Here I am with my granddaughter Alexandra, in short – Sasha, or Sashenka! Today is Sasha’s birthday: she reached age 3. We don’t see each other too often, but when we do, we definitely enjoy each other’s company. She takes the lead by commanding me to eat, have my tea with sweets and be merry. I suspect she likes sweets, as I do, but her mama Olga does everything possible to make her daughter love veggies. Sashenka gives me an extra chocolate candy and watches attentively. What I will do with it — eat or put it aside? I support Olga’s effort to bring up a slim girl and pretend that I don’t care about the candy. But it is not easy to fool the child! She laughs mischievously, but none of us is touching that candy… How different Sasha’s childhood seems to be from mine? Or is it?
My grandmother played in my life bigger role than I in Sasha’s life. I was already six years old, when the Soviet occupation of Estonia ended our lives as we knew them and the following Second World War destroyed the rest. As happened to so many so many other families, we also lost everything: the men were taken by the Soviet army, grandma’s modest houses were taken by the Soviets and an estate that father bought shortly before the Soviets arrived was, of course, taken over by the communist government. Circumstances pulled the family together under the roof of a poor house where my grandma managed instill in me the dream of a different life. Her incredible library was lost as everything else was, but she managed to keep the basic of Russian and West European classics for me, and she made me read them. I remember a summer when I was sent to herd city cows on a meadow near our home. I did — reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and offering the local cows chance to do whatever they wanted to do. I remember crying reading the scene when guilty Anna sneaks back into her home to see her son. And there were tsarist editions of Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, and War and Peace, and Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Fin with the mysterious Mississippi River that ran through the entire story of the friendship of these two outcasts, Fin and Jim. This reading awakened my imagination. I knew that the life we lived in Paide, a tiny provincial city, would not last forever, something will happen to me, I will soon go away from here…
In my adult life, a single word, “diagonal,” would describes my subconscious search for different life, promised to me by my childhood. Have you observed an ant crawling toward the top of a broken straw? The straw is tilted and doomed to fall sooner or later, but the ant still crawls drawn by its instinct. This is my life, I guess!
In Paide, my hometown, the local newspaper offered me job when I was still a high school student. But in college I chose to study engineering. Stalin’s images were hovering above us, humanitarian disciplines were twisted to the core by Marxist ideology, and we went to study engineering and geology instead of languages and history! Then Stalin died in 1953, and the Hungarian Revolt in 1956 shook the communist world. The jammed Voice of America radio described the atrocities of the Soviet Army which was crushing the rebels. The Hungarians wanted the communists to go away. We Estonians also wanted to shed ourselves of the communist regime, but we kept our mouths shut. Finally, Nikita Khrushchev unmasked Stalin.
I left engineering and resumed my work as a journalist. How did it happen that I specialized on reviewing films, you may ask? Did it happen to me, or did I happen to the Estonian film life? Who can tell? I got my academic degree in Movie Sciences in Moscow, became a member of the Board of the Estonian Film Makers Union, and then became a researcher in the Estonian Academy of Sciences. I was on the top of my Estonian world! Soon I learned that there is nothing more dangerous than being on top! Serious disagreements with the official ideology brought me down faster than I could count one-two-three! In the Academy I was supposed to write the history of Estonian film, but I did not. What they wanted me to write made me sick! My heart rejected it! The communist world was already shaking. It was equally stupid to write that false history of so called Estonian film art, and maybe it was even more stupid not to write it.
Instead, I took the liberty to write — without proper political support — a book about the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the legend, the author and director of the cult film “Andrei Rublev.” The Soviet authorities banned the film for “an incorrect interpretation of Russian ancient history.” In that film, the false “approved” heroes were not taking heroic poses, or parading in counterfeit historic costumes across the screen. There were no film divas shedding crocodile tears for fallen heroes — there was only the misery and poverty of the Russian people, the horror of the Tartar conquest and a lonely monk who was painting his icons.
Here you see “The Trinity” by Andrei Rublev. The lucky ones who saw the film went through a religious experience, because the film was about their souls buried so deeply under the garbage of communist propaganda that they had forgotten that they had one. I was one of them.
Estonians, having more than enough reasons, hated Russians and never stopped fighting the Russian Goliath. I was told to stop writing reviews as a Russian, because the nation needed a leading Estonian film critic, not a Russian one. (I am a Russian national who spoke Estonian better than Russian, but now it did not matter anymore!) So, in that highly puzzling situation, I started a book about Tarkovsky’s films. The communist world was already shaking wildly, and a miracle happened and the book about the Tarkovsky films was published in Estonia!
However, the hard-liners were clawing their way back to power. (And they’re still clawing and digging!) The reprisal was fast and merciless. Many people suffered as a result of printing my book. My pain was that the book was not worth it! However, it firmly planted the seeds of my conflict with the authorities in 1980, and those flowers turned to be poisonous! In 1989 I found myself and Vladimir, my adopted son, on a hit list for God knows what for. The hardliners and many other “liners” did not care anymore. I received repeated, probably scripted, phone calls saying, “The traitor (?) has to die. First we kill your son in front of your eyes and then we kill you!” As a result of those threats, we escaped to Los Angeles. How? Read my book, “Death the Beginning.”
During our flight to New York the stewardess asked, “Tea or coffee?” I answered “yes” and prayed God that she would go away. But she did not; she kept asking, “Tea or coffee?” I went on answering, “Yes!” This was the level of my English when I arrived in the USA. Our financial back up was even more spectacularly meager — we had 15 dollars between two of us. Nevertheless, in ten years I wrote my first book in English “Death the Beginning,” which was accepted for sale by the Barnes and Noble bookstore chain. And Vladimir, my adopted son, graduated from Cal Poly as a professional American architect. In a way, we made it. America was our new homeland! But did we really make it? The straw was already broken when we started to crawl along it toward the top. You may ask what it have to do anything with what I am doing? It has, but I need another page for explaining this.