Tourists in Baku

    
     The Armenian enclave of Nogorno-Karabakh, (aka Artsakh and since September 2, 1991, the independent Republic of Mountainous Karabakh - RMK) is located inside the Azerbaijan Republic. The history of how this occurred is convoluted. But as the USSR's power disintegrated fighting between Azeris and Armenians for control of this enclave began in February 1988. Until that year Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan had in addition to Azeris a large, diverse population of Russians, Armenians and Jews. But the outbreak of war in the mountains resulted in the expulsion of Azeris from RMK. Armenians living in Baku then experienced Azeri retribution and were forced to begin an exodus from the city. The fact that the Soviet Union favored the Armenians in this conflict also enraged the Azeris. In order to maintain control in Baku the Soviets rolled into the city an impressive military force and by January 1989, Baku was essentially under martial law.*
     With its gritty cosmopolitanism and located on the shores of the Caspian Sea I have found Baku most appealing. One walks the streets to the unrelenting beat of Turkic music. Along the sea front there are parks, mostly deserted in winter, flocks of seagulls, a frigate wafting at anchor - a most serene place to jog. My Hartwick College group arrived in Moscow January 3rd, 1989, for a one month tour. It consisted of 25 undergraduates and two curious faculty members.  My daughter Jennifer, a senior at Syracuse University was also in the mix. In my original itinerary I had requested  three days in Baku - and in Moscow was informed that because of "problems in Baku" it might not be possible to visit there. Perhaps unwisely I renewed my request for Baku. Over time I have thought about why the Soviet authorities granted my request. There were at least two reasons - first the Soviets urgently wanted the appearance of "normalcy" in Baku and the second I have accepted as a personal compliment.
     On January 16th we flew into what is today Heydar Aliy International Airport. Then in a modern, bright red "Intourist" bus on a sunny, cool afternoon we began the ride to downtown Baku. Traffic appeared to me to be normal. I had noticed that there were no other Intourist buses at the airport - we were the conspicuous "it". Then within a half mile from the airport in a grassy depression near an intersection appeared a large tank. Its cannon stretched forward the length of the chassis and then some. Everyone on the bus exhaled, Aaaaaaahhhhhhh ! Almost every crossroads on the way downtown was presided over by a tank or an armoured personnel carrier. At the Hotel Intourist on Neftyanikov Prospect there were two APCs parked nearby. Five soldiers on patrol studied us as we unloaded. In the lobby we had a meeting with the Hotel's administration and were informed of the curfew. Everyone had to be off the streets between 9:00 PM and 7:00 AM. Other than that all was normal - Welcome to Baku. The Hotel was not crowded. Our rooms were excellent - some with panoramic views of the Caspian Sea. The only incident that first day - three female students told me of someone hanging around too close. I told them to take his picture - they tried and he was not seen again. That first evening after dinner I experienced an anxiety rush - curfew at 9:00 PM - do I know where my students are? No problem - for three nights all members of the group were in the Hotel well before the appointed hour. As darkness gathered around 8:30 PM all were gathered on balconies overlooking the square below. At 8:50 PM the two APCs below would start their engines emitting a roar and bloom of exhaust. Then they would move - one would block half the street and turn off its engine. The other APC would pull parallel to the first and block the rest of the street. It left it's engine idling thus creating a formidable gate. In the near silence that ensued soldiers could be heard conversing amid the glow of cigarettes.
     We spent three pleasant days in Baku. At a well maintained school we met 25 or 30 first and second graders, all scrubbed, smartly dressed, with black hair, dark eyes and totally excited at meeting American tourists. I gave the children and their school a rave review in an interview for Azeri television. At a rug factory there was an interruption of the work day so some of the workers (all women) could meet the visitors. I remember a beautiful Hartwick student - Erica, with black hair and dark eyes sitting with two Azeri women with similar physical attributes - it could have been a family gathering. As I passed nearby the Azeris were saying "You American?" Erica replied "Yes, honest!" "Nnnnnnooooooo!" One afternoon I was returning to the Hotel and noticed three of my group, my daughter and two other young ladies across the street mingling with three Soviet soldiers on foot patrol. The six of them were laughing with heads rearing back and forth in great amusement. I enjoyed the scene for a couple of minutes. An officer coming up the street also saw it, stopped about ten yards ahead of me and yelled something including an obscenity at the sergeant. He saw the officer, came to attention and saluted. Then stone faced the soldiers quickly shooed away the surprised girls like annoying pigeons. My students had plenty of street time in Baku.  In the old USSR the streets were where students always learned the most.  The Hotel meals were substantial with plenty of good Soviet/Azeri food - students of course complain about all food - I liked it. We departed Baku without incident on January 19th by night train for Tbilisi, Georgia.
     Exactly one year later Baku exploded in an anti-Armenian pogrom. During January and February 1990, Armenian residents were murdered, tortured, robbed and humiliated. Reports were that 90 Armenians and 21 Russian soldiers were killed and approximately 700 were injured. *
     *See Baku, Wikipedia; Bill Keller, New York Times - 1990; Website of Republic of Mountainous Karabakh.

                                                       
                                                                       Samantha

A Russian New Year

    
 
                                                         

   The Aeroflot flight from Helsinki landed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International at just about 1:00 PM on December 31, 1989. Passport Control was slow as everyone was scrutinized for several minutes by security officers. Staring back I remember that the officer studying my passport had fuzzy hair on his cheeks. I wondered if he shaved yet. Custom's Control was a breeze - "Nothing to declare." The Russians at this point would let just about anything that wouldn't explode into the country. I was collected by a representative of my host, the Pereslavl-Zalessky School District and a driver. We climbed into a minivan and were off - traveling north up the Yaroslavl highway. The drive to P-Z was over two hours of bouncing and swerving on a pot holed, two/three land road packed with roaring trucks belching clouds of exhaust. But kilometers of the ride were as always Russian beautiful - snow covered landscape, stands of white birch trees and church cupolas rising above villages in the frosty distance.
     By the time I arrived at Yulia and Yuri's apartment I was starting to fade. The "rush" from arriving in Moscow was giving way to fatigue. Tea and snacks revived me and Yuri and I were then off to the "banya". This military banya had its own building and was restricted to officers. New Year's Eve - it was packed with men and their sons. After shedding our clothes we (there were now four of us) approached the door of the steam bath and it sprang open - out poured thirty or forty laughing, yelling men and boys. We rushed in and the bath filled rapidly. Defensively I sat on the bottom of four long benches . The door slammed shut - someone opened the furnace door and threw in a thick three foot log. I was impressed he could lift it. This was followed by a bucket of water. The ensuing shock wave of heat nearly flattened me. Ten minutes later we were out of the bath standing under cold showers. A vodka bottle appeared and we began toasting the New Year and everything else. Now I was getting "severely" tired. We returned to the steam room.
     Back at Yulia and Yuri's we had a light supper - a table was covered with delicious dishes accompanied by vodka and wine. Then it was off to a New Year's Eve party at a friend's apartment - more meats, salads, caviar and of course vodka, wine and brandy. Exhausted but realizing that I was the only one in attendance who was not an officer or a wife I was careful to - as the vulgar expression goes "keep my shit together". Russians drink a lot - the only defense against alcohol annihilation is to either stop drinking which many hosts find exceedingly rude or to keep eating. I cotinued consuming food and measured drink.
     New Year's Eve 1989 became 1990, the year before the extinction of the USSR. Five men, all slightly inebriated (the truly wasted had disappeared) sat around a table in a dimly lit room
having a dark conversation. Assume you are a fire control officer at an ICBM installation. And assume that a thermonuclear war erupts and amid a nightmare of firestorms and lethal radiation the earth is being destroyed, its population annihilated. Deterrence has failed. At this point you receive the order to "FIRE" your missile. Would you? A US Air Force study was cited that indicated in this situation perhaps 25% of US fire control officers would refuse to launch their weapons. I remember being surprised and impressed by the sympathy for the 25% that seemed to roll around the table. Then the only American present noted that 75% would fire - the agony of a dying planet be damned. There was some nodding, a depressed moment of silence and we moved on to another grim subject.
     Sometime after 5:00 AM I remember staring down at a single bed - a combination of jet lag, a great banya, vodka, wine, brandy and the lateness of the hour had taken their toll. I aimed and then collapsed face down deciding along the way to skip the disrobing function. At 9:05 AM I was capable of lifting my head briefly - to check the time - then back to sleep.

                                                    
                                                                             Bruno

John Takachenko

     I thought I saw John in Huntington Park on a February afternoon in 1997. Driving away from the library a man with John's proud, straight features in a black coat and dark hat was sitting on a bench set against a snowy background. He was looking straight ahead. I quickly leaned over to the passenger side preparing to wave but then realized that it couldn't be John. There followed a brief rush of sadness.
     The legend was that John and Soya Takachenko fled Russia in the 1920s, spent the next several decades in Brazil and then found their way to Oneonta in the 1970s. Soya taught Russian language at Hartwick College and he became a self-taught watch repairman. There were no children. Soya died in the 1980s and was buried at the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville. I would visit her grave once but primarily as a sidelight to strolling in the Russian Orthodox cemetery.
     I then began to see John rather frequently as he took his morning walks. He had a route that included at the very least Church, Center, Elm and Main streets. John was a tall, elegant man with precise but rugged features and moved with strong, purposeful strides. He was always well dressed suitable to the season. No depressed, lost soul this European. When we met pleasantries were exchanged. I would practice my probably incoherent Russian on him. He would ask about my last or forthcoming trip to the USSR. We were always pleased to see each other. One such encounter occurred late in the era of "perestroika" in a grocery store parking lot. The Soviet Union had loosened the travel restrictions on its' citizens. John in exact, precise English announced that to his amazement and delight his niece was coming to Oneonta to visit him. "I am so happy!"
     About two years later John invited me over to his house on Hill Street to meet his two brothers on the occasion of their first visit to the USA. In a rather dimly lite living room we would chat, share light snacks and vodka. Compared to John who was in his mid 60s, his brothers looked past 125. But of course it could also have been simply exhaustion. They had also been "cheated" out of several hundred dollars by a New York City cab driver who drove them from JFK to Oneonta. One of the brothers would also require a couple of days of hospitalization for diabetes.
     John and I would chat only once more. On a couple of other occasions we were a block apart and did not meet. Someone told me that his health was deteriorating. Next I knew he had sold his house and in anticipation of dying returned to his old home town in southern Russia. During those years I had periodically thought about having John over for s small dinner and some chess. But I never did. It is now 2012 and I still regret it.

                                                           Charlie
                                                




    

"Our Featured Volunteer"

                                         Humane Society of Sarasota County
                                                      November 4, 2012
                                                          John Lindell
                                                          Canine Coach

We asked John to share a little about himself and he was kind enough to send us this response.

On January 1st, 2000 I retired from a college in upstate New York as a professor of government with a specialization in Russian/Soviet affairs. Then as a gentle, kindly, somewhat reclusive, old pensioner, I moved to Florida to play some tennis and golf. Over the first six years I also worked periodically as a field assistant in Costa Rica and Panama for a brilliant Michigan State ornithologist, Dr Catherine Lindell. I was a ship's cook on three sailboats on several Gulf cruises and worked five seasons as a tax preparer in an IRS/AARP program. Then I discovered the dogs (and the people - of course!) at HSSC.

For the past half dozen years I have made many new friends - among them Diezel, Cooley, Emmitt, Catahoula John, Dutch, Zoey, Troy, Hoyt and more recently Shadow, Sarge and Bruno. There were many others. I am pleased to report that the record of adoptions among these dogs has been excellent. HSSC led by behaviorists John Pfohler, Karie Hajek and volunteer Christine Christian seems to excel at getting its' rescue dogs and cats placed in new homes. This makes volunteering at HSSC a pleasure. One meets new dogs - soon friends - provide them with exercise, training and affection and then almost all go on to a "forever" home. But each and every one leaves behind a gentle and lasting memory.
                                                           

                          

                                                                                                                                                       

 

                        Shadow - b. 2003 -  d. 12/5/2012          
                      Third chance Reprieve - 12/5/2012


        

Pereslaval-Zalessky, Russia

                       
                                       

                             

                                                          Goritsky Monastery

    During the winter of 1990 I was in Russia lecturing, consulting  and living in the Frigate Hotel. The Frigate a modern Soviet hotel had been built in the 1970s.  My room on the fifth floor was quite warm and pleasant. I had a bathtub, toilet, television and a large window looking out back at nothing special, some yard and part of a building. But every day there were snow showers and I could watch the snow swirl and drift to earth. My electric coil allowed me to make a cup of hot coffee and I always had bread, jam and a few snacks available. Truth is I was very comfortable.  On Sunday my day off, I would rise, bath, snack and maybe watch a little TV as I hand washed clothes in the bathtub. By roughly 11:30 AM I was ready to hit the streets.
     The Frigate Hotel was located on the west side of the Yaroslav highway as its two lanes passed through the city from Moscow in the south to Yaroslav in the north and on to Archangel. Across the highway from the Frigate and one block south was a single story buffet that was the less expensive
alternative to the Hotel's restaurant. It was popular with truckers, workmen, a few local residents and me. I climbed one snow bank, crossed the slick street, climbed another, then padded down the sidewalk on an inch of ice and entered the buffet. The decor inside was Soviet brown with simple tables and chairs, all with uneven legs. The food on the steam line seemed to be all brown. Beige meat sat next to brown stew next to brown vegetables - I was never hungry enough to load up a plate and find out what was what. My food selection was simple and always the same, a cabbage soup with pieces of meat, a roll and tea. The soup was always delicious, the roll large, doughy and great for dunking, the tea hot with  rich flavor.
     At the end of the steam line sitting at a small table was a rotund woman, an ubiquitous "babuska"  (a "grandmother"). In front of her was the cash box. Every now and then she would shriek at a customer usually for not having the correct amount for their purchase. I the visiting westerner found it amusing. The customer might feebly protest but most simply took the tongue lashing and then sat down and ate. No one ever seemed to leave the buffet in a pleasant mood - faces reflected indifference and irritation.
     It was perhaps my third or fourth visit to the buffet - I carried my tray to the babuska with the cash box. Without thinking or even trying to approximate what was due I placed a five ruble note on her table. The screaming hit me like a shock wave. I stood there not exactly believing that I was the object of her tirade. But indeed I was. Then the storm passed. She reluctantly made change, shoved it at me and looked away. Slightly shaken I moved to a table to eat. As I sipped my tea the shock of the assault was slowly replaced by a warm sense of belonging. The babuska had treated me exactly the way she treated almost everyone. I was now a buffet regular, just another guy to yell at, an ordinary Russian. I exited the restaurant ramrod straight, deeply pleased and with a dark, somber face.

Franz Kafka

Hi again Chuck,

RE: your question.
     Franz Kafka was a Jewish, Czech born in Prague, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to German speaking parents in 1883. Kafka wrote in German. His Metamorphosis, is a story about an ordinary guy who wakes up one morning to realize he has turned into a cockroach. He and his family are of course surprised! dismayed! horrified! In another dark work In The Penal Colony the protagonist develops a sophisticated machine for torturing and executing individuals and provides an ethereal justification for its' use.  Happily he gets to experience his invention. Kafka unknowingly anticipates the Nazi, Soviet eras but his work suggests that homo sapiens can do and rationalize anything.
     Kafka is also famous for his novels. In The Castle the protagonist for 300 pages seeks to make an appointment for an unknown reason, with someone high in the bureaucracy. Finally before securing the appointment he dies but receives a memo from the bureaucracy stating that he is permitted to continue living where he is. (Mark Harmon's 1998 translation is brilliant.)  In The Trial an individual is arrested one morning and spends the next 250 pages trying to discover with what he is charged. Never learning he is still convicted and executed. In Amerika (Kafka liked the place - kind of ) the hero experiences a series of surreal adventures (New York and Boston tend to blend together) and ends up in Oklahoma - we think. And there was much more. Kafka died in 1924 at the age of 41. His two sisters were later murdered at Auschwitz.
     You already knew? More than you wanted to know? Forgive me I was a professor.
     Years ago I had a situation develop in the New York State DMV Office in Oneonta.
I was trying to sell an old car of mine to my daughter Jennifer for $1.00. On my fourth trip to the DMV Office trying to complete this task I submitted an important, required, NYS form stamped with a "DO THIS". I pushed it towards the clerk - and she looked and pushed it back. "No, No, you must not do it that way!" I protested "it says "DO THIS"! "That doesn't matter!" she replied. "You must "DO THAT"! Then I kind of lost it - emotional control.
      This kind of situation and the one I believe you are going through are frequently described as Kafkaesque, meaning a bureaucratic situation of the surreal, with excruciating frustration and much insane crap.
     A friend and neighbor of mine Bob ______, also happened to manage the DMV OFFICE heard the commotion and came out.  Bob took me by the hand and led me back to his office. We completed the paperwork for the transfer in ten minutes. Two months later I purchased a vanity license plate KAFKA3. (Three other New Yorkers had the idea before me.) In Florida I have Kafka1. For me it represents a very minor, hopeless protest against the massive, overwhelming and  mostly inevitable intrusion of public and private organizations into our lives. I also want to believe that if Kafka with his rather depressed personality and dark sense of humor could see his name on a license plate it would  perhaps make him smile.

:-) John

                                                   
                                                                         Hardee
                             photo by Emilee Fuss www.emileefuss.com
                                                   

JOL's Premature Obit Bio

    


                                             

     
      John Oskar Lindell was born ____, ____ to Mary _____ and John O. Lindell in Utica, N.Y.. He died ( but in protest) 

_____________________. in ________________________. of mostly natural causes. 

     Mr. Lindell attended Sacred Heart Grammar School (now a community center and partially abandoned), Utica Catholic Academy (demolished for a parking lot) and Utica College of Syracuse University (the Oneida Square Campus was abandoned for a new location). Lindell was an uninspired student in high school though something of a basketball player. He began his years at Utica College in 1955 with an athletic scholarship that he promptly lost due to a grossly inadequate academic performance. Mr. Lindell would become a "student" late in his sophomore year. After getting priorities straight he received his BA from Syracuse University in 1959.
     In the autumn of that year Mr. Lindell enrolled in New York University to begin work on a Masters degree in the Department of Government. Upon arriving in New York City he stayed initially at the Broadway Central Hotel (in the 1970s the building collapsed) but then moved to 99 East 4th Street (subsequently razed for a parking lot). Mr. Lindell received his MA degree in 1962. 
     In 1960 another graduate of Utica College, Annette Nicotera received and entertained Lindell's proposal of marriage. There were family misgivings concerning the proposed match. Ms. Nicotera's Uncle Cy Susso, a superb American patriot, noted that Lindell had no Italian blood, was most probably a communist, perhaps a Russian spy and had no job. Rather courageously she accepted the proposal, they were married and took up residence in Utica. Over the next seven years Mrs. Lindell would issue forth three precocious and beautiful daughters; Catherine, Elizabeth and Jennifer. But unhappily a twenty-two year marriage would end in divorce in 1982.
     From 1961 to 1965 - defying the expectations of some - Mr. Lindell found a job, in fact several jobs. He taught at Utica Free Academy (now an assisted living facility), TR Proctor High School and Mohawk Valley Community College. Other employment included the New York State Legislature, IBM and General Electric Radio Receiver Division. As the alert reader will surmise the "radio" industry was not a wise career move. GE would subsequently layoff Lindell, close and abandon the plant. In 1965 he returned to NYU to begin work on a PhD. His area of special interest would be the USSR and he secured his doctorate in 1973. But in 1966 with years of work on his degree still in the future, Lindell accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. The Lindells moved from Utica (the population of the city over the ensuing years fell by 40%) to accept the position in Oneonta - "the city of the hills" where "life [is] enjoyed".
During his first two years at Hartwick Lindell occupied an office in a building designated Card Board Alley and shared a wall opposite a row of urinals. In addition he would be "fired" twice for not completing his PhD program. Remarkably he would also be reinstated twice. The CBA building would be demolished and Lindell moved to Arnold Hall and then upstairs into a refurbished Chapel. There he would have an office with a 35 mile view of the Susquehanna River Valley until retirement. Arnold Hall was torn down in 2009 and replaced with a parking lot.
     During his 34 years at Hartwick Dr. Lindell taught most of the courses offered by the Department of Political Science, a Department he organized in 1972. But his speciality was Russian/Soviet affairs and through the years he led tours, taught, lectured and did consulting in Russia. Contrary to Uncle Cy's suspicions Lindell was never a member of the Communist Party (his doctoral adviser had in fact vetoed his proposed contact with the CPUSA) and throughout his career Lindell had little interaction with the security services of the USA or the Soviet Union (the exception being in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1988). Professor Lindell did like to emphasize that as the USSR tottered on the abyss of oblivion he gave the Russians "lots of good advice". The USSR totally collapsed in 1991. Dr. Lindell retired in 2000.
     In retirement - now a gentle old pensioner - Lindell did many of the things that preoccupy such individuals. In 2000 he sold the family home in Oneonta that he had maintained with care. Shortly after the sale the house was "flipped", became rental property and shortly thereafter a slum. Houses up the street from the old home were also sold and converted to student housing. Finally in June, 2012, Center Street Elementary School - one block away and the pride of the neighborhood - closed forever.
     Mr. Lindell also played weak tennis, pathetic golf, did some minor research and inconsequential writing. He lived with his companion Carol A Hanlon for many years (anniversaries were not celebrated or even noted) in Fly Creek, NY and Sarasota, FL. Lindell also worked as a Field Assistant for his biologist daughter Catherine, in the Eden-esque rain forests of Costa Rica and the debilitating humidity of Panama. He crewed on sailboats as a "ship's cook" participating in his only "Mayday" aboard the floundering Critical Path off Boca Grande, FL in 2003. (The crisis would pass and Lindell that evening would serve the crew an excellent baked lasagna dinner.) For five years during tax season he worked as a Volunteer Tax Preparer for an IRS/AARP program in Sarasota. Thus did he face and rather heroically overcome his great fear of the IRS brought on during a period he referred to as My Time of Serious Tax Troubles.  For several years Lindell worked with dogs as a volunteer at the Humane Society of Sarasota County rising in rank to K-9 Coach. {The ranking system was then abolished.) He also volunteered at the Sarasota County Animal Services and Satchel's Last Resort. Mr. Lindell often said (paraphrasing Mark Twain) that if there were no dogs in heaven, he demanded to go where they were.