One for the Russians

I don't have any particular feeling about Russians, or Russia. I grew up after that period of time in Yugoslavia when Russian was an obligatory foreign language in schools or when Russians were automatically seen as "brothers." My tenuous personal links to the culture comprise one failed attempt to learn the basics of Russian at University when we had to choose a second foreign language; the class was taking place in the remote subterranean chambers of the Faculty of Philology, all dusty and murky, and was taught by an old Russian lady with long curving fingernails and a dishevelled bun on top of her head. That, and the dark deep-throat guttural sounds I was asked to produce in pronunciation exercises were a bit too much for me and I escaped to the sunnier, first-floor French section, but the ghost of the Russian language still haunts me occasionally, like when someone asks me where I am from, I tell them I am Serbian, and the person concludes happily, "So you speak Russian!" A couple of films by Nikita Mihalkov, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and the name of the legendary Belgrade band Ekatarina Velika (Catherine the Great) pretty much exhaust this list.




So it's not from sentimental reasons that I'm dedicating this one to Russians. And it wasn't the atrocious socialist-realist monument on Mount Avala near Belgrade I saw this summer that inspired me. (In sign of a protest against this particular artistic style, I didn't take a picture of it). It was, I think, the simple statement on the white marble plaque that seemed to speak from a time long long ago, when people still remembered their tragedies, when they cared about such disasters as the Second World War, when a certain simpler, more straightforward friendship existed. Above all, it was the sad irony enveloping a handful of Russian names etched into the marble slab, the kind which leaves you silent and empty-headed for a while.



A crash-course in history (which I myself had to take): after three years of German occupation, Belgrade was finally beginning to see the light of day in October 1944, and was liberated on October 20, by the joint efforts of the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Red Army. (My grandfather was there with his 9th Serbian Brigade -- which later earned him a somewhat humorous title of "my liberator of Belgrade!" from me -- and right around that time, my grandmother was getting ready to walk 300 kilometers from eastern Serbia to Belgrade, to find out if he was alive). The war in Europe ended the following spring, and the world woke up from what must have felt like a bad combination of sci-fi and horror nightmares. Exactly twenty years later, in October 1964, Belgrade was all set to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of freedom, and welcome the Soviet military delegation containing 6 participants of the operations carried out two decades before, led by Marshal Biriuzov and Colonel General Zdanov. In the morning of October 19, the plane carrying the delegation crashed into Mount Avala, just 16 kilometers away from Belgrade and the very spot where in 1944 they helped win somebody else's battle, survivors of man-made madness and chaos.

Grandfather Sreten's Liberator of Belgrade Testimonial

There wasn't much Belgrade could give them: gratitude, the monument to commemorate the tragedy, the title of the Yugoslav National Hero to Biriuzov, a street name for Zdanov... The story itself is receding from the living memory, disappearing under the fine patina of passing time, joining the lost ranks of thousands of other gradually forgotten battles that must have taken place in the history of this planet.



So this one is for them, while it is still possible to remember them. I too don't have much to offer except a small salute from across forty years, and this unlikely but real dandelion which against all odds found a way to push through the marble around the monument. A sure sign that the mountain remembers, perhaps.