Beth and Kevin have an extremely wide-angle photograph in their bathroom of 1000 odd troops near Charlotte in 1918. When I first saw it in the mirror I assumed, from the massing and the tones that it was in Russia. The arrangement, like the massing and clustering of soldiers' bodies in war paintings from the Middle Ages through the 19th century, really brings home the point of what those guys are there to do. Die. For so many of those guys, that photo was probably one last look.
I remember, in '87, walking somewhere in Moscow with a Russian guy and he points up a hillside and says "See up there. That's where, back in the Great Patriotic War (WWII), some guys thought up a new technique. The Germans had a pillbox up there, and our troops couldn't pass by the foot of the hill without being cut down. So one guy charged up the hill and threw his body in front of the pillbox, while some other guys came round the back and took out the Krauts. Then our guys proceeded on." I was, like, shit. Nobody ever thought of that back in my neighborhood. This is very different from anything I could ever consider doing, a different order of being.
So the other day, I'm talking to this Kievan guy Genna, and he's telling me that Gorbachev can rot in hell and that everybody in Russia agrees with him and spits when they hear his name and that Stalin understood Russia and people were ready to die for him and Russia made great strides under Stalin... All standard stuff you're used to hearing from liquored up semi-educated Russians, but Genna's neither of those. He's straight intelligentsia. The point is, there are attitudes towards masses of dead bodies and sacrifice and necessity that we can't begin to process.
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