What Goes Around...

In early February, Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Germany to inaugurate the “Year of Russian Culture in Germany.” During that trip, after Putin stressed that Russia sided with France and Germany against a war in Iraq at this time, reporters asked him if this meant that a Franco-Russo-German coalition would oppose the US in a new balance of power in world affairs. Putin replied that “I do not want to incite anti-Americanism in connection with the Iraq situation.” He later added that a split between Europe and the United States “would be a bad option for world development — bad for the United States and for Europe.”

For forty years, in the era of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Russia did all it could to force a wedge between the US and its European allies. Now Putin wants to do everything he can to keep the alliance together. This while the president—formerly a KGB spy resident in Eastern Germany—opened a year of pro-Russian festivals in a Unified German State, 60 years almost to the day from the German surrender at Stalingrad.

How much more can things change?

Meanwhile, back at home in Russia, the Duma was trying to pass an Orwellian Newsspeak law (see PostScript, page 64), one of the country’s only truly independent media outlets, NTV was in turmoil (see NoteBook) and winter just did not seem to want to end.

Sounds like a good time to go fishing …

In this issue, photographer and ice-fishing aficionado Sergei Semyonov offers us an offbeat look into the hearts and minds of Russian ice fisherman. It begins on page 28.

Meanwhile, the calendar brought some interesting anniversaries, one for a little-known poet (page 24), and another for a world-renowned composer (page 47).

That poet, as it turns out, was born not far from the town of Kazan, which is the capital of Tatarstan, the focus of an interesting travel article beginning on page 54. And it was from Kazan, as we read in our article beginning on page 40, that Empress Elizabeth ordered the first “herd” of feline protectors for the Hermitage.

That brings us back to St. Petersburg, where Sergei and his friends are still fishing.

The only story I did not mention is our fascinating account of 11 American airmen whose plane went down in Siberia (page 34), where they survived off the land for nearly a month before being rescued. This happened in the waning days of World War II, as Russian troops were closing in on Berlin, which is where President Putin was this February, to inaugurate …

Enjoy the issue.

Paul Richardson