallout. We'd show those stinking Rushings! I thought SoVeeYet Onion was an odd name for a country and believed the people of that nation had "red" skin, bad teeth, and cheeks like apples. I had also collected other important facts about the people of the SoVeeYet Onion such as: the men all wore black fur hats (of which I was envious), the women wore kerchiefs tied beneath their fat chins, and they all had faces resembling potatoes. I knew because I saw the photographs in Life magazine of them.

In 1965, Dr. Zhivago hit the movie theaters. A freshman in college and still quite impressionable, I then realized how gorgeous Russian people were. Who wouldn't want to look like Julie Christie? Never mind that she was British. Or Omar Sharif? Wait! Wasn't Sharif Egyptian? I didn't care. I decided I wouldn't mind looking like either one of them. Eventually, I majored in literature and was introduced to Russian literature: Tolstoy, Nabokov, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and decided that Russians were complex, intellectual, and psychologically dark. Moody bunch of people, they were! My education was complete.

Fortunately, one of my electives was a World History class and that helped to expand my understanding of Russian history and its people. What truly helped my insights into Russian character, however, was befriending my son's fencing coach years later. Sonja held two gold medals in women's fencing: one for the Soviet Union and one for the U.S. which she had made her home after defecting. Sonja was one of my "aha" moments. Because of her, I realized that politics, movies, and stereotypes will ever define a nation of people. As in Putin. Who defines a lot of things but hardly represents an entire country's character.