Community Corner
Of the Wild Wild East, Siberian Cats and 15 Great Kids
On our journey through Russia, we learned about the cats that saved Siberian art, and the best view in St. Petersburg.
I'll offer a bit of a travelogue on our Russian trip after , where our son Patrick spent the first nine months of his life.
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You know of Moscow and St. Petersburg, have read about them, seen them on TV and in films, perhaps even visited one or both. Chances are you have never heard of Tyumen, though it's a city of almost 600,000. Chances are I would not either if Patrick had not been born there. Our tour guide proudly boasted the city "is the gateway to Siberia." As getting "sent to Siberia" is our cliche for being sent somewhere really horrible, I wondered if this was the best promotional copy the Chamber of Commerce could come up with. But the more I heard about the history of the city, the more I saw a parallel to our own.
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The Cossacks took the area where Tyumen is now from the Tatars in 1585, making it the first Russian settlement in Siberia. The Pilgrims wouldn't get to Plymouth Rock for another 25 years. The Cossacks had guns, the nomad Tartars spears. The Cossacks won in the same way white settlers and the U.S. calvary beat the native Americans, and gave Russia its first foothold in a vast and harsh wilderness holding untold riches—gold, later oil and gas. Progress followed: More towns, cities, the railroad, the continent-spanning Trans-Siberian Railroad. The more I heard this history, the more I saw Siberia not as a strange frozen desolation in Asian, but as the wild wild East, much like our wild wild West, settled in the opposite compass direction to ours and a good 200 years earlier.
Except, of course, we don't banish people to California.
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The Russians love statues. Everywhere we turned, we found marble or granite thrown up to heroes of World War II, heroes of the revolution, even heroes to geology. In Tyumen, the statue of Lenin, as always, pointing off into the future, still stands. My favorite was the statue—actually three statues; as I said, they love them here—honoring the Siberian cats of World War II.
During the 900-plus day siege of St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad), millions of people starved to death, along with all the cats. The rats survived, of course, and started eating everything, including the priceless art held in the famous Hermitage and other museums. So Siberians shipped their cats to Leningrad to save the day. Years later back in Tyumen, they put up carved black stone images of those brave cats playing, heroes to the nation.
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In St. Petersburg, we drove past the building that housed the KGB, and now its successor internal security agency, the more benign sounding FSB. Our guide said that many rumors circulated about the building when it was the KGB's, including that it had as many floors below ground as above, all those basement levels used for torture. "It is said," our guide Anna continued, "that the building has the best view in all of St. Petersburg. Because you can see Siberia from the bottom floor."
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I will add one last personal comment about our journey to Patrick's homeland. As you will probably never visit Tyumen, you will probably also never meet the 15 other kids we traveled with for a week and half. I wish you could.
They range in age from 6 to 16. The were born in St. Petersburg and Petropavlovsk and Magnitogorsk and Rostov-on-Don, and even the United States. They live all over the U.S., in Wisconsin, Connecticut, Oregon and Colorado.
What distinguishes them is not that they're from Russia, or adopted, but their generosity of spirit. They put up with eight, 10-hour days of touring art museums, and with parents crying during the visits to baby homes and orphanages they don't remember (these visits are often more emotional for the moms and dads than the kids). They were all instant friends on the first day in Moscow, and stayed that way. They formed no cliques. They ate with each other, rode the bus with each other, talked with each other. There was none of we sit here, you sit over there. The older kids were patient with the younger (for which I'm particularly appreciative, as Patrick's dad). They were, in all ways, spectacular. So a shout out:
Ben, Radik, Alex, Slava, Natasha, Olga, Dmitri, Sean, Elena, Viktor, Natalie, Ethan, Britta, Stephanie, Kate, and Patrick, you were the best part of the trip. You all are a credit to where you're from, and a reward to where you are going.
