From Russia, with love

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Sergei L. Loiko /Los Angeles Times /MCT Protesters in Moscow carry pictures of jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and late leaders Moammar Gadhafi and Kim Jong Il next to a picture of a fantasy movie character who is supposed to bear a resemblance to Premier Vladimir Putin. (TRIBUNE MEDIA MCT)

WASHINGTON — The Lost Tribes gathered from the Old and New Countries for all the holidays.

First, we tacked up the blue-and-white tinsel and hauled out the silver menorah and I tried to remember which candle you’re supposed to light first. I took a stab at the Hanukkah blessing while our Canadian-American-Russian daughter, Lizzie, 6 ½, begged to strike the flame.

Grandma Tanya and Grandpa Valery flew in the next night from Moscow with enough luggage to fill the Lubyanka Prison. They unpacked caviar, artworks and fake-fur hats, and set to work on a feast.

This was one fork of the great river of our people, the descendants of the Jews of Czarist Russia who did not sail a century ago for New York or Montreal or Buenos Aires or Winnipeg, who endured the pogroms and Stalin’s Great Purge, and whose homes, by fate or fortuity, stood just beyond the range of the German destroyers.

Seventy seasons of Soviet atheism had diluted the traditions but not the blood.

Now, in one little girl, the tributaries, dammed by a century, cleft by an ocean, flowed together and the river became one.

We invited a dozen neighbours. Babushka conjured potato latkes and kasha varnishkes from the depths of her ancestral memory.

The next morning, we bought the smallest pine on the Lions Club lot, strung it with lights, put a wreath on the garage door, laid out cookies and milk for Santa Claus and carrots for Rudolph, hung stockings from the mantel, and wrapped a telescope, a guitar, a doll stroller big enough for a pair of four-year-old human twins and at least 30 other presents for the princess and set them under the boughs.

In the Soviet Union, the trappings of the opiate Christian Christmas were transmuted to be in honour of the new year, with white-bearded Grandfather Frost in place of Saint Nicholas, but with the same tree, the same lights, the same bonanza of swag for the ankle-biters.

In America, my wife Natasha’s generation of emigrant Russians — Jewish or goyishe — made a mash-up of December’s great fêtes and washed it down with Georgian wine.

On Saturday, Grandma Tanya relieved an organic butcher of a $105 goose for the Christmas Eve gorging. So much for free Soviet Jewry.

But this was no ordinary Yule for the Russians, or for Russia. As the fat and luckless bird was roasting in suburban Maryland, tens of thousands of Val and Tanya’s neighbours were out in Sakharov Avenue back home, chanting foul against their swaggering president and challenging their centuries of single-strongman rule.

I went to the kitchen and informed Baba Tanya there were massive, restive crowds in the streets of Moscow and she did not believe this could be possible. "Maybe 5,000," she said. I showed her the news photos of Sakharov Avenue, overflowing beyond the range of vision, and, quietly, she said, "Yes. Maybe this is more."

One of them, we soon found out, was Cousin Kirill. Like Andrey Sakharov, Cousin Kirill was a physicist probing the inner life of the atom.

Unlike Sakharov, Kirill was neither a defiant dissident nor the winner of the Nobel Prize, although for the latter, give him time.

"What brought me there," he was saying on the phone from the Russian capital, when the largest anti-government demonstration of his lifetime was done, "wasn’t really against Putin, but against the falsification of the parliamentary election results. In Moscow, half of the vote for United Russia wasn’t real. A graph was circulated of the precincts, and you could see spikes of nice round numbers — 60, 65, 70 per cent. This signalled clearly that the results were falsified. I couldn’t be in my hometown and not take part."

So Cousin Kirill drifted toward Sakharov Avenue and found "a huge river of people, flowing through the Metro station and all of them going to the same place. I expected to find them all highly excited, but it was normal, nothing special in their mood."

In the crowd, he noticed a girl he knew in high school and a fellow from the same class. Now the woman taught in Germany, the guy wrote programming code in Colorado, and Kirill was ensconced as a nanotechnology researcher and instructor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

Such was the new Russian diaspora, 100 years after my ancestors — the grocers and carpenters and house painters — fled Bialystok and Minsk and Pinsk for the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

"As you know, I’m rather cynical," said Kirill.

"I felt a little bit out of place. I live in America. I have a green card. It is not really honest of me to go protest in Russia.

"To tell you the truth, no one really gave a shit about who was giving speeches. My impression was the people in the audience did not care so much for the so-called leadership of the movement. Some people were clapping in a rather lukewarm way, some did not do anything, some people whistled at whatever was being said. For most of us, it was just an opportunity to hang out, have some tea and some food."

"Were people afraid?" I wondered.

"Oftentimes," Kirill answered, "I overheard people saying in a joking way what they would do if they got arrested. But actually, the police were quite nice."

I tried to drink this in: 100,000 convivial protesters, unconcerned about retribution, rocking an avenue named for a heroic prisoner of conscience and jeering the very clowns who pretended to be leading them. This was classically Russian, but if sarcasm could topple a czar, they would have been free long ago.

"What did people ask you when they learned you lived in the States?" I wondered.

"I had quite a few discussions about how democracy works and how protest works," Kirill said. "I referred to the Tea Party and to Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity. It seemed that in Russia, there had been a bit of propaganda about how the police handled Occupy Wall Street — that it had been a case of complete brutality."

"How will this end?" I asked Kirill.

"The trademark of Russian authority is unpredictable power," he replied.

I hung up the phone and went downstairs to lamb chops, more kasha and the grandparents from the U.S.S.R. Nine gold candles were blazing in the hanukiah.

Then I heard Lizzie shouting with surprise: Outside, there was a winter rainbow, wide enough to span the sea.

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 31, 2011 i6