October 20, 2007

Living Through the Cuban Missile Crisis

[This aired as a Commentary on Vermont Public Radio on October 19, 2007. Streaming audio can be found here.]

Forty five years ago, I had barely just arrived. I was trying to put a little weight on, getting used to the sights and smells. Then suddenly this new world I had fallen into was teetering on the brink of nuclear annihilation. It's hard not to be affected by that sort of thing.

On October 22, 1962, I was less than two weeks old when President John F. Kennedy went on television to announce a military quarantine of Cuba. On October 14, a U2 spy plane flying over Cuba had discovered what had been suspected all summer: that the Soviets were secretly, despite repeated assurances to the contrary, building nuclear missile launch pads in Cuba. The Joint Chiefs argued for invasion of the island. Kennedy feared that the Soviets would retaliate by taking Berlin, so a blockade, euphemised as a quarantine, was declared.

If I had known at the time how close the world was to nuclear war, I would surely have been a bit upset. Who wouldn't be? You spend nine months gestating, you expect to get more to show for it than two weeks breathing oxygen and filling up diapers. There I was, working on developing my retinas and Kennedy and Khrushchev were standing eyeball to eyeball.

I was my mother's second child, so she was pretty relaxed about bringing another life into the world. But something about the threat of nuclear war upset her.

"It's all still so very clear," she says. "I was so frightened that I wouldn't be able to get formula for my new baby, that the grocery stores would go to a rationing program."

My mother had been a child during World War II and remembered the rationing. Plus, we lived in San Pedro, California - a major port and a likely nuclear target.

"There was also the concern about husbands being called to fight," my mother recalls. "We were glued to the black and white TV."

Then it was over as suddenly as it had begun. Just six days of terror, imagining what a nuclear war might be like, and the Russians had backed down. Nikita Khrushchev was chastened. His move, meant to redress Russia's huge nuclear disadvantage, lead to his downfall. It came - no small irony - two years to the day from when that U2 made its discovery over Cuba.

Needless to say, despite being a helpless infant in October 1962, I was scarred for life. My generation grew up in the shadow of nuclear annihilation. That shadow was my fellow traveler, affixed at birth.

Ironically, the shadow yanked me toward Russia. I became a Kremlinologist and, a quarter century after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was working in Russia, where I watched communism unravel first hand.

We have come a long way in 45 years. Despite continued bilateral bluster, the ICBMs have stood down. The threat of nuclear war has essentially disappeared.

So why is it I can't shake this shadow?

Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of our Books

June 01, 2021

White Magic

The thirteen tales in this volume – all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century – contain a fair dose of magic and mysticism, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.

Fiction

December 01, 2016

The Moscow Eccentric

Advance reviewers are calling this new translation "a coup" and "a remarkable achievement." This rediscovered gem of a novel by one of Russia's finest writers explores some of the thorniest issues of the early twentieth century.

Fiction

March 05, 2018

Resilience: Life Stories of Centenarians Born in the Year of Revolution

Call it resilience, grit, or just perseverance – it takes a special sort of person to have survived the last 100 years of Russian and Soviet history.

Nonfiction

November 01, 2019

The Samovar Murders

The murder of a poet is always more than a murder. When a famous writer is brutally stabbed on the campus of Moscow’s Lumumba University, the son of a recently deposed African president confesses, and the case assumes political implications that no one wants any part of.

Fiction

December 24, 2022

A Taste of Chekhov

This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.

Fiction

December 01, 2008

93 Untranslatable Russian Words

Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.

Language Reference Language Learning Nonfiction

Chekhov Bilingual

Some of Chekhov's most beloved stories, with English and accented Russian on facing pages throughout.

Bilingual Books Fiction Language Learning

September 01, 2009

Life Stories

The Life Stories collection is a nice introduction to contemporary Russian fiction: many of the 19 authors featured here have won major Russian literary prizes and/or become bestsellers. These are life-affirming stories of love, family, hope, rebirth, mystery and imagination, masterfully translated by some of the best Russian-English translators working today. The selections reassert the power of Russian literature to affect readers of all cultures in profound and lasting ways. Best of all, 100% of the profits from the sale of this book are going to benefit Russian hospice—not-for-profit care for fellow human beings who are nearing the end of their own life stories.

Literature Fiction

Tolstoy Bilingual

This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious.

Bilingual Books Fiction Language Learning

July 01, 2015

The Latchkey Murders

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin is back on the case in this prequel to the popular mystery Murder at the Dacha, in which a serial killer is on the loose in Khrushchev’s Moscow...

Literature Fiction

November 01, 2010

Frogs Who Begged...

The fables of Ivan Krylov are rich fonts of Russian cultural wisdom and experience – reading and understanding them is vital to grasping the Russian worldview. This new edition of 62 of Krylov’s tales presents them side-by-side in English and Russian. The wonderfully lyrical translations by Lydia Razran Stone are accompanied by original, whimsical color illustrations by Katya Korobkina.