We are currently living during the days of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war to conquer the Ukraine in order to bring it back into the borders of Russia. This war is being very vividly played out 24/7 because of the excellent communication available through social media and the non-stop news cycle available to anyone who cares to watch it. Over one million women, children and elderly men have tried to flee into bordering countries. The younger men have stayed behind to try to defend their country.
It should be no surprise to anyone who knows me that I have a deep and long lasting passion for Russian culture and history, for its language, art, architecture, history, music and spectacular beauty spread wide over eleven time zones! It has many cruel paradoxes, and the country came late to the table when it came to liberating its serfs. Still it did not deserve its ruling family to be assassinated in cold blood, in secret, without a trial in the basement of a nondescript building in Ekatarina but it happened. It did not deserve life to become worse for the serfs under Lenin and Stalin but it did.
One interesting result of Putin’s war on the Ukraine is the speaking out by the Russian Borzoi breeders of their pride in their country. I chose to have Russians as Facebook Friends because they bred borzoi, and I wanted to know more about them and to see good pictures of their borzoi. And it has gone along that way. I never would have expected Russia to go to war with a neighboring country and that is most unfortunate. Facebook has given me a very clear look as if through a keyhole or a seat at the table of a tea given by a borzoi breed club where the breeders were gathered and the topic of discussion was not the war, but their borzoi, their shows and their breeding progerams. I have had the opportunity to read firsthand and unedited the emotions expressed by the breeders I know. And borzoi directly down from my breeding are there, thanks to a grandson of Magnus, Majenkir Cedar who went to Olga Barkovski of Cavalierika Borzoi in Russia. From there, borzoi of my line went to Israel, Thailand nd New Zealand. However, I divulge. In Russia, the breeders are proud and loyal to their homeland, and I do not condemn them for it. It was not their idea to go to war, but they are loyal to their country. It would make no sense for an established person to suddenly turn against their country. I have seen on the news there are younger Russian people protesting, and they are running the risk of ten to twenty years in prison for so doing, Their point of view is important, too, So, not only are two different countries at war but two different generations.
In the eighteenth century, there lived a poet Nikolai Nekrasov, who wrote poetry about the lives and hardships of the peasantry class, and he was greatly loved. A Russian borzoi breeders shared one of his poems. It tells how nuanced the differences of loyalties there are among Russians themselves, some are for the war, and others are against. I am sharing the poem which I found on Facebook where I am the closest to being allowed to live in Russia
Minding the horrors of war,
With each new battle casualty
I feel sorry for not a friend, not a wife,
I feel sorry for not the hero himself…
Alas! the wife will be comforted,
And a friend best friend will forget;
But somewhere there is only one soul –
She will remember it until her coffin!
In the midst of our hypocritical affairs
And all sorts of vulgarity and prose
I peeped alone in the world
Holy, sincere tears –
Those are the tears of poor mothers!
They should not forget their children,
Dead by the bloody field,
How not to raise a weeping willow
Of its fallen branches..