region:black sea

Suffering unseen: The dark truth behind wildlife tourism
▻https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/06/global-wildlife-tourism-social-media-causes-animal-suffering

I’ve come back to check on a baby. Just after dusk I’m in a car lumbering down a muddy road in the rain, past rows of shackled elephants, their trunks swaying. I was here five hours before, when the sun was high and hot and tourists were on elephants’ backs.

Walking now, I can barely see the path in the glow of my phone’s flashlight. When the wooden fence post of the stall stops me short, I point my light down and follow a current of rainwater across the concrete floor until it washes up against three large, gray feet. A fourth foot hovers above the surface, tethered tightly by a short chain and choked by a ring of metal spikes. When the elephant tires and puts her foot down, the spikes press deeper into her ankle.

Meena is four years and two months old, still a toddler as elephants go. Khammon Kongkhaw, her mahout, or caretaker, told me earlier that Meena wears the spiked chain because she tends to kick. Kongkhaw has been responsible for Meena here at Maetaman Elephant Adventure, near Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, since she was 11 months old. He said he keeps her on the spiked shackle only during the day and takes it off at night. But it’s night now.

I ask Jin Laoshen, the Maetaman staffer accompanying me on this nighttime visit, why her chain is still on. He says he doesn’t know.

Maetaman is one of many animal attractions in and around tourist-swarmed Chiang Mai. People spill out of tour buses and clamber onto the trunks of elephants that, at the prodding of their mahouts’ bullhooks (long poles with a sharp metal hook), hoist them in the air while cameras snap. Visitors thrust bananas toward elephants’ trunks. They watch as mahouts goad their elephants—some of the most intelligent animals on the planet—to throw darts or kick oversize soccer balls while music blares.

Meena is one of Maetaman’s 10 show elephants. To be precise, she’s a painter. Twice a day, in front of throngs of chattering tourists, Kongkhaw puts a paintbrush in the tip of her trunk and presses a steel nail to her face to direct her brushstrokes as she drags primary colors across paper. Often he guides her to paint a wild elephant in the savanna. Her paintings are then sold to tourists.

Meena’s life is set to follow the same trajectory as many of the roughly 3,800 captive elephants in Thailand and thousands more throughout Southeast Asia. She’ll perform in shows until she’s about 10. After that, she’ll become a riding elephant. Tourists will sit on a bench strapped to her back, and she’ll give several rides a day. When Meena is too old or sick to give rides—maybe at 55, maybe at 75—she’ll die. If she’s lucky, she’ll get a few years of retirement. She’ll spend most of her life on a chain in a stall.

Wildlife attractions such as Maetaman lure people from around the world to be with animals like Meena, and they make up a lucrative segment of the booming global travel industry. Twice as many trips are being taken abroad as 15 years ago, a jump driven partly by Chinese tourists, who spend far more on international travel than any other nationality.

Wildlife tourism isn’t new, but social media is setting the industry ablaze, turning encounters with exotic animals into photo-driven bucket-list toppers. Activities once publicized mostly in guidebooks now are shared instantly with multitudes of people by selfie-taking backpackers, tour-bus travelers, and social media “influencers” through a tap on their phone screens. Nearly all millennials (23- to 38-year-olds) use social media while traveling. Their selfies—of swims with dolphins, encounters with tigers, rides on elephants, and more—are viral advertising for attractions that tout up-close experiences with animals.

For all the visibility social media provides, it doesn’t show what happens beyond the view of the camera lens. People who feel joy and exhilaration from getting close to wild animals usually are unaware that many of the animals at such attractions live a lot like Meena, or worse.

Photographer Kirsten Luce and I set out to look behind the curtain of the thriving wildlife tourism industry, to see how animals at various attractions—including some that emphasize their humane care of animals—are treated once the selfie-taking crowds have gone.

After leaving Maetaman, we take a five-minute car ride up a winding hill to a property announced by a wooden plaque as “Elephant EcoValley: where elephants are in good hands.” There are no elephant rides here. No paint shows or other performances. Visitors can stroll through an open-air museum and learn about Thailand’s national animal. They can make herbal treats for the elephants and paper from elephant dung. They can watch elephants in a grassy, tree-ringed field.

EcoValley’s guest book is filled with praise from Australians, Danes, Americans—tourists who often shun elephant camps such as Maetaman because the rides and shows make them uneasy. Here, they can see unchained elephants and leave feeling good about supporting what they believe is an ethical establishment. What many don’t know is that EcoValley’s seemingly carefree elephants are brought here for the day from nearby Maetaman—and that the two attractions are actually a single business.

Meena was brought here once, but she tried to run into the forest. Another young elephant, Mei, comes sometimes, but today she’s at Maetaman, playing the harmonica in the shows. When she’s not doing that, or spending the day at EcoValley, she’s chained near Meena in one of Maetaman’s elephant stalls.

Meena Kalamapijit owns Maetaman as well as EcoValley, which she opened in November 2017 to cater to Westerners. She says her 56 elephants are well cared for and that giving rides and performing allow them to have necessary exercise. And, she says, Meena the elephant’s behavior has gotten better since her mahout started using the spiked chain.
Read MoreWildlife Watch
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We sit with Kalamapijit on a balcony outside her office, and she explains that when Westerners, especially Americans, stopped coming to Maetaman, she eliminated one of the daily shows to allot time for visitors to watch elephants bathe in the river that runs through the camp.

“Westerners enjoy bathing because it looks happy and natural,” she says. “But a Chinese tour agency called me and said, ‘Why are you cutting the show? Our customers love to see it, and they don’t care about bathing at all.’ ” Providing separate options is good for business, Kalamapijit says.

Around the world Kirsten and I watched tourists watching captive animals. In Thailand we also saw American men bear-hug tigers in Chiang Mai and Chinese brides in wedding gowns ride young elephants in the aqua surf on the island of Phuket. We watched polar bears in wire muzzles ballroom dancing across the ice under a big top in Russia and teenage boys on the Amazon River snapping selfies with baby sloths.

Most tourists who enjoy these encounters don’t know that the adult tigers may be declawed, drugged, or both. Or that there are always cubs for tourists to snuggle with because the cats are speed bred and the cubs are taken from their mothers just days after birth. Or that the elephants give rides and perform tricks without harming people only because they’ve been “broken” as babies and taught to fear the bullhook. Or that the Amazonian sloths taken illegally from the jungle often die within weeks of being put in captivity.

As we traveled to performance pits and holding pens on three continents and in the Hawaiian Islands, asking questions about how animals are treated and getting answers that didn’t always add up, it became clear how methodically and systematically animal suffering is concealed.

The wildlife tourism industry caters to people’s love of animals but often seeks to maximize profits by exploiting animals from birth to death. The industry’s economy depends largely on people believing that the animals they’re paying to watch or ride or feed are having fun too.

It succeeds partly because tourists—in unfamiliar settings and eager to have a positive experience—typically don’t consider the possibility that they’re helping to hurt animals. Social media adds to the confusion: Oblivious endorsements from friends and trendsetters legitimize attractions before a traveler ever gets near an animal.

There has been some recognition of social media’s role in the problem. In December 2017, after a National Geographic investigative report on harmful wildlife tourism in Amazonian Brazil and Peru, Instagram introduced a feature: Users who click or search one of dozens of hashtags, such as #slothselfie and #tigercubselfie, now get a pop-up warning that the content they’re viewing may be harmful to animals.

Everyone finds Olga Barantseva on Instagram. “Photographer from Russia. Photographing dreams,” her bio reads. She meets clients for woodland photo shoots with captive wild animals just outside Moscow.

For her 18th birthday, Sasha Belova treated herself to a session with Barantseva—and a pack of wolves. “It was my dream,” she says as she fidgets with her hair, which had been styled that morning. “Wolves are wild and dangerous.” The wolves are kept in small cages at a petting zoo when not participating in photo shoots.

The Kravtsov family hired Barantseva to take their first professional family photos—all five family members, shivering and smiling in the birch forest, joined by a bear named Stepan.

Barantseva has been photographing people and wild animals together for six years. She “woke up as a star,” she says, in 2015, when a couple of international media outlets found her online. Her audience has exploded to more than 80,000 followers worldwide. “I want to show harmony between people and animals,” she says.

On a raw fall day, under a crown of golden birch leaves on a hill that overlooks a frigid lake, two-and-a-half-year-old Alexander Levin, dressed in a hooded bumblebee sweater, timidly holds Stepan’s paw.

The bear’s owners, Yury and Svetlana Panteleenko, ply their star with food—tuna fish mixed with oatmeal—to get him to approach the boy. Snap: It looks like a tender friendship. The owners toss grapes to Stepan to get him to open his mouth wide. Snap: The bear looks as if he’s smiling.

The Panteleenkos constantly move Stepan, adjusting his paws, feeding him, and positioning Alexander as Barantseva, pink-haired, bundled in jeans and a parka, captures each moment. Snap: A photo goes to her Instagram feed. A boy and a bear in golden Russian woods—a picture straight out of a fairy tale. It’s a contemporary twist on a long-standing Russian tradition of exploiting bears for entertainment.

Another day in the same forest, Kirsten and I join 12 young women who have nearly identical Instagram accounts replete with dreamy photos of models caressing owls and wolves and foxes. Armed with fancy cameras but as yet modest numbers of followers, they all want the audience Barantseva has. Each has paid the Panteleenkos $760 to take identical shots of models with the ultimate prize: a bear in the woods.

Stepan is 26 years old, elderly for a brown bear, and can hardly walk. The Panteleenkos say they bought him from a small zoo when he was three months old. They say the bear’s work—a constant stream of photo shoots and movies—provides money to keep him fed.

A video on Svetlana Panteleenko’s Instagram account proclaims: “Love along with some great food can make anyone a teddy :-)”

And just like that, social media takes a single instance of local animal tourism and broadcasts it to the world.

When the documentary film Blackfish was released in 2013, it drew a swift and decisive reaction from the American public. Through the story of Tilikum, a distressed killer whale at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, the film detailed the miserable life orcas can face in captivity. Hundreds of thousands of outraged viewers signed petitions. Companies with partnership deals, such as Southwest Airlines, severed ties with SeaWorld. Attendance at SeaWorld’s water parks slipped; its stock nose-dived.

James Regan says what he saw in Blackfish upset him. Regan, honeymooning in Hawaii with his wife, Katie, is from England, where the country’s last marine mammal park closed permanently in 1993. I meet him at Dolphin Quest Oahu, an upscale swim-with-dolphins business on the grounds of the beachfront Kahala Hotel & Resort, just east of Honolulu. The Regans paid $225 each to swim for 30 minutes in a small group with a bottlenose dolphin. One of two Dolphin Quest locations in Hawaii, the facility houses six dolphins.

Bottlenose dolphins are the backbone of an industry that spans the globe. Swim-with-dolphins operations rely on captive-bred and wild-caught dolphins that live—and interact with tourists—in pools. The popularity of these photo-friendly attractions reflects the disconnect around dolphin experiences: People in the West increasingly shun shows that feature animals performing tricks, but many see swimming with captive dolphins as a vacation rite of passage.

Katie Regan has wanted to swim with dolphins since she was a child. Her husband laughs and says of Dolphin Quest, “They paint a lovely picture. When you’re in America, everyone is smiling.” But he appreciates that the facility is at their hotel, so they can watch the dolphins being fed and cared for. He brings up Blackfish again.

Katie protests: “Stop making my dream a horrible thing!”

Rae Stone, president of Dolphin Quest and a marine mammal veterinarian, says the company donates money to conservation projects and educates visitors about perils that marine mammals face in the wild. By paying for this entertainment, she says, visitors are helping captive dolphins’ wild cousins.

Stone notes that Dolphin Quest is certified “humane” by American Humane, an animal welfare nonprofit. (The Walt Disney Company, National Geographic’s majority owner, offers dolphin encounters on some vacation excursions and at an attraction in Epcot, one of its Orlando parks. Disney says it follows the animal welfare standards of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, a nonprofit that accredits more than 230 facilities worldwide.)

It’s a vigorous debate: whether even places with high standards, veterinarians on staff, and features such as pools filled with filtered ocean water can be truly humane for marine mammals.

Dolphin Quest’s Stone says yes.

Critics, including the Humane Society of the United States, which does not endorse keeping dolphins in captivity, say no. They argue that these animals have evolved to swim great distances and live in complex social groups—conditions that can’t be replicated in the confines of a pool. This helps explain why the National Aquarium, in Baltimore, announced in 2016 that its dolphins will be retired to a seaside sanctuary by 2020.

Some U.S. attractions breed their own dolphins because the nation has restricted dolphin catching in the wild since 1972. But elsewhere, dolphins are still being taken from the wild and turned into performers.

In China, which has no national laws on captive-animal welfare, dolphinariums with wild-caught animals are a booming business: There are now 78 marine mammal parks, and 26 more are under construction.

To have the once-in-a-lifetime chance to see rare Black Sea dolphins, people in the landlocked town of Kaluga, a hundred miles from Moscow, don’t have to leave their city. In the parking lot of the Torgoviy Kvartal shopping mall, next to a hardware store, is a white inflatable pop-up aquarium: the Moscow Traveling Dolphinarium. It looks like a children’s bouncy castle that’s been drained of its color.

Inside the puffy dome, parents buy their kids dolphin-shaped trinkets: fuzzy dolls and Mylar balloons, paper dolphin hats, and drinks in plastic dolphin tumblers. Families take their seats around a small pool. The venue is so intimate that even the cheapest seats, at nine dollars apiece, are within splashing distance.

“My kids are jumping for joy,” says a woman named Anya, motioning toward her two giddy boys, bouncing in their seats.

In the middle of the jubilant atmosphere, in water that seems much too shallow and much too murky, two dolphins swim listlessly in circles.

Russia is one of only a few countries (Indonesia is another) where traveling oceanariums exist. Dolphins and beluga whales, which need to be immersed in water to stay alive, are put in tubs on trucks and carted from city to city in a loop that usually ends when they die. These traveling shows are aboveboard: Russia has no laws that regulate how marine mammals should be treated in captivity.

The shows are the domestic arm of a brisk Russian global trade in dolphins and small whales. Black Sea bottlenose dolphins can’t be caught legally without a permit, but Russian fishermen can catch belugas and orcas under legal quotas in the name of science and education. Some belugas are sold legally to aquariums around the country. Russia now allows only a dozen or so orcas to be caught each year for scientific and educational purposes, and since April 2018, the government has cracked down on exporting them. But government investigators believe that Russian orcas—which can sell for millions—are being caught illegally for export to China.

Captive orcas, which can grow to 20 feet long and more than 10,000 pounds, are too big for the traveling shows that typically feature dolphins and belugas. When I contacted the owners of the Moscow Traveling Dolphinarium and another operation, the White Whale Show, in separate telephone calls to ask where their dolphins and belugas come from, both men, Sergey Kuznetsov and Oleg Belesikov, hung up on me.

Russia’s dozen or so traveling oceanariums are touted as a way to bring native wild animals to people who might never see the ocean.

“Who else if not us?” says Mikhail Olyoshin, a staffer at one traveling oceanarium. And on this day in Kaluga, as the dolphins perform tricks to American pop songs and lie on platforms for several minutes for photo ops, parents and children express the same sentiment: Imagine, dolphins, up close, in my hometown. The ocean on delivery.

Owners and operators of wildlife tourism attractions, from high-end facilities such as Dolphin Quest in Hawaii to low-end monkey shows in Thailand, say their animals live longer in captivity than wild counterparts because they’re safe from predators and environmental hazards. Show operators proudly emphasize that the animals under their care are with them for life. They’re family.

Alla Azovtseva, a longtime dolphin trainer in Russia, shakes her head.

“I don’t see any sense in this work. My conscience bites me. I look at my animals and want to cry,” says Azovtseva, who drives a red van with dolphins airbrushed on the side. At the moment, she’s training pilot whales to perform tricks at Moscow’s Moskvarium, one of Europe’s largest aquariums (not connected to the traveling dolphin shows). On her day off, we meet at a café near Red Square.

She says she fell in love with dolphins in the late 1980s when she read a book by John Lilly, the American neuroscientist who broke open our understanding of the animals’ intelligence. She has spent 30 years training marine mammals to do tricks. But along the way she’s grown heartsick from forcing highly intelligent, social creatures to live isolated, barren lives in small tanks.

“I would compare the dolphin situation with making a physicist sweep the street,” she says. “When they’re not engaged in performance or training, they just hang in the water facing down. It’s the deepest depression.”

What people don’t know about many aquarium shows in Russia, Azovtseva says, is that the animals often die soon after being put in captivity, especially those in traveling shows. And Azovtseva—making clear she’s referring to the industry at large in Russia and not the Moskvarium—says she knows many aquariums quietly and illegally replace their animals with new ones.

It’s been illegal to catch Black Sea dolphins in the wild for entertainment purposes since 2003, but according to Azovtseva, aquarium owners who want to increase their dolphin numbers quickly and cheaply buy dolphins poached there. Because these dolphins are acquired illegally, they’re missing the microchips that captive cetaceans in Russia are usually tagged with as a form of required identification.

Some aquariums get around that, she says, by cutting out dead dolphins’ microchips and implanting them into replacement dolphins.

“People are people,” Azovtseva says. “Once they see an opportunity, they exploit.” She says she can’t go on doing her work in the industry and that she’s decided to speak out because she wants people to know the truth about the origins and treatment of many of the marine mammals they love watching. We exchange a look—we both know what her words likely mean for her livelihood.

“I don’t care if I’m fired,” she says defiantly. “When a person has nothing to lose, she becomes really brave.”

I’m sitting on the edge of an infinity pool on the hilly Thai side of Thailand’s border with Myanmar, at a resort where rooms average more than a thousand dollars a night.

Out past the pool, elephants roam in a lush valley. Sitting next to me is 20-year-old Stephanie van Houten. She’s Dutch and French, Tokyo born and raised, and a student at the University of Michigan. Her cosmopolitan background and pretty face make for a perfect cocktail of aspiration—she’s exactly the kind of Instagrammer who makes it as an influencer. That is, someone who has a large enough following to attract sponsors to underwrite posts and, in turn, travel, wardrobes, and bank accounts. In 2018, brands—fashion, travel, tech, and more—spent an estimated $1.6 billion on social media advertising by influencers.

Van Houten has been here, at the Anantara Golden Triangle Elephant Camp & Resort, before. This time, in a fairly standard influencer-brand arrangement, she’ll have a picnic with elephants and post about it to her growing legion of more than 25,000 Instagram followers. In exchange, she gets hundreds of dollars off the nightly rate.

At Anantara the fields are green, and during the day at least, many of the resort’s 22 elephants are tethered on ropes more than a hundred feet long so they can move around and socialize. Nevertheless, they’re expected to let guests touch them and do yoga beside them.

After van Houten’s elephant picnic, I watch her edit the day’s hundreds of photos. She selects an image with her favorite elephant, Bo. She likes it, she says, because she felt a connection with Bo and thinks that will come across. She posts it at 9:30 p.m.—the time she estimates the largest number of her followers will be online. She includes a long caption, summing it up as “my love story with this incredible creature,” and the hashtag #stopelephantriding. Immediately, likes from followers stream in—more than a thousand, as well as comments with heart-eyed emoji.

Anantara is out of reach for anyone but the wealthy—or prominent influencers. Anyone else seeking a similar experience might do a Google search for, say, “Thailand elephant sanctuary.”

As tourist demand for ethical experiences with animals has grown, affordable establishments, often calling themselves “sanctuaries,” have cropped up purporting to offer humane, up-close elephant encounters. Bathing with elephants—tourists give them a mud bath, splash them in a river, or both—has become very popular. Many facilities portray baths as a benign alternative to elephant riding and performances. But elephants getting baths, like those that give rides and do tricks, will have been broken to some extent to make them obedient. And as long as bathing remains popular, places that offer it will need obedient elephants to keep their businesses going. 


In Ban Ta Klang, a tiny town in eastern Thailand, modest homes dot the crimson earth. In front of each is a wide, bamboo platform for sitting, sleeping, and watching television.

But the first thing I notice is the elephants. Some homes have one, others as many as five. Elephants stand under tarps or sheet metal roofs or trees. Some are together, mothers and babies, but most are alone. Nearly all the elephants wear ankle chains or hobbles—cuffs binding their front legs together. Dogs and chickens weave among the elephants’ legs, sending up puffs of red dust.

Ban Ta Klang—known as Elephant Village—is ground zero in Thailand for training and trading captive elephants.

“House elephants,” Sri Somboon says, gesturing as he turns down his TV. Next to his outdoor platform, a two-month-old baby elephant runs around his mother. Somboon points across the road to the third elephant in his charge, a three-year-old male tethered to a tree. He’s wrenching his head back and forth and thrashing his trunk around. It looks as if he’s going out of his mind.

He’s in the middle of his training, Somboon says, and is getting good at painting. He’s already been sold, and when his training is finished, he’ll start working at a tourist camp down south.

Ban Ta Klang and the surrounding area, part of Surin Province, claim to be the source of more than half of Thailand’s 3,800 captive elephants. Long before the flood of tourists, it was the center of the elephant trade; the animals were caught in the wild and tamed for use transporting logs. Now, every November, hundreds of elephants from here are displayed, bought, and sold in the province’s main town, Surin.

One evening I sit with Jakkrawan Homhual and Wanchai Sala-ngam. Both 33, they’ve been best friends since childhood. About half the people in Ban Ta Klang who care for elephants, including Homhual, don’t own them. They’re paid a modest salary by a rich owner to breed and train baby elephants for entertainment. As night falls, thousands of termites swarm us, attracted to the single bulb hanging above the bamboo platform. Our conversation turns to elephant training.

Phajaan is the traditional—and brutal—days- or weeks-long process of breaking a young elephant’s spirit. It has long been used in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia to tame wild elephants, which still account for many of the country’s captives. Under phajaan, elephants are bound with ropes, confined in tight wooden structures, starved, and beaten repeatedly with bullhooks, nails, and hammers until their will is crushed. The extent to which phajaan persists in its harshest form is unclear. Since 2012, the government has been cracking down on the illegal import of elephants taken from the forests of neighboring Myanmar, Thailand’s main source of wild-caught animals.

I ask the men how baby elephants born in captivity are broken and trained.

When a baby is about two years old, they say, mahouts tie its mother to a tree and slowly drag the baby away. Once separated, the baby is confined. Using a bullhook on its ear, they teach the baby to move: left, right, turn, stop. To teach an elephant to sit, Sala-ngam says, “we tie up the front legs. One mahout will use a bullhook at the back. The other will pull a rope on the front legs.” He adds: “To train the elephant, you need to use the bullhook so the elephant will know.”

Humans identify suffering in other humans by universal signs: People sob, wince, cry out, put voice to their hurt. Animals have no universal language for pain. Many animals don’t have tear ducts. More creatures still—prey animals, for example—instinctively mask symptoms of pain, lest they appear weak to predators. Recognizing that a nonhuman animal is in pain is difficult, often impossible.

But we know that animals feel pain. All mammals have a similar neuroanatomy. Birds, reptiles, and amphibians all have pain receptors. As recently as a decade ago, scientists had collected more evidence that fish feel pain than they had for neonatal infants. A four-year-old human child with spikes pressing into his flesh would express pain by screaming. A four-year-old elephant just stands there in the rain, her leg jerking in the air.

Of all the silently suffering animals I saw in pools and pens around the world, two in particular haunt me: an elephant and a tiger.

They lived in the same facility, Samut Prakan Crocodile Farm and Zoo, about 15 miles south of Bangkok. The elephant, Gluay Hom, four years old, was kept under a stadium. The aging tiger, Khai Khem, 22, spent his days on a short chain in a photo studio. Both had irrefutable signs of suffering: The emaciated elephant had a bent, swollen leg hanging in the air and a large, bleeding sore at his temple. His eyes were rolled back in his head. The tiger had a dental abscess so severe that the infection was eating through the bottom of his jaw.

When I contacted the owner of the facility, Uthen Youngprapakorn, to ask about these animals, he said the fact that they hadn’t died proved that the facility was caring for them properly. He then threatened a lawsuit.

Six months after Kirsten and I returned from Thailand, we asked Ryn Jirenuwat, our Bangkok-based Thai interpreter, to check on Gluay Hom and Khai Khem. She went to Samut Prakan and watched them for hours, sending photos and video. Gluay Hom was still alive, still standing in the same stall, leg still bent at an unnatural angle. The elephants next to him were skin and bones. Khai Khem was still chained by his neck to a hook in the floor. He just stays in his dark corner, Jirenuwat texted, and when he hears people coming, he twists on his chain and turns his back to them.

“Like he just wants to be swallowed by the wall.”

#tourisme #nos_ennemis_les_bêtes

Ten sailors dead, 14 saved after two ships catch fire near Crimea | Reuters
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crimea-ship-idUSKCN1PF1PX

https://s2.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20190121&t=2&i=1348300293&w=1200&r=LYNXNPEF0K1F4#.jpg

Ten crew members have been found dead and 14 have been rescued after two ships caught fire in the Kerch Strait near Crimea, Russia’s transport ministry said on Monday, with a rescue operation still underway.

The ministry said earlier on Monday that crew members were jumping into the sea to escape the blaze, which probably broke out during a ship-to-ship fuel transhipment.

Both ships were under the Tanzanian flag - Candy (Venice) and Maestro - and had a combined total of 31 crew members. Of them, 16 were Turkish citizens and 15 from India, it said.

Russia’s Gazprom says offshore part of TurkStream is complete | Reuters
▻https://uk.reuters.com/article/turkey-russia-gas-pipeline-idUKL8N1XU3N5

Construction of the offshore part of the TurkStream pipeline that will carry Russian gas across the Black Sea to Turkey has been completed, Russian gas producer Gazprom said on Monday.

TurkStream is part of Moscow’s efforts to bypass Ukraine as a gas transit route to Europe, which imports around a third of its gas needs from Gazprom.

“Projects of this kind and this project in particular are not directed against the interests of anyone. Projects of this kind are purely creative,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said as he and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan attended an official ceremony in Istanbul.

Work will now focus onshore and is on track to be completed by the end of 2019, he said.

Gazprom is building the TurkStream in two lines, each with a capacity of 15.75 billion cubic metres of gas per year. The first will supply Turkey and the second southern Europe.

Turkey is almost completely reliant on imports to meet its energy needs. A crippling currency crisis which has seen the lira plummet has increased costs, prompting energy companies to hike consumer prices.

Turkey’s state pipeline operator Botas will build the 69-km section of TurkStream which will carry natural gas from the coast to its distribution centre in Luleburgaz in northwestern Turkey, Energy Minister Fatih Donmez told private broadcaster NTV, adding he expected this to be completed in 2019.

A 145-km section of pipeline from the distribution centre to the border will be constructed by Botas and Gazprom, he said.

World’s oldest intact shipwreck discovered in Black Sea | Science | The Guardian
►https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/23/oldest-intact-shipwreck-thought-to-be-ancient-greek-discovered-at-botto

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1cb1179ad6b0ff0d187a4c94e7f7484a91b81839/22_176_4072_2443/master/4072.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&s=72e825823e9532b5bdaf68712dba78da

Archaeologists have found what they believe to be the world’s oldest intact shipwreck at the bottom of the Black Sea where it appears to have lain undisturbed for more than 2,400 years.

The 23-metre (75ft) vessel, thought to be ancient Greek, was discovered with its mast, rudders and rowing benches all present and correct just over a mile below the surface. A lack of oxygen at that depth preserved it, the researchers said.

–—

Black Sea ship: ’World’s oldest intact wreck’ found - BBC News
►https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45951132

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A Greek merchant ship dating back more than 2,400 years has been found lying on its side off the Bulgarian coast.

The 23m (75ft) wreck, found in the Black Sea by an Anglo-Bulgarian team, is being hailed as officially the world’s oldest known intact shipwreck.

The researchers were stunned to find the merchant vessel closely resembled in design a ship that decorated ancient Greek wine vases.

The rudder, rowing benches and even the contents of its hold remain intact.

#bateau #épave #mer_noire #archéologie #grèce_antique

Ancient shipwrecks found in Greek waters tell tale of trade routes | Reuters
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-greece-ancient-shipwrecks/ancient-shipwrecks-found-in-greek-waters-tell-tale-of-trade-routes-idUSKCN1

Archaeologists in Greece have discovered at least 58 shipwrecks, many laden with antiquities, in what they say may be the largest concentration of ancient wrecks ever found in the Aegean and possibly the whole of the Mediterranean.

The wrecks lie in the small island archipelago of Fournoi, in the Eastern Aegean, and span a huge period from ancient Greece right through to the 20th century. Most are dated to the Greek, Roman and Byzantine eras.

Although shipwrecks can be seen together in the Aegean, until now such a large number have not been found together.

 Experts say they weave an exciting tale of how ships full of cargo traveling through the Aegean, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea met their fate in sudden storms and surrounded by rocky cliffs in the area.

“The excitement is difficult to describe, I mean, it was just incredible. We knew that we had stumbled upon something that was going to change the history books,” said underwater archaeologist and co-director of the Fournoi survey project Dr. Peter Campbell of the RPM Nautical Foundation.

The foundation is collaborating on the project with Greece’s Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, which is conducting the research.

When the international team began the underwater survey in 2015, they were astounded to find 22 shipwrecks that year. With their latest finds that number has climbed to 58, and the team believe there are even more secrets lying on the seabed below.

“I would call it, probably, one of the top archaeological discoveries of the century in that we now have a new story to tell of a navigational route that connected the ancient Mediterranean,” Campbell told Reuters.

 The vessels and their contents paint a picture of ships carrying goods on routes from the Black Sea, Greece, Asia Minor, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Cyprus, the Levant, Egypt and north Africa.

The team has raised more than 300 antiquities from the shipwrecks, particularly amphorae, giving archaeologists rare insight into where goods were being transported around the Mediterranean.

Ukraine’s Ports Show Struggles to Join Global Economy - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-20/ukraine-s-ports-show-struggles-to-join-global-economy

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Gleaming silos, towering container cranes and hulking cargo ships docked at quaysides in Europe’s biggest corn and sunflower producer should be a symbol of an agricultural exporting powerhouse.

Instead, it’s a cautionary tale of how Ukraine may squander another opportunity to plug the former Soviet republic into the global economy and give safe harbor to the world’s biggest investors.

It’s not just Ukraine’s increasingly forgotten four-year civil conflict that’s an issue here along the Black Sea. It’s also about whether authorities are committed to modernizing a nation that sits astride Russia and the European Union. The risk is that it falls back to the cronyism and corruption that has plagued the country even after two post-communist uprisings.

The government is moving ahead with a plan to complete the privatization of its maritime cargo handling system, which now handles 66 percent of all goods exported. While the land underlying 13 separate ports will remain state-owned, the government is pushing a to hand over the final 25 percent of cargo handling to professional stevedores — or, local handlers fear, the nation’s well-connected businessmen.

The running of the ports is “worse than an old Soviet pig farm,” said Oleksiy Vadaturskyy, the owner of Nibulon Ltd., a central Ukrainian farming company that handles its own grains for export in the port city of Mykolayiv.
[…]
The first ports targeted for sale will be Olvia and Kherson, with Yuznyi and Chornomorsk coming later.

Pour ceux qui se demandent un stevedore anglais, c’est un aconier français…

The History of Civilization Is a History of Border Walls

When I joined my first archaeological dig at a site near Hadrian’s Wall in 2002, walls never appeared in the nightly news. Britain was still many years away from planning a barrier near the opening of the Chunnel in Calais. Saudi Arabia hadn’t yet encircled itself with high-tech barricades. Israel hadn’t started reinforcing its Gaza border fence with concrete. Kenya wasn’t seeking Israel’s help in the construction of a 440-mile barrier against Somalia. And the idea that India might someday send workers high into the Himalayas to construct border walls that look down on clouds still seemed as preposterous as the notion that Ecuador might commence construction on a 950-mile concrete wall along its border with Peru.

No one chatted about walls while we cut through sod to expose the buried remains of an ancient fortress in northern Britain. I doubt that anyone was chatting about walls anywhere. The old fortress, on the other hand, was generally considered the crown jewel of British archaeology. For more than 30 years, sharp-eyed excavators at the Roman fort of Vindolanda had been finding writing tablets — thin slivers of wood upon which Roman soldiers had written letters, duty rosters, inventories, and other assorted jottings. At first, the tablets had represented something of a technical challenge; their spectral writing faded almost immediately upon exposure to air, almost as if written in invisible ink. But when the writings were recovered through infrared photography, a tremendous satisfaction came from the discovery that Roman soldiers complained about shortages of beer while the wives of their commanders planned birthday parties. The Romans, it turned out, were a lot like us.

Archaeology, even at such a special place, was tiring business, but after work I enjoyed taking hikes along the wall. It was beautiful countryside — well lit by an evening sun that lingered late during the Northumbrian summer — and as I ambled over the grassy hills, occasionally enjoying the company of sheep, I sometimes imagined I was a lonely Roman soldier, stationed at the end of the world, scanning the horizon for barbarians while I awaited a resupply of beer. I’m ashamed to say that I took no detailed notes on the wall itself. It made for beautiful photographs, the way it stretched languidly over the countryside, but my real interest lay in other things: the Roman soldiers, the barbarians, the letters. If anything I saw in Britain was to hold any significance for my research, it seemed obvious that I would find it in the wet gray clay of Vindolanda. There I hoped only to discern tiny clues about a particular period of Roman history. Such are the modest goals of the academic. For the duration of my stay, my focus was on the clay. All the while, I was standing right next to a piece of a much bigger story, a fragment of the past that was about to rise up from its ancient slumber to dominate contemporary politics on two continents. I was leaning against it, resting my hand on it, posing for pictures by it. I just didn’t see it.

It was my interest in the barbarians that finally opened my eyes to the historical importance of walls. The barbarians were, in the main, inhabitants of every North African or Eurasian wasteland — the steppes, the deserts, the mountains. Civilized folk had erected barriers to exclude them in an astonishing array of countries: Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Iran, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Britain, Algeria, Libya, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Peru, China, and Korea, to give only a partial list. Yet somehow this fact had entirely escaped the notice of historians. Not a single textbook observed the nearly universal correlation between civilization and walls. It remained standard even for specialists to remark that walls were somehow unique to Chinese history, if not unique to Chinese culture — a stereotype that couldn’t possibly be any less true.

By some cruel irony, the mere concept of walls now divides people more thoroughly than any structure of brick or stone.

The reemergence of border walls in contemporary political debates made for an even more surprising revelation. Like most people my age, I had watched the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 with great excitement. To many of us, it looked like the beginning of a new era, heralded by no less towering an international figure than David Hasselhoff, whose concert united both halves of Berlin in inexplicable rapture. More than a quarter-century has passed since then, and if it had once seemed that walls had become a thing of the past, that belief has proven sorely wrong.

Border walls have experienced a conspicuous revival in the 21st century. Worldwide, some 70 barriers of various sorts currently stand guard. Some exist to prevent terrorism, others as obstacles to mass migration or the flow of illegal drugs. Nearly all mark national borders. By some cruel irony, the mere concept of walls now divides people more thoroughly than any structure of brick or stone. For every person who sees a wall as an act of oppression, there is always another urging the construction of newer, higher, and longer barriers. The two sides hardly speak to each other.

As things turned out, it was the not the beer or the birthday parties that connected the past to the present in northern England. It was the wall. We can almost imagine it now as a great stone timeline, inhabited on one end by ancients, on the other by moderns, but with both always residing on the same side facing off against an unseen enemy. If I couldn’t see that in 2002, it was only because we were then still living in an anomalous stage in history and had somehow lost our instinct for something that has nearly always been a part of our world.

How important have walls been in the history of civilization? Few civilized peoples have ever lived outside them. As early as the 10th millennium BC, the builders of Jericho encircled their city, the world’s first, with a rampart. Over time, urbanism and agriculture spread from Jericho and the Levant into new territories: Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Balkans, and beyond. Walls inevitably followed. Everywhere farmers settled, they fortified their villages. They chose elevated sites and dug ditches to enclose their homes. Entire communities pitched in to make their villages secure. A survey of prehistoric Transylvanian farming villages determined that some 1,400 to 1,500 cubic meters of earth typically had to be moved just to create an encircling ditch — an effort that would have required the labor of 60 men for 40 days. Subsequently, those ditches were lined with stone and bolstered by palisades. If a community survived long enough, it might add flanking towers. These were the first steps toward walls.

The creators of the first civilizations descended from generations of wall builders. They used their newfound advantages in organization and numbers to build bigger walls. More than a few still survive. We can estimate their heights, their thicknesses, their volumes, and their lengths. But the numbers can only tell us so much. We will always learn more by examining the people who built the walls or the fear that led to their construction.

And what about these fears? Were civilizations — and walls — created only by unusually fearful peoples? Or did creating civilization cause people to become fearful? Such questions turn out to be far more important than we’ve ever realized.

Since 2002, I’ve had ample time to reflect on the Roman soldiers who once guarded Hadrian’s Wall. They certainly never struck me as afraid of anything. Then again, they weren’t exactly Roman, either. They came chiefly from foreign lands, principally Belgium and Holland, which were in those days still as uncivilized as the regions north of the wall. Everything they knew of building and writing, they had learned in the service of Rome.

As for the Romans, they preferred to let others fight their battles. They had become the definitive bearers of civilization and as such were the target of a familiar complaint: that they had lost their edge. Comfortable behind their city walls and their foreign guards, they had grown soft. They were politicians and philosophers, bread makers and blacksmiths, anything but fighters.

The Roman poet Ovid knew a thing or two about the soft life, but he also had the unusual experience of learning what life was like for Rome’s frontier troops. The latter misfortune came as a consequence of his having offended the emperor Augustus. The offense was some peccadillo — Ovid never divulges the details — compounded by his having penned a rather scandalous book on the art of seduction. “What is the theme of my song?” he asked puckishly, in verse. “Nothing that’s very far wrong.” Augustus disagreed. Reading Ovid’s little love manual, the moralistic emperor saw plenty of wrong. He probably never even made it to the section where Ovid raved about what a great ruler he was. Augustus banished the poet from Rome, exiling him to Tomis, a doomed city on the coast of the Black Sea, 60-odd miles south of the Danube.

Tomis was a hardscrabble sort of place, a former Greek colony already some 600 years old by the time of Ovid’s exile in the first century AD and no shinier for the wear. Its distinguishing characteristics were exactly two: First, it was about as far from Rome as one could be sent. Second, it lay perilously close to some of Rome’s fiercest enemies, in an area that didn’t yet have a border wall. Like northern Britain, the region of Tomis would one day receive its share of border walls, but in Ovid’s day, the only barriers to invasion were the fortifications around the city itself.

Ovid suffered in his new home. It was one thing to live in a walled city, but quite another to be completely confined within those walls. In his letters to Rome, Ovid complained that the farmers of Tomis couldn’t even venture out onto their fields. On the rare occasion when a peasant dared to visit his plot, he guided the plow with one hand while carrying weapons in another. Even the shepherds wore helmets.

Fear permeated everyday life in Tomis. Even in times of peace, wrote Ovid, the dread of war loomed. The city was, for all intents and purposes, under perpetual siege. Ovid likened the townspeople to a timid stag caught by bears or a lamb surrounded by wolves.

Occasionally, Ovid reminisced on his former life in the capital, where he’d lived free from fear. He wistfully recalled the amenities of Rome — the forums, the temples, and the marble theaters; the porticoes, gardens, pools, and canals; above all, the cornucopia of literature at hand. The contrast with his new circumstances was complete. At Tomis, there was nothing but the clash and clang of weapons. Ovid imagined that he might at least content himself with gardening, if only he weren’t afraid to step outside. The enemy was quite literally at the gates, separated only by the thickness of the city’s wall. Barbarian horsemen circled Tomis. Their deadly arrows, which Ovid unfailingly reminds us had been dipped in snake venom, made pincushions of the roofs in the city.

The birth of walls set human societies on divergent paths, one leading to self-indulgent poetry, the other to taciturn militarism.

There remained a final indignity for Ovid: the feeble, middle-aged author was pressed into service in defense of Tomis. As a youth, Ovid had avoided military service. There was no shame for shirkers back in Rome, a city replete with peaceniks and civilians. Now aging, Ovid had finally been forced to carry a sword, shield, and helmet. When the guard from the lookout signaled a raid, the poet donned his armor with shaking hands. Here was a true Roman, afraid to step out from behind his fortifications and hopelessly overwhelmed by the responsibility of defending them.

From time to time, a Chinese poet would find himself in a situation much like Ovid’s. Stationed at some lonely outpost on the farthest reaches of the empire, the Chinese, too, longed for home while dreading the nearness of the barbarians. “In the frontier towns, you will have sad dreams at night,” wrote one. “Who wants to hear the barbarian pipe played to the moon?” Sometimes they meditated on the story of the Chinese princess who drowned herself in a river rather than cross beyond the wall. Even Chinese generals lamented the frontier life.

Oddly, none of these sentiments appear in the letters written by the Roman soldiers at Vindolanda. Transplanted to a rainy land far from home, they grumbled at times about the beer supply but had nothing to say about shaky hands or sad dreams. It was as if these barbarian-turned-Roman auxiliaries had come from another world, where homesickness and fear had been banished. Perhaps they had.

Almost anytime we examine the past and seek out the people most like us — those such as Ovid or the Chinese poets; people who built cities, knew how to read, and generally carried out civilian labor — we find them enclosed behind walls of their own making. Civilization and walls seem to have gone hand in hand. Beyond the walls, we find little with which we can identify — warriors mostly, of the sort we might hire to patrol the walls. The outsiders are mostly anonymous, except when they become notorious.

The birth of walls set human societies on divergent paths, one leading to self-indulgent poetry, the other to taciturn militarism. But the first path also pointed to much more — science, mathematics, theater, art — while the other brought its followers only to a dead end, where a man was nothing except a warrior and all labor devolved upon the women.

No invention in human history played a greater role in creating and shaping civilization than walls. Without walls, there could never have been an Ovid, and the same can be said for Chinese scholars, Babylonian mathematicians, or Greek philosophers. Moreover, the impact of walls wasn’t limited to the early phases of civilization. Wall building persisted for most of history, climaxing spectacularly during a 1,000-year period when three large empires — Rome, China, and Sasanid Persia — erected barriers that made the geopolitical divisions of the Old World all but permanent.

The collapse of those walls influenced world history almost as profoundly as their creation, by leading to the eclipse of one region, the stagnation of another, and the rise of a third. When the great border walls were gone, leaving only faint traces on the landscape, they left indelible lines on our maps — lines that have even today not yet been obscured by modern wars or the jockeying of nations for resources. Today, a newer set of walls, rising up on four continents, has the potential to remake the world yet again.

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Russian navy put on high alert off Ukraine coast : sources | Reuters
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-soccer-worldcup-russia-ukraine-milita/russian-navy-put-on-high-alert-off-ukraine-coast-sources-idUSKBN1JA2BS

Sources close to the Russian military said on Thursday that Russian naval forces in the Black Sea had been put on heightened alert to discourage Ukraine from trying to disrupt the soccer World Cup as the tournament got under way.

However, the Defence Ministry itself dismissed the reports, saying in a statement: “The forces of the Black Sea Fleet are working in routine mode. No measures to put (them) on high combat alert have taken place.”

Reuters was not able to verify a Ukrainian build-up independently, and there was no confirmation of that from officials in Kiev.

One of the military sources said there were concerns that Ukraine was building up its military presence in the area as a “provocation” during the tournament.

Three sources said Russia’s forces around the Black Sea Crimea peninsula had been put on a state of high combat readiness. Two of them said it was linked to the tournament.

Trois sources russes insiders, longuement rapportées, pas de vérification indépendante, même pas côté ukrainien…

Comment qu’c’est déjà ?
« toute allégation ou imputation d’un fait dépourvu d’éléments vérifiables de nature à rendre l’information vraisemblable »
ah non, ça c’est le projet initial, le dépourvu d’éléments vérifiables est tombé, sans doute parce que trop facilement … vérifiable : Reuters lui-même l’annonce. Actuellement, c’est :
« toute allégation ou imputation d’un fait, inexacte ou trompeuse, constitue une fausse information »

Vous en pensez quoi, M’dame la juge ?

Is the ’Bulgarian Stream’ on its way?

▻http://www.balkaneu.com//is-the-bulgarian-stream-on-its-way

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Turbulence is triggered by the statement of the President of Bulgaria, Rumen Radev, as recorded by Kommersant newspaper.

According to him, both Bulgaria and Russia will only benefit from the ’resurrection’ of the rejected South Stream pipeline, which was intended to be the counterweight to the Nord Stream pipeline and to feed the Balkans and SE Europe more widely with Russian natural gas.

If its revival is not feasible, it could very well, he argued, build a submarine pipeline under the Black Sea that will directly connect Russia with Bulgaria, irrespective of the Turkish Stream pipeline, which already links Russia with Turkey.

#gaz #guerre_du_gaz #bulgarie #russie #gazprom #nabucco #mer_noie #crimée

Gregory Klimov. The Terror Machine. Chapter 14
▻http://g-klimov.info/klimov-pp-e/ETM14.htm

The Dialectical Cycle

In the steaming heat of the late summer of 1946 Karlshorst lived its normal life. In all the S. M. A. administrations and departments there was feverish activity. In the rush of work the officers with gold epaulettes forgot that Karlshorst was only a remote island surrounded with a foreign and hostile element. But when the time came for them to go on leave and return to the homeland they grew more conscious of the fact that far away to the east was an enormous country whose interests they were called on to defend outside its frontiers.

Letters from the Soviet Union reported an unusual drought all over European Russia. Fears were being openly expressed for the harvest. The small allotments and market gardens, which provided produce for the great masses of the people, were withering in the sun. People stared anxiously into the sky and feared that they were in for a famine still worse than that experienced during the war. Letters from home sounded desperate, hopeless.

A year had passed since my arrival in Berlin to work in the Soviet Military Administration. I was due for leave at the end of the summer. I could shake the dust of Berlin from my feet and relax at home for six weeks.

Andrei Kovtun took his leave at the same time as I, and we agreed to travel together. We decided to stop in Moscow for a time, then to visit our hometown in the south, and to finish our holiday somewhere on the Black Sea coast. Andrei insisted on organizing our leave so as to spend it largely surrounded by memories of our youth.

At the Berlin Schlesische station Andrei, relying on his M. V. D. uniform, went to see the military commandant, and quickly came back with two second-class tickets. His foresight was amply justified. All the carriages were packed. The majority of the travelers was taking a mass of baggage with them, and refused to be parted from it; they did not trust the baggage cars. Andrei and I each had two trunks filled mainly with presents for relations and acquaintances.

Our train arrived at Brest without adventure, though the Soviet military trains running between Berlin and Moscow often came under fire and even attacks from Polish nationalists hiding in the forests. The first check of documents and baggage took place at the Soviet frontier post in Brest, where we transferred to another train. The M. V. D. frontier guards made a special point of thoroughly searching the baggage of demobilized military men, looking for weapons which officers and men might be taking home as trophies.

Just in front of us a frontier-guard lieutenant checked the documents of a captain going on leave. “Why didn’t you leave your service weapon behind, Comrade Captain?” he asked.

“I received no instructions to do so,” the captain answered with a shrug of annoyance.

“On arrival at your destination you must hand over your pistol to the local commandatura when you register,” the lieutenant said as he returned the documents.

“That’s peacetime conditions for you!” the captain muttered as we left the control-point office. “Everybody’s afraid of something or other.”

While waiting for the Moscow train Andrei and I sat in the waiting room. Here there were many officers in Polish uniform, including the Polish square military caps. They were all talking in Russian, resorting to Polish only for swearing. They were officers of Marshal Rokossovsky’s Soviet forces stationed in Poland and dressed in Polish uniforms. Some of the Russian officers returning from Berlin fell into conversation with them.

“Well, how are things with you in Germany?” an officer with an unmistakable Siberian accent and with a Polish eagle in his cap asked a lieutenant who had come from Dresden. “D’you find the Germans a handful?”

“Not in the least,” the lieutenant answered casually. “They’re a disciplined people. Tell them they mustn’t, and they don’t. At first we thought we’d have to deal with unrest and even attempts on our lives. Nothing of the sort!”

“You don’t say!” The fellow from Siberia shook his head, obviously astonished. “But our ’gentlemen’ give us more than we bargain for. Not a night passes without someone being knocked off or shot. And this chicken is of no help whatever” - he pointed to the eagle in his cap.

“You don’t know how to treat them!” the lieutenant said with a hint of superiority.

“It isn’t so simple as that!” another Soviet officer in Polish uniform intervened. “During the war years Rokossovsky had sixteen expressions of Stalin’s thanks in orders of the day, but during his one year in Poland he has had twenty censures! All because of the Poles. They shoot at you round corners, and you aren’t allowed to raise a finger against them, otherwise you’ve had it! Court-martial for you. That’s politics!” He gave a deep sigh.

Shortly after the train for Moscow had started our documents were checked again, this time in the carriage. We had traveled only a few hours when the procedure was repeated a second time.

Andrei sat silent in a corner seat, taking no notice of what went on around him, sunk deep in thought. A passenger glanced in, noticed the M. V. D. officer’s uniform, and pretended he had made a mistake, and went to look for a seat elsewhere. Even in the second class, where every traveler had a Party ticket, people preferred to keep a respectable distance between them and the M. V. D.

Towards evening Andrei livened up a little - he had not uttered a word for a long time. We began to talk about the past. Gradually his reminiscences turned to Halina. I sat listening in astonishment. Evidently he had been thinking of her all the time, but only now did he openly talk about her. Time and distance had blunted his feelings a little, but now his heart was burning once more with that same former fire.

The story of Andrei’s pre-war relations with Halina was somewhat unusual. She was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, with a pure and exalted quality in her beauty. Above all, her character was in perfect harmony with her appearance. Andrei worshipped her. But for a long time she was indifferent to his attentions and did not notice his slavish devotion. Then a strong friendship developed between them. Possibly his sacrifice and devotion won her, or perhaps she felt that his love was different from other young men’s flattering attentions.

Their acquaintances all thought this friendship queer; the contrast between his angular figure and her spiritual beauty was too obvious. Nobody could imagine what bound them to each other. Again and again her girl friends reduced her to tears, for they took every opportunity of pointing out Andrei’s defects. His comrades openly congratulated him on his ’undeserved good fortune’.

More than once this sort of thing led to their separating for a time. And then Andrei had no rest. He wandered like a shade behind her, not daring to go up to her, yet lacking the strength to turn away. Thus they went on, all but inseparable, down to the outbreak of war. The war flung him into the partisans and directed his unbridled emotions in another direction. The town in which she was living was soon overrun by German troops, and they completely lost contact with each other.

“We’re continually striving towards something,” he now said abruptly. "We strive for power, for fame, for distinction. But that is all outside us. And when you come to a certain point you realize that all the time you’ve only been giving out from yourself. And you ask yourself: what have you gained for it all?

“I’ve got a strange feeling. Putting aside everything else and thinking only of myself, I get the impression that all I’ve done in my struggle to climb higher has been for Halina’s sake. Now I shall lay this uniform and these orders at her feet.”

He ran his eyes over his perfectly fitting uniform, brushed a speck of dust from the blue riding breeches, and said dreamily:

“Now Halina has graduated as an engineer; she’s living in Moscow, she has work worthy of her, and a comfortable home. And what more can any woman achieve today? And now, to complete it all, a major in the State Security Service will turn up as a guard and defender of her well being. Don’t you think that’s quite a logical conclusion? And now, old friend, I’m hoping that life will repay me with interest for everything.” He clapped his hand down on my knee, then rose and stared through the window into the darkness ahead, as though he hoped to discern what fate had in store for him.

I had noticed before that he had rather queer ideas of his position with regard to Halina. He had put all his ardour into his ambitions and had received no satisfaction from life in return; on the contrary, he was tortured by his situation, in which he was compelled to act against his own convictions. And so he had subconsciously begun to seek for some compromise with life, he had begun to convince himself that his old love and the happiness of married life would fill the void in his soul. To meet Halina again had become an obsession with him; he thought of it as the miracle, which would bring him salvation.

“D’you know what?” He turned round sharply. “I simply must get hold of a bottle of vodka.”

“But you don’t drink.”

“It’s for you,” he replied abruptly. “I want everybody round me to be jolly. Damn it all, I’m not going to a funeral, I’m going to a wedding!”

I tried to dissuade him. “So you want to insult me? Is that it?” he demanded. I could only hope that he was unlikely to find vodka at that time of night.

At the very next station he went out; a few minutes later he returned with a bulging pocket. “Obtained in perfect agreement with regulations!” he grinned. “The station commandant had confiscated it from someone, and I confiscated it from him. The raspberry capband has its uses!”

He filled the glass so full that the vodka overflowed. “I’m all on fire inside, and there’s something lacking,” he said. “You drink for me. You know, there are times when I feel an emptiness inside me almost physically.” He sat with his feet planted widely apart, his hands on his knees. “Sometimes I think about God, and I envy those who believe in Him. It’s better to believe in a non-existent but infallible God than in the scoundrelly pretenders of this earth.”

“When did you go to church last?” I asked.

"Some twenty years ago. My father took me. When I was a boy I knew all the prayers by heart.

“Yes, the soul of a man is not a piece of litmus paper,” he sighed. “You’ve got no means of deciding straight off whether it will be red or blue. In my damned job one often has to think about a human soul. I’ve developed quite a psychosis: I’m looking for people who believe in something.”

All around us there was silence. Our native land sped towards us.

The train arrived in Moscow next day. We went into the sunlit square outside the station and stopped to look about us. The trams clattered past, cars drove by silently, and people were hurrying about their affairs. All the feverish life of the capital city was opened before us. It was all so everyday, so simple. We felt as though we had never left Moscow.

Thanks to his M. V. D. uniform and the gold star of a ’Hero of the Soviet Union’ Andrei easily obtained a room for two in the Staraya-Moskovskaya Hotel on the farther side of the river Moskva, right opposite the Kremlin. Our window looked out on to the river, and beyond we could see the new Stone Bridge, the rows of trees beginning to turn yellow along the Kremlin Embankment, the pointed towers and gold cupolas behind the Kremlin walls, and a long white building staring with innumerable windows. That building housed the brain of our country, the laboratory for the creation of a New World.

We spent our first day aimlessly wandering about the city. We were both impatient to see Moscow life with our own eyes. Only a year had passed since I had last seen Moscow, but that year had been so filled with experiences that I felt now as though I were getting to know my own capital for the first time. Somewhere in the depths of my being I felt mingled feelings of expectation, distrust, and anxiety; as though, despite everything, I was trying to find something here that would make me change my mind, would lead me to revoke a firmly made decision.

That summer evening Andrei and I wandered into Mayakovsky Square. Before us the black cube of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute loomed up in the dusk. In that stone chest the brain of Lenin, the ideologist and founder of the Soviet State, is preserved in spirit as a very sacred object. To the left of the square rose the editorial offices of Pravda.

At roof level an illuminated sign was announcing the latest news. Nobody in the square paid any attention to it. But we craned our necks and began to read: ’The farmers report... the accomplishment of the plan for handing in the harvest... ’ Andrei and I looked at each other. Evening after evening, year after year, similar reports had been flashed along the roof of Pravda before the war. And it was still the same today. Hadn’t there been any war and all that the war connoted?

“What does it say up there, little son?” An old, feeble, quavering voice sounded behind us.

Beside Andrei a decrepit old man was standing. He was wearing a homespun coat of uncertain color, and a tangled, reddish beard framed his face and brightly twinkling eyes. His long hair hung down from beneath his old peaked cap.

“My eyes are weak, little son, and besides, I’m not good at reading,” he murmured. “Tell me what it says.”

He addressed Andrei in the tone that simple folk use to their superiors: with respect and wheedling sincerity.

“Why haven’t you learned to read and write, daddy?” Andrei asked with a warm smile, touched by the old fellow’s request.

“What do we simple people need to know them for? That’s what learned men are for, to understand everything.”

“Where are you from, daddy?” Andrei asked.

“My village is a little way outside Moscow,” the old man answered. “Nearly forty miles from here.”

“Are you in town to visit your son?” Andrei asked again.

“No, little son; I’m here to look for bread.”

“Why, haven’t you any in your village?”

“No, little son. We’ve handed over all our corn. Now all we can do is sell our potatoes in the Moscow market in order to buy bread.”

“What’s the price of bread in the market now?” Andrei inquired.

“Seventy rubles a kilo, little son.”

“And how much did you sell your grain to the State for?”

The old fellow fidgeted from foot to foot, sighed and said reluctantly:

“Seven kopecks a kilo....”

There was an awkward silence. We behaved as though we had forgotten his request that we should read the news to him, and walked on. In the middle of the square we came to a halt before a granite obelisk; it had a bronze plaque fastened to each of its sides. Andrei and I went closer to read the inscriptions on the plaques.

“Little son, perhaps you’ll tell me what it says on those boards.” We again heard that feeble, aged voice behind us. The old man stood there like a shade, shifting from foot to foot.

A smile slipped over Andrei’s face, and he turned his eyes back to the obelisk, intending this time to satisfy the old man. Slowly he read the first few words aloud, but then he broke off and read the further lines in silence.

“What’s the matter, little son?” the old man asked with some concern. “Isn’t it written in Russian?”

Andrei was silent; he avoided the old man’s eyes. In the dusk I too read the words. The plaques carried extracts from the Soviet Constitution, dealing with the rights and liberties of Soviet citizens. Hungry and ragged Moscow, this old peasant arrived in search of bread, and the bronze promises of an earthly paradise! I realized why Andrei was silent.

The next day was a Saturday; we decided to find out where Halina lived and call on her. Through letters from mutual acquaintances I had learnt that she was working as an engineer in one of the Moscow factories. But when Andrei phoned the works administration they told him she was no longer working there, and refused to give any further information. On making inquiries at the Bureau for Ad-dresses we were amazed to be given an address in one of the out-lying suburbs, an hour’s journey by electric train.

The sun was sinking behind the crowns of the pine forest when Andrei and I knocked at the door of a small timber-built house in a summer settlement not far from the railway. A negligently dressed, elderly woman opened the door to us, gave us an unfriendly look, listened to us in silence, and silently pointed up a rickety staircase to the first floor. Andrei let me go in front, and I could not see his face; but by the sound of his footsteps and the way he leaned heavily on the shaking banister rail I could tell how much this meeting meant to him.

On the landing damp underwear was hung out to dry. Dirty pans and old rags littered the windowsill. A board door, hanging by rusty hinges, had tufts of wool blocking the chinks between the planks. I irresolutely took hold of the handle, and knocked.

We heard shuffling footsteps. The door shook on its hinges and scraped over the floor as it was slowly opened; to reveal a woman simply dressed, with old shoes on her stockingless feet. She gazed interrogatively into the dimly lit landing. Then she distinguished men in military uniform, and the astonishment in her eyes was changed to fear.

“Halina!” Andrei called quietly.

The young woman’s face flushed crimson. She fell back. “Andrei!” a half-suppressed cry broke from her lips. She stood breathing rapidly and heavily, as though short of breath.

Andrei avoided looking about him. He tried not to see the wretched furnishing of the half-empty room; he tried to ignore her old clothes and worn shoes. He saw only the familiar features of the woman he loved. All the world was lost in oblivion, sunk beneath the burning depths of her eyes fixed on him.

How often during all the long years had he dreamed of her eyes! And now those eyes slowly took him in, from head to foot. They rested on the gold epaulettes with the blue facings, on the star indicating his major’s rank, on the brilliant raspberry band of his service cap. Her eyes turned to the M. V. D. insignia on his sleeve, then stared into his eyes.

“Halina!” he repeated again as though in a dream; he stretched out both his hands to her.

“Gregory, shut the door, please!” she said to me, as though she had not noticed Andrei or heard his voice. Her tone was cold, her eyes faded, her features set. She avoided Andrei’s eyes and, not saying a word, went to the open window at the far end of the room.

“Halina, what’s the matter?” he asked anxiously. “How is it you’re living here... in such conditions?”

“Perhaps you’d better tell your story first,” she answered. She seemed to be finding our visit a torture.

“Halina! What’s the matter with you?” A growing alarm sounded in his voice.

There was a long silence. Then she turned her back on us and said in a voice that was almost inaudible as she gazed out of the window:

“I’ve been dismissed... and exiled from Moscow.”

“Why?”

“I am an enemy of the people,” she said quietly.

“But what for?”

Another silence. Then, like a rustle of wind outside the window:

“Because I loved my baby....”

“Are you married?” His voice broke with the despair of a man who has just heard his death sentence.

“No.” The word came softly.

“Then... then it’s not so bad, Halina.” The fear in his voice turned to a note of relief.

There was another silence, disturbed only by his panting breath.

“Look at that!” She nodded at a small photograph standing on the table. Andrei followed her glance. From the simple wooden photograph frame a man in German officer’s uniform smiled at the major of the Soviet State Security Service. “He was the father of my child,” she said from the window.

“Halina... I don’t understand.... Tell me what happened.” He dropped helplessly into a chair; all his body was trembling.

“I fell in love with him when our town was under German occupation,” she answered, after turning away from us again. “When the Germans retreated I hid the child. Someone informed on me. And of course you know the rest....”

“But where is the child?” Andrei asked.

“It was taken from me.” Her voice choked. Her shoulders shook with dry sobbing.

“Who took it from you?” There was a threat in his tone.

“Who?” she echoed him. “Men in the same uniform as you’re wearing.”

She turned her face to us. It had nothing in common with the face of the gentle and friendly girl we had known in past days. Before us stood a woman in all the nakedness of her womanly pain.

“And now I must ask you to leave my house.” She stared fixedly at Andrei’s motionless figure. He sat with shoulders bowed as though under the blows of a knout, staring at the floorboards: his back huddled, his eyes expressionless, and his body lifeless.

The sun was glowing orange beyond the window. The branches of the dusty pines swayed silently. The sun lighted up the fluffy hair of the woman standing at the window caressed her proudly carried head, the gentle outlines of her neck, the frail shoulders under the old dress. The light left in shadow all the wretched furniture of the half-empty room and all the signs and tokens of human need. At the window stood a woman now farther off than ever, but now more desired than ever. On a chair in the middle of the room slumped a living corpse.

“Halina... I’ll try...” he said thickly. He himself had no idea what he could hope to do, and he was silent again.

“We have nothing more to talk about,” she answered quietly and firmly.

He rose heavily to his feet, looked helplessly about him. He muttered something, held out his hand as though asking for something, or maybe in farewell. She looked away, taking no notice of his hand. There was another long silence.

I crept out of the room as though from the presence of the dead. Andrei followed me. As he went downstairs he clung to the wall like a blind man. His face was ashen; words came incoherently from his lips. Our steps sounded hollowly on the creaking stairs.

In the train he stared with glassy eyes out of the window and was obdurately silent. I tried to distract his thoughts with talk. He did not hear my voice; he took no notice of me whatever.

As we made our way to the Moscow Underground station he broke the silence by asking: “Which way are you going?” I guessed he wanted to get rid of me, but I also felt that on no account could I dare to leave him to himself.

We returned to our hotel. All the rest of the evening I followed him like a shadow. When he left the room for a moment I unloaded our pistols, which were lying in the table drawer. He would not have any supper, and went to bed unusually early. But he tossed and turned and could not sleep. He wished to escape from this life at least in his sleep, to find release from his torment; but he could not.

“Andrei, the best thing would be for you to go home tomorrow,” I said.

“I have no home,” came from his bed after a long silence.

“Then go to your family,” I persisted.

“I have no family,” he said thickly.

“Your father...”

“My father has disowned me.”

Andrei’s father was a man of the old school, hard as oak and as obstinate as a mule. When the years of collectivization arrived the old cossack had preferred to leave his native soil to live in a town, rather than join a collective farm. In the town he had become an artisan. No repressive measures, no amount of taxation could drive him into an artisans’ cooperative. “I was born free, I shall die free!” was his one answer. He had given all his strength to bring up his son, in the hope that the lad would be a comfort to his old age. But when he heard that his Andrei had gone over to the enemy he disowned him.

All night Andrei tossed and turned in his bed. All night I lay in the darkness, not closing my eyes, fighting to keep from falling asleep. The hours passed. The ruby stars of the Kremlin towers shone in through the open window. As the sky turned pale and the first feeble light stole into the room, I saw that Andrei was still awake. He had buried his face in the pillow, and his arms hung helplessly down, one on either side of the bed. In the silence I caught words that came strangely from his lips, words that I remembered from times long past, the time of my childhood. They came in a passionate whisper: “Lord, incline Thine ear and hear my prayer, for I am miserable and weak.”

For the first time that night I closed my eyes. I would not hinder a man who stood on the confines of this world. And again in the early morning stillness I heard a whisper that had nothing earthly in it, the words of a long forgotten prayer: “Lord, forgive thy sinful slave...”

On the farther side of the river the Kremlin clock chimed in answer.

While in Berlin I had exchanged very little correspondence with Genia. She was too sensitive to the least hint of insincerity and mental reservations; moreover, there was still a military censor-ship, and that had to be taken into account. A frank description of my present life and of our impressions of the real world around us would have been unforgivable lunacy. And we had no private life in Karlshorst that I could write about. Both she and I were too young and too fond of life to write each other insane letters out of sheer amiability.

So I preferred to use the nights when I had a twenty-four-hour turn of duty in the staff headquarters, and was alone in the commander-in-chief’s private office, for getting direct telephonic contact with Moscow and talking to Genia. On such occasions we had long conversations that had no connection with the marshal’s office, or policy. The people tapping the telephone could go on reading their novels unperturbed.

On returning to Moscow I looked forward impatiently to seeing Genia again. And in preparing for my first visit I spent a long time pondering what to wear - my military uniform or civilian clothes. I finally decided in favor of the civvies.

I found only Anna Petrovna at home. She was feeling bored, and she took the opportunity to ply me with questions concerning Berlin, and simultaneously to retail the latest Moscow news.

Now the family was reunited. Genia’s father, Nikolai Sergeivich, had returned home after the conclusion of operations against Japan. But even now, when he was stationed in Moscow, his wife knew as little as ever about his duties and activities, and she lived in constant dread of his being sent off again in some unknown direction and for an indefinite period.

After lunch Genia decided that she and I would go off into the country for the rest of the day. I was very grateful to her for taking me to her parents’ country house, for the small summer villa outside the city had been the scene of my first meeting with her, in the early days of the war. She herself drove her sports-model Captain.

When we reached the villa she began to question me at great length and in unusual detail about life in Germany. All my explanations and descriptions failed to satisfy her. Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, she gazed into my eyes and asked: “But why are you so thin?”

“I’m feeling fine!” I replied. “It may be just overwork.”

“No, it isn’t that.” She shook her head. “You look really bad. You’re keeping something from me.” She gazed at me closely, as though trying to read my thoughts.

“Maybe there is something,” I assented, touched by her anxious tone. “But if there is I haven’t noticed it.”

“But I do,” she whispered. “At first I thought it must be some-thing coming between us... Now I see it’s something else. Forget it!”

And I did forget it. I was boundlessly happy to see the familiar walls around me, and to hear only Genia, to think only of Genia.

As the evening twilight settled over the forest and shadows began to steal through the room she decided to celebrate my arrival with a supper.

“Today you’re mine.” She flashed her eyes at me. “Let father be annoyed because we’ve gone off! Let him know how mother worries when he’s not at home! I’ll show him!”

We had hardly sat down to eat when we heard the sound of a car approaching. Genia raised her eyebrows anxiously. The car stopped outside, and a moment later Anna Petrovna entered. She was followed by Nikolai Sergeivich and a colleague of his, Colonel-General Klykov. They were all in a very cheerful mood, and the house was filled with their laughter and talk.

“Now isn’t this wonderful! We’ve only just arrived, and the table’s already laid!” Klykov laughed and rubbed his hands. “Nikolai Sergeivich, your daughter’s a treasure!”

“D’you think she’s prepared all this for us?” Nikolai Sergeivich answered. “You must excuse us for interrupting, Yevgenia Nikolaevna,” he said very formally, turning to his daughter. “Would you permit us to join your company?”

“And you’re a fine one!” he added, turning to me. “Get into civilian clothes and you immediately forget your army regulations! You know your first duty is to present yourself to your superiors! Ah, you youngsters....”

“But we were just getting ready to go home,” Genia began.

“Then why have you laid the table? For us?” Her father roared with laughter. “So we drive here, and you go back there! You think you’re clever, my girl. But I’m no fool either. Just to punish you we’ll spend all the evening with you.”

Anna Petrovna set to work to prepare supper. They had brought cans and bottles of a striking diversity of labels with them. All the lands of eastern Europe were represented: Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary. These commodities were not spoils of war, but normal peacetime production. There were American conserves too, obviously the remnants of lend-lease deliveries. None of these things could be bought in the Moscow shops, but they were available in abundance in the special distribution centers to which generals had access.

“Well, Gregory, now tell us all about it from the beginning.” Nikolai Sergeivich turned to me when the dessert arrived. “What is life in Germany like?”

“Not too bad,” I answered vaguely, waiting for him to be more definite in his questions.

“In any case he has a better apartment there than we have,” Genia intervened.

The general ignored her, and asked: “What’s Sokolovsky doing?”

“What Moscow orders,” I replied, involuntarily smiling. “You people here should know best what he’s doing.”

Obviously I had given Nikolai Sergeivich the opening he was fishing for. He sat turning over his thoughts. Genia looked about her with a bored air.

“Germany’s a tough nut.” General Klykov broke the silence. “It’ll be a long time before we crack it. The Allies won’t clear out of western Germany without giving trouble, and there isn’t much to be expected simply from eastern Germany. Not like the Slavonic countries: no sooner said than done! I think our first task is to create a strong bloc of Slavonic states. If we form a Slavonic bloc we shall have a good cordon sanitaire around our frontiers. And our positions in Europe will be strong enough to prevent any repetition of 1941.”

“My friend, you’re always looking backward, but we’ve got to look forward.” Nikolai Sergeivich shook his head reproachfully. “What do we want a Slavonic bloc for? The old dreams of a pan-Slav empire! Today we’re in the epoch of the communist advance along the whole front. Eastern Europe and the western Slavonic states are of interest to us now chiefly as providing a favorable base for penetration and further action.”

“So far the masters are pursuing a quite clear pan-Slavonic policy,” the colonel-general retorted. Like all the upper circles of Moscow he resorted to the vague term ’masters’ to denote the Kremlin and the Politburo.

“That’s what policy’s for, to conceal the ultimate aims,” Nikolai Sergeivich said. “It would be a crying shame not to exploit our possibilities today. One half of Europe belongs to us, and the other half is inviting us to take it over and give it order.”

It was now quite dark outside. Moths fluttered through the open window and beat against the lamp glass, burning their wings. A drowsy fly crawled over the table, moving its legs painfully. The fly had no aim, it simply crawled.

“There’s Europe!” the general said with a contemptuous smile, and he unhurriedly picked up the fly between two fingers. “You don’t even have to catch it, you simply take it.”

“But tell us frankly, Nikolai Sergeivich, what do you need that dead fly for? What good will it be to you?” the colonel-general asked.

“Of course we’re not greatly interested in western Europe as such,” the general answered after a moment’s thought. “It’ll probably be more difficult to plant communism in the Europeans than in any other peoples. They’re too spoilt economically and culturally.”

“There you are! You yourself admit it’s very difficult to make Europe communist,” Klykov expressed his thoughts aloud. “If we intend to build communism seriously there we’ll have to send half the population to Siberia and feed the other half at our expense. And what’s the sense of that?”

“We need Europe so as to deprive America of her European markets, and then she’ll go under economically. But in any case...” The general was silent, thoughtfully rolling the unfortunate fly between his thumb and fingers. Then, as though he had come to a definite decision, he flung the fly away and repeated: “But in any case... neither you nor I know what the masters are thinking. And it’s just as well that we don’t,” he went on after another pause. His tone suggested that he knew more than he proposed to say.

“Communist theory lays it down that the revolution should develop where there are the best prerequisites for it: in the weakest link of the capitalist system. And at the moment that isn’t in Europe. Today Asia is ripe for revolution. There we can gain the greatest possible successes with the least risk and the least expenditure. Asia is waking up nationally, and we must use this movement in order to further our objectives. The Asiatics are not so cultured and spoilt as the Europeans.”

He paused again, then went on: “It’s more important to have Asia in our hands than Europe. All the more so as Japan has dropped out of the running. Today China is the key to Asia. Nowhere else in the world are the prerequisites for revolution so favorable as in China.”

“All right, I give you China,” the colonel-general said in a joking tone. “And what will you do with it?”

“China is an enormous reservoir of vital forces,” Nikolai Sergeivich replied. “It would be a tremendous thing to have such a reserve at our disposal, for the army and for industry. And, above all, that’s the way we shall force America to her knees.”

“So America’s giving you trouble again?” Klykov laughed.

“Sooner or later our roads will cross,” Nikolai Sergeivich answered. “Either we must renounce our historical mission or follow it through to the end.”

“All the same, I assume that our post-war policy is directed towards ensuring the security of our frontiers, both in the West and in the East.” The colonel-general held to his views. But he prudently made his remarks sound more like a commentary on Kremlin policy than an expression of his own attitude.

The general put on a smile of superiority. “Don’t forget, my friend, that one can build socialism in one country, but communism only in all the world.”

“What’s the world to do with you, when you’re a Russian?”

“We’re communists first, and Russians only second....”

“So you need the whole world.” The colonel-general drummed his fingers ironically on the table.

“That is the general line of the Party,” the general answered coldly.

“Our policy during the war...” Klykov put up a feeble opposition.

“Policy can change with circumstances, but the general line remains the general line;” the general would not let him finish. “It has to be so,” he went on slowly. “It’s a historical necessity. We’ve already exhausted all the possibilities of internal development. Internal stagnation is equivalent to death of old age. Either we finally retreat on the internal front, or we go forward on the external front. That is the law of dialectical development that applies to every state system.”

“You’re going too far, Nikolai Sergeivich. You’re placing the interests of the state system above those of your people and your country.”

“That’s why you and I are communists,” Genia’s father said slowly and firmly, raising his glass as though to confirm his words. Klykov pretended not to notice this invitation, and felt for his cigarettes. Anna Petrovna and Genia sat listening to the conversation with bored expressions on their faces.

“What you’ve just said, Nikolai Sergeivich, is one thing in words, but in reality it means war,” Klykov said after a long silence. “You underestimate the external factors-America, for instance,”

“And what is America?” Nikolai Sergeivich asked. “An agglomeration of people who represent no nation and possess no ideals, and whose basis of unity is the dollar. At a certain stage her living standards will fall inevitably, the class antagonisms will grow sharper, and then favorable conditions will arise for the development of the class struggle. The war will be shifted from the front to the rear of the enemy.”

“And that’s what you and I are generals for - to wage war,” he added.

“A general should be a citizen of his country first and foremost.” Klykov drew at his cigarette and sent the smoke curling up to the ceiling. “A general without a native country is...” He did not finish the sentence.

During the war Colonel-General Klykov had successfully commanded large Soviet forces in the field. Shortly before the war ended he had been recalled from the front and given a comparatively subordinate post in the Commissariat for Defense. Generals on active service were not subjected to such changes without reason.

Before leaving Moscow to join the S. M. A. I had met Klykov more than once at the home of Genia’s parents. Whenever the talk turned to politics he had always been very moderate, taking the attitude that the war was one of defense of the national fatherland. At that time, just about the close of hostilities, there was a good deal of rather independent discussion, or rather surmise, as to the U. S. S. R.’s future policy. It is hardly to be doubted that Klykov had been rather too frank in expressing his opinions, which did not entirely coincide with the Politburo’s secret plans, and that this had been the reason for his recall to the rear, closer to the Kremlin’s ever-watchful eye.

“But we won’t argue about that, Nikolai Sergeivich,” he said in a conciliatory tone, after a long pause. “In the Kremlin there are wiser heads than yours or mine. Let them decide.”

They fell into a long silence. Anna Petrovna sat turning over the pages of a periodical. Genia looked at the clock, then at the moon rising through the trees. At last she could stand no more, and she jumped up.

“Well, you can go on dividing up the world, but we’re going home.”

“Why, is the moon making you restless?” her father laughed. “Off you go, then, only don’t get lost on the way. If anything happens, Gregory, I shall hold you responsible.” He jokingly wagged his finger at me.

A minute or two later we drove off. In the moonlight, the shadows of the trees fell spectrally across the ground. Here and there the windowpanes of summer villas gleamed through the trees. The car bumped over the hummocky forest road. I sat at the wheel, not speaking.

“What were you so dumb for this evening?” Genia asked.

“What could I talk about?” I asked.

“What others talk about.”

“I can’t repeat the sort of thing your father says. And I mustn’t support Klykov.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t happen to be Klykov. Your father would never stand from me what he takes from Klykov. Klykov gives expression to very imprudent views.”

“Let’s forget politics!” she whispered. She put her hand to the dashboard and switched off the headlamps. The night, the marvelous moonlit night, caressed us with its silence. I gazed into her face, into her eyes, veiled in the half-light. My foot slowly released the accelerator.

“If you don’t close your eyes again...” she murmured.

“Genia, I’ve got to steer the car.”

Instead of an answer, a neat little foot was set on the brake pedal. The car slowly pulled sideways and came to a stop.

I spent the next few days visiting my numerous Moscow friends and acquaintances. Everywhere I was bombarded with questions about life in Germany. Although occupied Germany was no longer ’foreign’ in the full meaning of the word, and many Russians had already seen the country with their own eyes, there was no falling off in the morbid interest the Russian people showed in the world on the farther side of the frontier.

This interest and the exaggeratedly rosy ideas of life abroad were a reaction from Soviet Russia’s complete isolation. Moreover, the Russians have one trait, which is seldom found in other nations: they are constantly seeking to find the good sides of their neighbors in the world. The Germans used to regard this as evidence of the primitive ways of thought in the East.

After I had satisfied my friends’ curiosity as far as possible I turned to questioning them about life in Moscow. But while they were very ready to listen to my guarded accounts of life in Germany, they were very unwilling to answer my questions about life in Moscow. The general mood was joyless. Everybody had hoped that living conditions would improve after the war. But now there were signs of famine. And in addition, the papers were again talking hysterically of a new war danger.

When my friends learned that we in Berlin were in the habit of meeting Americans, talking to them and even shaking their hands, they stared at me as if I were a ghost, and did not know what comment to make. Although there had been a considerable cooling off in relations between the Allies during the first twelve months after the war, the very fact that we lived in the same city did to some extent mitigate the growing tension in official relations.

But in Moscow the one-sided and continual abuse in which all the press and propaganda weapons were indulging was leading the people, despite their own personal convictions, to think of the Americans as cannibals. The propaganda poison was having its effect.

One evening I went as usual to see Genia, and found all the family making ready for a journey. Anna Petrovna explained that they were going next morning to see Nikolai Sergeivich’s parents, who lived in a village between Moscow and Yaroslavl, and she invited me in her husband’s name to go with them. I knew already that his parents were simple peasants, and that, despite their son’s attempts to persuade them, they had refused to move to Moscow, preferring to remain on their land and continue as peasants.

I readily accepted the invitation, though Genia turned up her nose a little and made no comment. I had observed already that she was not fond of visiting her grandparents, and did so only because her father wished her to. She had grown up in the Moscow milieu, and was completely alien to her peasant origins.

Early next morning Nikolai Sergeivich, Anna Petrovna, Genia and I drove in the general’s limousine out of Moscow. We passed through the suburbs with its factories and small houses, and plunged into the forests surrounding the city. Towards midday, after a long journey over by-roads, we drew near to our destination. Bumping over the potholes, the car crawled into a village street. It was enveloped in a deathly silence; there was not a sign of life anywhere. No domestic animals, no chickens, not even a dog to be heard. It seemed to have been deserted by its inhabitants.

Our car stopped at one of the houses on the outskirts. With a groan the general climbed out and stretched his legs after the long drive. Anna Petrovna gathered her things together. Genia and I waited for them to lead the way. There was no sign of life in the hut. Nobody came out to welcome us.

Finally, the general went up the steps of the porch and opened the unfastened door. We went through a dark entry smelling of dung. The general opened the living-room door without knocking. In the middle of the room a girl about eight years old, bare-foot and straight haired, was sitting on the floor, swinging a cradle hanging from the ceiling. She was singing under her breath. When she saw us she stopped, and stared half in wonder, half in alarm, without rising.

“Good morning, my child,” the general said to her. “Have you lost your tongue?”

In her confusion she only stuck her finger into her mouth.

“Where is everybody?” Nikolai Sergeivich asked again.

“They’ve gone to work,” the child answered.

At that moment we heard a noise behind us, and a pair of legs shod in worn feltboots began to stir on the enormous Russian stove that filled half the room. A muffled coughing and groaning came from the shelf for a few moments, then a shaggy, gray head was stuck out from behind a cloth curtain.

“Ah.... So it’s you, Nikolai!” an aged, rather hoarse voice said. “So you’ve come again!” It was the general’s father. The old man’s face showed no sign of pleasure at the sight of his son.

“Who else should it be?” the general thundered with forced gaiety as the old man climbed down from the stove. “I’ve brought something for you, Sergei Vassilievich. Something for the pain in your legs. You won’t refuse a bottle of vodka, I’m sure!”

“Bread would have been more acceptable than vodka!” the old man grumbled.

“Marusia, run to the chairman of the collective farm” - the general turned to the child - “and ask him to release all our people from work today. Tell him the general’s arrived.”

“The general... the general....” the old man mumbled in his beard. He laid his hand affectionately on Genia’s head. “You’re looking well, dragon-fly. So you haven’t forgotten your old grand-dad in that Moscow of yours?”

I went to the car and brought in the packets and bundles of presents we had brought with us. One after another the rest of the family arrived, all the general’s numerous kindred and their grown-up children. They all seemed rather awkward, and showed no sign of pleasure at the arrival of guests. The last to enter was a man who had been wounded in the war, and now walked with the aid of a stick. He was the general’s cousin, and the collective farm store-keeper.

As usual in the country, the oldest man of the family issued the orders. The grandfather waved to one of the women:

“Lay the table, Serafima. We’ll have dinner now we’ve got guests.” Turning to his son, he remarked: “I don’t suppose you’ve eaten potatoes for a long time, Nikolai? Well, you can have some now. We haven’t any bread, so we’re eating potatoes instead.”

“What’s happened to your corn then?” Nikolai asked. “Haven’t you received anything yet from the collective farm?”

“Received anything...” the old man muttered. “The collective farm handed over everything down to the last grain to the State, and that still left it in debt. We haven’t met our delivery plan. We’re managing with potatoes at present, but when winter comes... we haven’t any idea what we’ll eat.”

“Well, don’t worry!” the general reassured him. “We’ve brought bread with us.”

“Ah, Nikolai, Nikolai! If you weren’t my son I’d show you the door! Brought your bread to make a mock of us country-people, have you? You know our custom: the host provides for the guest. You’ll eat what we eat. And no arguments! Don’t turn up your nose at our food.”

With a sweeping gesture he invited everybody to sit down at the table, on which Serafima had set a huge iron pot of steaming beetroot soup. Next to it she placed a pot of potatoes boiled in their jackets. Then she arranged earthenware plates and wooden spoons round the table. The general was the first to sit down.

He was the most talkative of all the company, and tried hard to show that he was perfectly at home in the house where he had been born. He joked as he peeled his potatoes, readily held out his plate for Serafima to fill with the ’beetroot soup’, which apparently had been made without meat or fat. For some time only the clatter of the wooden spoons was to be heard.

“What’s a dinner without vodka?” the general exclaimed at last, and he rose and went across to his packages. “We’ll throw back a glass all round, and then we’ll feel more cheerful.”

All the men in the house readily accepted his invitation, and the bottle was swiftly emptied. A second followed it. The plain peasant food was quickly disposed of. The general again resorted to his packages, and littered the table with cans of preserves labeled in all the languages of Europe. His old father watched him glumly, and tried to protest; but then he held his peace and, staring at the strange labels, confined himself to the brief remark: “You’ve done some looting....”

The plentiful supply of vodka had its effect; they all found their tongues.

“Well, Nikolai, tell us. They say there’s a smell of war around again,” the old man asked, a little more amiable after several glasses of vodka.

“We’re a long way off war at the moment, but we must always be ready for surprises,” the general replied. “We’ve won the war, now we must win the peace,” he added self-importantly.

“What sort of world?” his father asked, screwing up his eyes cunningly. “That old story again... ’proletarians of all countries unite... ’?” (The Russian word ’mir’ has two meanings: ’peace’, and ’world’; the old man deliberately twists his son’s remark.)

“Why of course, we mustn’t forget the proletarians of other countries,” the general said sluggishly, conscious of the ineptitude of his remark. “Proletarian solidarity,” he added, avoiding his father’s eyes.

“Of course, of course.... My belly tells me every day that we’re proletarians. But as for the solidarity! D’you mean that others are to go hungry with us? Is that it?”

“Let’s have another drink, Sergei Vassilievich,” his son proposed, realizing that there was no point in arguing with him. He filled his glass again.

“But tell me just one thing, Nikolai.” His father went over to the offensive. “I don’t say anything about our having shed our blood and gone hungry in this war. God be thanked that it ended as it did. But tell me one thing: did the soldiers want to fight at the beginning, or didn’t they? You should know the answer, you’re a general.”

The general stared silently at his plate.

“Nothing to say?” the old fellow crowed. “The soldiers didn’t want to fight. And you know very well why. Because they’d had enough of that song long before. You can’t fill your belly with songs.”

“But all the same we won the war,” the general said in his own defense.

“Nikolai! I’m your father, and you needn’t tell me lies. Have you forgotten what was promised us during the war? Why were the churches opened again? Why have you been given Russian epaulettes? Why have you tsarist ribbons on your chest? You hid behind the backs of the Russian people! We were promised land and freedom. That’s what we fought for! And where is it all?” He banged his fist down on the table, making the glasses jingle. “Where is it all?” he shouted again, furiously pointing a skinny finger at the potato skins littered about the table.

“You can’t have everything at once,” the general feebly protested.

“What do you mean by that? You can’t have everything at once!” The old man exploded like a gunpowder barrel. “D’you mean it’s going to be still worse?”

“Oh no.... But when everything’s been destroyed it can’t all be restored at once;” the general made his retreat.

“Ah, now that’s a different story! But you began at first with the old song: Solidarity! Proletariat! We know it all by heart. We even know it backward!”

The general said no more, but apathetically chewed a bread-crust. The old man could not get over his excitement. With a trembling hand he helped himself to a glass of vodka and tossed it off. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then looked about him to see if anyone was daring to oppose him. But they all sat staring indifferently into their empty plates.

“Don’t tell me any of your fairy-stories, Nikolai!” the old fellow said decisively, with a challenging stare across the table. “I know all that you’ve been up to! D’you think I don’t know how for the last twenty years you’ve been going about the world with a flaming torch? D’you think I don’t know where you got all those gewgaws from?”

He pointed to the orders on his son’s chest. “When you were lying in that cradle,” he nodded to the cradle hanging from the ceiling," we didn’t only have bread in the house, we had everything in plenty. Now you’ve become a general, but the child in that cradle is crying with hunger. What’s happened to your conscience? Answer me! Have you exchanged your conscience for those gewgaws?"

“Grand-dad, where could I find a basket?” Genia, who had been sitting silent next to her father, asked the old man. She rose from the table to go out.

“What, dragon-fly, had enough?” Her grandfather gazed after her. “Go and pick some mushrooms in the forest, then we’ll have mushrooms as well as potatoes for supper.”

Genia stood at the door with a basket on her arm, and nodded to me to go with her. As I left the room I heard the old man say:

“I tell you, Nikolai, I don’t want to hear any more about the proletariat in my house. If there’s anybody who’s the last, the very bottom-most proletariat, it’s us, and not anybody else. If anybody’s got to be set free, it’s us! Get that? Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

Genia and I walked out of the village. The forest began almost at the last house. The sky was overcast with gray. The air was autumn-ally clear, and pervaded with the scent of rotting leaves and dampness. Genia had flung a kerchief over her head, knotting it beneath her chin. She took off her high-heeled shoes and dropped them into her basket, and went on in front without saying a word, cautiously stepping with her bare feet through the grass.

I followed her, my eyes delighting in her supple figure. We went deeper and deeper into the forest, and at last came to a clearing littered with the great, mossy trunks of felled trees; all around them was a wilderness of wild berries, mushrooms, and grasses.

“But what does father come here for at all?” Genia broke the silence. She walked aimlessly along with bent head, gazing at the ground. “Granddad always entertains him with this sort of performance, and father seems to like it.”

“Perhaps he likes to see the difference between what he was and what he is now,” I suggested.

“I’ve had enough of this comedy, long since!” she went on. “And this time it’s all the more unpleasant because you’ve seen it.”

“Genia!” I called quietly.

She turned round so swiftly and so readily that she might have been waiting for the call. Her chestnut eyes were fixed on me with a look of expectation.

“Genia, what comedy are you referring to?” I asked, feeling an unpleasant suspicion rising in my mind. She stood embarrassed, disturbed by the tone of my voice. I took her by the hands and set her against a large, mossy stump rising as high as her head. She humbly stood as I had placed her.

“Don’t you see it for yourself?” She attempted to avoid my question.

“But it the comedy itself you mind?” I gazed into her eyes and saw that she was expecting, yet fearing, my question. “Which one do you think is the comedian?”

“I... I don’t know, Grisha....”

“Genia, which one do you regard as the comedian?” I repeated harshly.

“I’m sorry for granddad,” she whispered, lowering her eyes. I could see that this talk was torturing her. “But it’s all so silly...” she added, as though excusing herself.

“So you think your grandfather is a comedian?” I insisted.

“No; he’s quite right. But...” Tears came into her eyes.

I had a feeling of relief, mingled with a warm tenderness. I took her head between my hands and kissed her on the lips. I had no wish to go on tormenting her, by forcing her to disavow her own father. There was no need for me to say more.

“D’you know what, Genia?” I said, as I played with a strand of her hair. “I’m very grateful to you at this moment.”

“Why?” she whispered in surprise.

"I was afraid for you. I was afraid you’d say something else....

“I felt really upset for the old man,” I added thoughtfully. “Before the war came, each of us lived in his own nest, and each built his life to the best of his ability. During the war everything was changed, everybody was threatened and everybody was equal in the presence of death. In those days of blood and evil I experienced so much good from people I didn’t know at all, from simple people like your grandfather. The war brought us together in a brotherhood of blood. Now I feel sick at heart for these people.”

A gray pall crept across the sky. The scent of rawness rose from the earth. A bird fluttered about for a moment, then flew off. “You and I are on top,” I went on quietly. “We must never forget that. Our being on top and remaining there only makes sense if we don’t forget it. I think your father has. And I was afraid you bad too....”

The rustles of the autumnal forest stirred through the glade. I looked at Genia’s bare feet, at her peasant’s kerchief, at the basket standing beside her. In her hands she held a sprig of ash berries which she had broken off as she walked along.

“I’d be tremendously happy if you were only your grandfather’s granddaughter and lived in that hut,” I said.

She pressed closer to me, as if she were cold.

“For then I’d know you belong to me,” I whispered into her ear. “You know, I often think of the first days we met. When you were simply Genia, a delightful girl who was a soldier’s friend. D’you remember how I knocked at your door, straight back from the front, in a soldier’s dirty greatcoat? I was always so proud of you... A soldier’s little wife...”

“Grisha, tell me quite frankly.” As she learned against the mossy stump she bore little resemblance to the saucy and carefree girl I had once known. She spoke quietly, seriously. “You’ve come back from Berlin completely changed.... And you talk so little... I feel that something’s getting you down. What is it?”

“Genia, it’s because I’m sorry that our friendship will never be anything more than that...”

“What’s preventing it?”

“When I first met your father I was proud of him. I thought of him in those days as an example to be followed...”

“And now?” She looked into my eyes with a strange look.

I did not answer at once. I could not yet put what I felt into words. “That you should leave the life you’re living now and belong only to me... I can’t insist that you should do that,” I said quietly. "But if you were to include me in your life, it would be the end for all of us.

“So my father stands in the way?” she said with a strange calm. The words came as an answer to my own thoughts. I remained silent, gently stroking her shoulders. The leaves of the birches rustled quietly. The cloudy sky was silent. Ants crawled aimlessly over the stump.

“Don’t be afraid, Grisha. I’d come to the same conclusion my-self.” Her voice betrayed her weariness. “There’s just one thing I want to say: it isn’t my father that stands between us. What has come between us is something that long since came between me and my father. I am only a woman and a daughter. But I feel differently about that.” She was silent for a moment, then she went on: “I’ve told you once already I’m an orphan...”

She raised the sprig of mountain ash to her face and brushed her cheeks with the cluster of berries. The air was fresh with the autumn. We stood silent in the forest glade, forgetting what we had come there for.

“And so you’ve quite made up your mind?” she asked at last.

I only shrugged my shoulders impotently.

“But supposing I throw up everything and come to you in Berlin?”

“My position there is too insecure. I can’t risk your future...”

She played thoughtfully with the cluster of orange berries. Her eyes gazed over my shoulder into the distance.

“I shall never forget you, my dear,” I began, and was not at all sure whom I was trying to comfort, her or myself. My heart quivered once more with all the pang of a soldier’s parting, with sadness and tenderness, as in times past. But now the girl’s body did not quiver and caress me as it had done in the past. It was lifeless and cold.

“Don’t be angry with me,” I pleaded. “It’s very difficult for me too. Very...”

She raised her head. The emptiness in her eyes slowly gave place to the irresistible call of life. “If it has to be so,” she whispered, “the soldier’s little wife won’t cry.” She smiled through her tears. Then she set both her hands on my shoulders and threw her head back as though she were looking at me for the first time. A burning kiss scalded our lips.

After a fortnight in Moscow I suddenly felt a griping void and restlessness. I hurried to put my affairs in order, feeling rather like a man afraid of being late for a train.

Andrei Kovtun had already left Moscow. After his meeting with Halina he had wandered about for several days as though in a trance, dead to everything around him. I had great difficulty in persuading him to take the train to Sochi on the Black Sea, to spend the rest of his leave in a sanatorium. Even when I saw him off at the station he did not smile, and as he shook my hand he gazed aside.

When I left Berlin to return to Russia I had not felt any need of a rest. But now, after a fortnight in Moscow, I felt desperately tired and in need of a break.

One morning towards the end of the third week I hurriedly packed my few belongings and took a trolley-bus for the Central Aerodrome. I had already phoned and found out that there were always free places in the S. M. A. planes flying from Moscow to Berlin. And now, just as I had done more than a year before, I stood in the airport office, entering my name in the passenger list.

With a pain in my heart I went to a telephone kiosk and called up Genia. When I heard her familiar voice I said:

“Genia, I’m phoning from the airport. I’ve been urgently called back to Berlin.”

“Don’t tell lies,” I heard her say. “But I’m not angry with you. Only it’s a pity you didn’t give me a parting kiss...”

I was about to say something, but she had already rung off.

Half an hour later our plane was airborne. This time the pilot did not make a farewell circle above Moscow. This time I did not gaze out of the window. And I did not look forward with any feeling of pleasure to what lay ahead of me. I tried to avoid thinking of what I had left behind me.

Sommaire ►https://seenthis.net/messages/683905
#anticommunisme #histoire #Berlin #occupation #guerre_froide

Éboulements dans le Canal de Corinthe

Greece temporarily shuts Corinth canal for ships after rockfall
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-greece-shipping-canal/greece-temporarily-shuts-corinth-canal-for-ships-after-rockfall-idUSKCN1GA2

http://3kbo302xo3lg2i1rj8450xje.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/shutterstock_158172182.jpg

Greece on Monday closed the Corinth canal after a rockfall that followed heavy rain, temporarily blocking a transit route used mainly by commercial ships and pleasure yachts.

The 6.4-km canal serves about 11,000 ships a year, offering a short transit from southern Italy to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, saving mariners a 700-km (434-mile) journey around the Peloponnese Peninsula. But its 21.5-metre (64-foot) width means it is not a key waterway for ocean-going vessels.
[…]
The canal’s operator will need about 15 days to restore it, the official said.

First conceptualized in ancient times, the canal took some 11 years to be built and start operations in 1893.

UPDATE 1-Russian oil product exports from Black Sea port ’collapse’ - Transneft
▻https://uk.reuters.com/article/russia-oil-port/update-1-russian-oil-product-exports-from-black-sea-port-collapse-transn

Shipments of oil products from a Russian Black Sea port, hit by a managerial conflict, have “collapsed”, Russian oil pipeline monopoly Transneft said on Wednesday.

A Transneft spokesman said as many as six tankers have been held up at the port of #Novorossiisk and 2,400 railcars have been waiting for reloading.

Four industry sources told Reuters earlier that shipments from the IPP terminal at Novorossiisk have been disrupted since early February due to a row over control of the port.

Transneft blames the port’s captain for “unlawful” interference in its commercial operations.

It added that it was experiencing a shortage of railcars for loadings at Tikhoretsk, a railway junction and pipeline hub in the region, and had asked Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov to intervene.

Turkey Announces Route for #Kanal_Istanbul
▻https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/turkey-announces-route-for-kanal-istanbul

https://www.maritime-executive.com/media/images/pressreleases/alternatives-for-kanal-istanbul-16x9.99edd7.f0a339.a27d9d.jpg

The government of Turkey has released the finalized route for a second shipping channel between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, parallel to the Bosporus Strait. 

The new waterway - to be known as Kanal Istanbul - would increase capacity for shipping to and from the Black Sea. The route selected would run between Küçükçekmec in the south, near Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, to the Sazlıdere Dam and then north to Durusu (in red in the image above). The total length will be about 25 nm, and it will be the nation’s largest ever infrastructure project. As designed, it will be able to accommodate 160 vessel transits per day - roughly equivalent to the current volume of traffic through the Bosporus. 

Unlike the existing channel, which is protected by treaty, the new canal would allow Turkey to charge a service fee for transits. With the ability to raise revenues from users, Turkey will look for private partners to raise the funds necessary for construction. “We intend to complete the bidding process with a mixed model, including a build-operate-transfer model, and other public-private partnership alternatives, and to launch the project this year,” said transport minister Ahmet Arslan at a press conference on Monday. 

Arslan said that the final route was selected after an exhaustive review of five alternatives, incorporating environmental impacts, land expropriation, geological studies, earthquake risks and groundwater effects, among many other factors. The excavation material may be used to create artificial islands in the Sea of Marmara.

Sanctions-Proof Oil Rig Thwarts U.S. Policy From Cuba to Russia - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-19/sanctions-proof-oil-rig-thwarts-u-s-policy-from-cuba-to-russia

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iZg0jeJMtgO0/v0/800x-1.jpg

The oil rig was built mostly in China and drilled its first well in Cuba. Now it’s delivering a victory for Russia in its fight against U.S. sanctions. 

Italian oil giant Eni SpA and Russia’s state-controlled Rosneft PJSC are using the Scarabeo 9 ultra-deepwater rig to drill in water more than 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) deep in the Black Sea. It’s the first well drilled by a western company at a Russian oil project that falls squarely under U.S. sanctions imposed on the sector in 2014.

For Vladimir Putin, it’s a second energy-sector victory in a little over a week after the $27 billion Yamal liquefied natural gas project started shipping cargoes despite U.S. sanctions against its controlling shareholder.

“It is important not because of the size, but from a geopolitical perspective it is key,” said Alejandro Demichelis, director at boutique investment bank Hannam & Partners. “Eni and the Italians in general have been closer to Russia than they have been to the U.S., at least in terms of oil and gas. They have always been on Putin’s side to solve problems.”
[…]
“The Scarabeo 9 is one of the very few units in the industry which is using a technology which is not an American one,” Saipem’s then CEO Pietro Franco Tali told investors before its maiden voyage to Cuba.

Neither here, nor there: Georgian #refugees from #Abkhazia

In the Soviet period Abkhazia, a balmy region on the Black Sea coast and popular summer destination among the USSR’s elites, enjoyed autonomous status within the Georgian republic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, ethnic Abkhaz with some Russian support fought a brutal war against the Georgian government in 1992-93. The catastrophe left more than 250,000 Georgians (who had constituted a majority in the region) homeless. In August 2008, Russia recognised the territory as independent – the overwhelming majority of states consider it part of Georgia.

▻http://rightsinexile.tumblr.com/post/165951419877/neither-here-nor-there-georgian-refugees-from
#Abkhazie #Géorgie #réfugiés #asile #migrations

Romania faces a rush of migrant boats as smugglers test new routes to Europe | Public Radio International

▻https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-09-26/romania-faces-new-rush-migrant-boats-smugglers-test-new-routes-europe

Et maintenant, le corridor roumain

▻https://cdn1.pri.org/sites/default/files/styles/open_graph/public/story/images/Romania+border%20police%201.JPG?itok=1HtMz8US

During World War II, Romania’s Jewish refugees, fleeing extermination in Europe, would pay to cram aboard flimsy boats crossing the Black Sea to the Middle East. In 2017, Romania’s shores have been the recipient of migrant boats traveling the journey in reverse, as a rarely-used smuggler’s passage is reactivated.

#migrations #asile #réfugiés #roumanie

Cargo Ship Splits in Two Off Turkey - VIDEO – gCaptain
▻http://gcaptain.com/cargo-ship-splits-in-two-off-turkey

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMb-3ktzpEA

A 40-year-old general cargo ship broke in two in the Black Sea off Turkey on Sunday. 

All 11 crew members were rescued by Turkish authorities and are reported safe.

The 114-meter Mongolian-flagged MV Leonardo started buckling and broke in two while at anchor off Istanbul’s Kilyos coast.

Encore un bateau sous pavillon mongol, le pavillon de complaisance qui monte…

Fears of new Black Sea migration route after Romania intercepts asylum boat

Romanian coastguard authorities catch fishing boat carrying Iraqi and Syrian asylum seekers

http://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/styles/main_image_article_page/public/main-images/TURKEY-RUSSIA-SHIP-1024x707.jpg

signalé par @reka et la mailing-list Migreurop

The World according to Eratosthenes

▻http://etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/10400/10489/10489.htm

http://etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/10400/10489/10489.jpg

Projection: Unknown,
Source Bounding Coordinates:
W: E: N: S:

Description: A facsimile of the world map by Eratosthenes (around 220 BC). Eratosthenes is the ancient Greek mathematician and geographer attributed with devising the first system of Latitude and Longitude. He was also the first know person to calculate the circumference of the earth. This is a facsimile of the map he produced based on his calculations. The map shows the routes of exploration by Nearchus from the mouth of the Indus River (325 BC, after the expedition to India by Alexander the Great), and Pytheas (300 BC) to Britannia. Place names include Hellas (Greece), Pontus Euxinus (Black Sea), Mare Caspium (Caspian Sea), Gades (Cadiz), Columnæ Herculis (Gibraltar), Taprobane (Sri Lanka), Iberes (Iberian peninsula), Ierne (Ireland), and Brettania (Britain), the rivers Ister (Danube), Oxus (Amu Darya), Ganges, and Nilus (Nile), and mountain systems. The map shows his birthplace in Libya (Cyrene), the Egyptian cities of Alexandria and Syene (Aswan) where Eratosthenes made his calculations of the earth’s circumference, and the latitudes and longitudes of several locations based on his measurements in stadia.

Place Names: A Complete Map of Globes and Multi-continent, Europa, -Libya, -Asia, -India, -Scythia, -Arabi
ISO Topic Categories: society
Keywords: The World according to Eratosthenes, physical, -historical, kEarlyMapsFacsimile, physical features, topographical, society, Unknown, 220 BC
Source: Ernest Rhys, Ed., A Literary and Historical Atlas of Asia (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton & CO., 1912) 2
Map Credit: Courtesy the private collection of Roy Winkelman

#cartographie #cartographie_ancienne

U.S. Navy ship changes course after Iran vessels come close: U.S. official | Reuters
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran-navy-idUSKBN16D1X3

http://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20170306&t=2&i=1175110578&w=780&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&sq=&r=LYNXMPED25158#.jpg

Multiple fast-attack vessels from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps came close to a U.S. Navy ship in the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, forcing it to change direction, a U.S. official told Reuters on Monday.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the boats came within 600 yards (meters) of the USNS Invincible, a tracking ship, and stopped. The Invincible and three ships from the British Royal Navy accompanying it had to change course.

The official said attempts were made to communicate over radio, but there was no response and the interaction was “unsafe and unprofessional.”

Russia ratifies bill on Turkish Stream gas pipeline - ENERGY
▻http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/Default.aspx?pageID=238&nID=107480&NewsCatID=348

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/images/news/201612/n_107480_1.jpg

Russia announced late on Dec. 16 that it had approved a bill to ratify the Turkish Stream natural gas pipeline project.

The bill was passed by the Russian government and was sent to the Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, the Kremlin said in a statement.

The Russian Energy Ministry and Foreign Ministry jointly prepared the bill on the project, which is meant to supply natural gas to Turkey and other countries through Turkey.

The Turkish Stream, announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a 2014 visit to Turkey, would carry gas from Russia under the Black Sea to Turkey’s Thrace region. One line, with 15.75 billion cubic meters (bcm) of capacity, is expected to supply the Turkish market, while a second line is set to carry gas to Europe.

The agreement on the project entered into force through publication in Turkey’s Official Gazette on Dec. 6.

Turkey’s parliament ratified a bill for the Turkish Stream agreement on Dec. 2 and it was signed into law by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

#russie #turquie #gaz #pipelines #mer_noire

Planetoscope - Statistiques : Pêche et prises mondiales de poissons
▻http://www.planetoscope.com/eau-oceans/199-peche-et-prises-mondiales-de-poissons.html

Le total de la pêche mondiale représente 154 millions de tonnes de poissons, soit 4 900 kilos de poissons chaque seconde. En 2012 selon la FAO, 91,6 millions de tonnes de poissons et animaux marins ont été capturés, un niveau relativement stable depuis 20 ans. 40% de la production de poisson proviennent de l’aquaculture et 60% de la pêche de poissons sauvages. La pêche illégale représente presque un tiers de la pêche légale.

http://mktg.factosoft.com/consoglobe/image-upload/img/peche-mondiale-stats.JPG http://mktg.factosoft.com/consoglobe/image-upload/img/peche-mondiale-alimentation.JPG

Giant Pioneering Spirit Lands Pipelay Work in Black Sea – gCaptain
▻https://gcaptain.com/giant-pioneering-spirit-lands-pipelay-work-in-black-sea

https://i2.wp.com/gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Pioneering-Spirit-01-1600x900-1.jpg

Swiss-based Allseas Group announced Thursday it has received offshore gas pipe laying contract in the Black Sea utilizing the world’s largest construction vessel Pioneering Spirit.

The contract was awarded to Allseas by South Stream Transport to lay the first line of the #TurkStream offshore gas pipeline.

Under the contract Pioneering Spirit will lay 900 km of 32-inch pipeline through the Black Sea from Anapa in Russia to Kiyikoy in Turkey, where water depths reach 2200 meters. The contract also comes with an option for laying a second line.

#gazoduc #Mer_Noire

EU to keep patrolling for Somali pirates until end of 2018 | Reuters
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-naval-somalia-idUSKBN13N14I

The European Union’s naval mission will keep patrolling for pirates off the coast of Somalia for another two years, to guard against any resurgence of attacks, the bloc said on Monday.

The number of raids and kidnappings has fallen - though maritime officials have warned that the risk is still, underlined by two attempted attacks last month.

NATO said last week it had ended its own mission off the Horn of Africa, as it shifts resources to deterring Russia in the Black Sea and people smugglers in the Mediterranean.

But the EU said it would extend the EUNAVFOR Somalia Operation Atalanta until the end of 2018, allowing it to keep guarding U.N. aid deliveries.

The mission, which was due to shut down at the end of 2016, typically uses 1,200 personnel, four to six warships and two or three patrolling aircraft provided by EU member states.

NATO ends counter-piracy mission as focus shifts to Mediterranean | Reuters
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-defence-idUSKBN13I22D

L’OTAN va (enfin !) pouvoir se consacrer aux vrais enjeux…

NATO has ended its Indian Ocean counter-piracy mission after a sharp fall in attacks, the alliance said on Wednesday, as it shifts resources to deterring Russia in the Black Sea and people smugglers in the Mediterranean.

All ships and patrol aircraft have now left the area off the Horn of Africa, where they patrolled since 2009, as part of a broader international effort to crack down on Somali-based pirates who had caused havoc with world shipping.

NATO says its “Ocean Shield” operation, as well as European Union and other counter-piracy missions, have significantly reduced attacks, with no ships captured off Somalia since May 2012, down from more than 30 ships at the peak in 2010-11.