Editor’s Desk
Back in the USSR
Ted Genoways
Dimiter Kenarov
Twenty years ago, the most grandiose political and social experiment of the twentieth century, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, came to an end. It was a slow and painful death; there was no Soviet 9/11, no sudden implosion of illusions amid smoke and rubble. When the Belavezha Accords, formally dissolving the Union, were signed in a primeval forest in Belarus on December 8, 1991, the gesture was merely symbolic.
Fiction
Closed Fracture
Kseniya Melnick
This morning, a phone call from an unfamiliar foreign number interrupted my game of golf. Although I recognized Russia's country code, I let it go to voicemail. I would have done the same with any unidentified caller. You never know what guise the past might put on to haunt you. When I got back to my condo after a round of cocktails with my golf partners, all Florida retirees like me, I listened to the voicemail twice with trepidation. It was from my former best friend.
La Moretta
Maggie Shipstead
Bill and Lyla spent the first week of their honeymoon in Venice, and then they had rented a car, a stubby white Simca, and driven into Yugoslavia, all the way down to Dubrovnik and back up to Sarajevo and over to Belgrade and into Romania. After Romania, they would carry on to Hungary and Czechoslovakia, skirt East Germany, pass through Munich to France and Switzerland, and fly home from Italy, their marriage tempered by almost two months of very thrifty travel.
Poetry
Vesper Sparrow
Patrick Phillips
All I can do / to keep from believing / where, in truth, your last steps led, // is think of the story you told us...
Essay
Maria P. Vassileva
The pictures on the wall of the library at the Slavutych elementary school are vivid and richly colored—and startlingly post-apocalyptic. A mournful ghost appears in front of an ashen city. The fins of a beautiful goldfish reach out and lightly touch the chimneys of a nuclear plant. An atom, its orbits laid out like petals, is on fire, and trees and buildings emerge from the flames.
A Threat to Public Order
Dimiter Kenarov
I had always wondered what KGB agents looked like. The agent who interrogated me looked, to my bemusement and horror, just like KGB agents in the old Bond movies (the Western imagination was not so out of touch after all). He was heavyset and boxy, like a wardrobe or a very large trunk, with a crew cut and a dark suit.
Dirty Secrets
Steve Featherstone
In April 2009, a regional Ukrainian legislator arranged a secret meeting at a gas station in Zalishchyky, a rural town 300 miles southeast of Kiev. He
agreed to hand over a gray metal container emblazoned with a yellow and black radiation trefoil in exchange for $50,000. (The original ask was $17 million, but like everything in Ukraine, including government ministries, the price was negotiable). Not a bad deal considering that inside the container was 3.7 kilograms of plutonium-239, half the amount required to build a nuclear weapon.
From The Archives
South to the Caucasus (1928)
Ernestine Evans
We took the train from the Kursk station in Moscow for the Caucasus the third Monday in July. I had seen the station last the winter of the famine when its floor had been covered with dusty, sack-like shapes that huddled comatose on the floor, the flow of refugees from the south creeping north for bread. But 1925 had brought a harvest, an old time harvest, surpassing even 1913, so memorable for its plenty. And 1926 was just as good. The station floors attested comfort again for city and for country. They were scrubbed until they shone.
Russian River (1932)
Waldo Frank
As we sailed east almost into the shadow of the Urals, the Revolution shrank smaller, farther, unreal away. Even in my sleep in Leningrad its beat, bursting the old world, was in my ears and I had waked each morning to its thunderous music. Now, while we stopped at village after village, there were whole hours when I forgot the Revolution, when I knew only Russia. For if the migrating muzhik was a sign of Russia's deepest move—the proletarianizing of the farm—as yet the hearts of these men and women knew no Revolution, despite the destiny of their bodies.
