May Term 2010

Warsaw is the only city on our itinerary that I’ve not been to, but I feel a connection anyway. My brother has been scanning family documents, and there’s one picture of my grandfather in a Russian army uniform (his family was from the Kiev area), the picture being taken in a Warsaw studio; we think … Continue reading »

If it’s Thursday, we must be in Vilnius. We spent most of the day getting here, transiting through Latvia to Lithuania. As we got farther south, the agriculture seemed more “regular”–which is to say, more like back home, with some cows, and a lot less forest. The northern areas looked more like the North Woods … Continue reading »

Reval–better known by its Estonian name (at least here), Tallinn–is a city in Estonia with a long and storied history. I hadn’t thought about it, but northern Europe, specifically the Baltic Countries, were sometimes players in the game of Empire, but frequently pawns. Until Peter the Great stamped his footprint on the area, the Danes, … Continue reading »

St. Petersburg — May 9, 2010 The tour of Russia began (for me) on Friday night, when I joined Prof. Vitzthum and his friends from Ruhrgas, where we’d visited earlier in the day, at a local bistro for dinner. When we were done, it was around 9 o’clock, and, far north, it was still light … Continue reading »

If you’re the right age (and that’s my age), you can almost understand my fascination with what’s happening in Moscow this week. For my generation, Red Square was the scene of enormous displays of Russian military might. I remember the dissection of the number of troops, missiles, and the speculation associated with which leader had … Continue reading »