On a breezy Tuesday evening, lanky Simone Shiferaw, the son of Ethiopian immigrants, paces outside a restaurant on Washington DC’s vibrant U Street, positioning himself before commuters emerging from a nearby metro station. He flashes flyers for the evening’s Dope Comedy Showcase at Dukem, an eatery popular with Ethiopian immigrants and local foodies.

“Comedy and Ethiopian food tonight!” he chants cheerily. “It’s a great combination!”

Members of the Ethiopian diaspora—close to 2 million worldwide—call themselves “Habesha,” referring to any ethnicity from the Horn of Africa, a region of many cultures, including Amharic, Oromo, Tigray and dozens more.

Of all the Habesha comics working in the United States today, Biniam Bizuneh is the biggest star. The Indiana-born Eritrean-American started working clubs in Indianapolis before moving to the West Coast, where he joined the writing team of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show. He’s also done sets in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, where he enjoys a dedicated following.

“If you’re Ethiopian,” he says beginning a typical sketch, silencing murmurs offstage.

“And you go to high school…” (scattered chuckles)

“And the cross-country coach finds out?” (shriek of recognition)

“I mean, you don’t even have a choice! You just join the team!” (rolling laughter)

Such cultural exchanges with the homeland are a slice of global trade that rarely rates economists’ scrutiny. But they’re essential to the commerce of ideas that spurs migration and rewards it. If all the world really is a stage, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” then immigrants and expats are players.

Performers like Bizuneh are also continuing an enduring American show biz tradition—immigrants who successfully master their host communities’ storytelling techniques.

It’s the legacy of Charlie Chaplin, a circus acrobat who left London for New York. He arrived expecting to cavort on sawdust under a tent but instead gravitated to silent film, where he connected with a multilingual audience of new Americans who delighted in seeing versions of their own experiences in his screen antics. Chaplin practically invented silent film comedy with his 1917 directorial debut, “The Immigrant,” many believe, and became a touchstone for migrants everywhere.

An industry that welcomed immigrants, Hollywood provided a form of storytelling that crossed back to Europe, essentially inviting audiences there to become immigrants, too.

Today, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok carry on those traditions for the Habesha comics, who are giving rise to a new comedy scene.

You could call it the Injera Circuit—after the staple Ethiopian sponge bread—a latter-day Borscht Belt, the cradle of comedy for legendary New York performers from Jerry Lewis to Jerry Seinfeld.

Those comics, the children of 20^th-century immigrants from Europe, crafted humorous bits from typical immigrant encounters with American life—everything from how to get a sweetheart to how to get a job to how to satisfy ambitious parents.

And just as the Borscht Belt turned the performers Joseph Levitch and Irwin Kniberg into icons named “Jerry Lewis” and “Alan King,” today’s Habesha comedians draw stage monikers from hip hop culture. Yonas Berhe tours as “Lost Lyrics,” frequently joining “Felonius Munk”—born Arif Bilal Shahid in Chicago. Atlanta’s Michael Kebede tours as “Mr. Goopie.”

Back in Washington DC, Simone Shiferaw serves jokes and mild insults to diners hungry for authentic Horn of Africa fare as well as topical schtick. Common themes in his routine include dating while Ethiopian, being neither authentically “Black” nor authentically “African” and the comic standard, disappointing one’s striving immigrant parents.

“My father says: ‘You’re doing comedy now, Simone?’” Shiferaw moans. “‘Your life is just a joke!’”

Warming up the crowd, he zeroes in on a table where diners are deftly scooping up lamb cubes and lentils with bits of injera bread.

“Are you Habesha?” he says, cocking a skeptical eyebrow. “I dunno. I think I smell Silver Spring on you,” referring to the sprawling DC suburb.

Inferring diners may be visiting Maryland suburbanites rather than homeys down with the neighborhood, Shiferaw’s dig adds a dash of insult to their injera.

Such fare isn’t limited to big metropolitan areas like the capital, which boasts the largest concentration of Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants in the United States. Habesha comedy is a mainstay at restaurants like Minneapolis’s Red Sea, Abyssinia in West Philadelphia and Addis in Richmond, VA.

Houston’s Yonas Berhe got his start as a Bizuneh protégé. After he graduated from Prairie View A&M University in Texas, his first professional gig brought him to Toronto and Winnipeg to warm up audiences for Bizuneh on a brief tour. The apprenticeship persuaded him to ditch his day job with the accounting multinational Deloitte and throw himself into Habesha comedy.

“Social media is my funnel,” says Berhe, 29, whose road schedule features three or more comics appearing together at Ethiopian restaurants. Recent gigs included a hookah lounge in Charlotte, NC, the Zanzi nightclub in Oakland and a Dallas eatery called Yenat Guada.

Berhe has also begun testing markets overseas. Last year, he teamed up with Atlanta’s Filmon “Gergish” Yohannes to do shows at Ethiopian eateries in the Netherlands and Sweden.

Last month, he took his material all the way back to Ethiopia to perform in Addis Ababa, where some 1,200 local fans packed into a converted warehouse. The Heineken brewing company, whose Harar Beer is brewed in eastern Ethiopia, sponsored the event.

Many came eager to rehear jokes they’d already shared with each other on social media. Others came to express solidarity with an American expat’s comedy journey.

The Habesha circuit also welcomes comics who aren’t of Ethiopian descent, continuing comedy’s tradition of blending immigrant and American cultures. Shawn “PeeWeeJr” Neverson, a native New Yorker, got his start on the stand-up circuit as a student at Richmond’s Union College, staging weekly performances at the Addis restaurant, owned by an Eritrean refugee.

In 2024, he returned to Richmond on a reunion tour, bringing in protégés to perform each week for almost two months.

“Addis helped me create a lane for up-and-coming comics,” Neverson said. “It felt great coming back.”

Joel Millman is a journalist and community organizer based in Philadelphia. He covered immigration and Latin America for almost 30 years, mainly for The Wall Street Journal, before working as a press officer for the UN’s International Organization for Migration in Geneva. His interests include refugee protection and resettlement and assisting US communities as they pursue successful integration of migrants in their midst. He was a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs in Central America from 1987 to 1989.

Last month on Baoding Hill (Bǎodǐng Shān), some 170 kilometers from Chongqing in southwestern China, I spent 20 minutes admiring the Thousand-Armed Guanyin, an 800-year-old, painstakingly restored Buddhist bodhisattva carved into rock and covered in gold foil. The 7.7-meter-tall statue has 1007 arms, each with an eye set into the palm, representing the guanyin’s (goddess of mercy’s) vow to witness and lend a helping hand to the world’s suffering.

Over 10 days in China, as I marveled at the electric nighttime skylines of two megacities and wandered ancient streets transformed into pedestrian shopping areas, I thought about the precarious balance between the country’s long history and its headlong plunge into the future.

In Chengdu, some 300 kilometers northwest of Chongqing, I had my bags and face scanned several times a day as I entered the city’s state-of-the-art metro system, a network longer, cleaner and more efficient than New York’s. I ordered bubble tea, taxis and admission tickets on WeChat and photographed kiosks manned by humanoid robots in festive red hats and scarves. Those sights felt like an unsettling glimpse into a future where US technology might be eclipsed.

At the stunning Sanxingdui Museum, 40 kilometers north of Chengdu, I fought crowds of domestic tourists to take photos of Bronze Age masks with bulging eyes, mysterious relics of the ancient Shu kingdom. The bronze blades and gold foil masks reminded me of finds from around the same period in Mycenaean Greece, but the intricacy and completeness of the artifacts on display here were on another level. The Shu and the Mycenaeans never met, but growing competition between America and China feels inevitable, especially as Chinese firms expand to US markets.

On my second day in China, the United States and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran, igniting conflict in the Middle East. I followed developments on my phone, using the VPN I had installed before I landed. In older times, the guanyin might have reached out to comfort the war’s afflicted. But now it seemed she held her thousand arms and eyes high, monitoring the conflict yet remaining apart, ever-building and ever-watching, waiting for a decisive moment to reveal herself.

Steven Tagle is a writer living in Switzerland. He was an ICWA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Fellow in Greece (2021-2023) based in the Evros region and islands of Chios and Crete, from where he explored the culture, history and economies of the country’s border zones and their importance to national politics, society, economics and geopolitics, including Greece’s mounting role in the Eastern Mediterranean and transatlantic alliance.

Editor’s note: This passage about events in June 2019 is an excerpt from Suzy Hansen’s new book From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan (published today by Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Hüseyin said it was like a movie—that they came out of nowhere. A mob of thugs, all limbs and swinging arms, assumed battle formation, taking up the whole width of the street and moving swiftly, trying to get to their target without interruption. They came from the direction of Sulukule, the Roma enclave inside [the working-class Istanbul neighborhood] Karagümrük that [President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan had mostly torn down and replaced with fancy-looking, shoddily built, expensive town houses, which had mysteriously filled up with Arabs. They passed the real estate agent Ebru’s office and then turned down the top of Professor Naci Şensoy Avenue.

As they marched by, all of the shopkeepers came to their doors to watch, and pedestrians clutching plastic bags stumbled to the side to hug the walls. The men were carrying baseball bats—for what they had baseball bats, I do not know, since baseball is not a popular sport in Turkey, though later someone said, “For this”—and they had clubs, or sopa, as they called them, rough pieces of wood. One man even had a döner kebab knife, which is long and has a serrated edge, intended for cutting the upside-down pyramid of meat that hangs in so many restaurant windows. These döner kebab knives appeared in fights often in Istanbul; I saw one for the first time in a brawl on my street when I first moved to the city 12 years earlier. At the time, I thought it was a sword. I still wondered whether these fighters with the döner kebab knives worked at a döner place, had family who owned a döner place, or had stolen the knife from a döner place, though later a man in the neighborhood would tell me that in Turkey many people have döner kebab knives and it was normal to see them wielded in neighborhood fights.

By then I knew it was likely that only descendants of Turks who came from Anatolia would say such a thing about döner kebab knives, whereas those whose families liked to think of themselves as the “real” Istanbul people might grumble that before 1950, they didn’t even have the popular döner kebab wraps in Istanbul, one of those “Arab things.” One of the many things I would learn from Karagümrük in those years was that what created and divided Istanbul was not Erdoğan or Islam or secularism or left or right—as I had long thought—but this endless story of the countryside and the city, and all that they hated and envied of one another.

That evening, at some point, with a jog and a hop, one man with a bat—who sounded like the leader—smashed Al Nour’s window, as if their charge down the street resulted in this release of energy, all of it hurtling at the proud window with its stenciled glass. The first strike had an effect on the activity of the street, a momentary freeze. Some people backed out of the way. Others hurried past. The man at the butchery kept smoking and watching. It all happened so fast.

The other men followed their leader, galloping at the window to shatter it and then leaping back again, afraid of the glass, amazed by themselves. Get the fuck out of here! Fuck you! They didn’t say, Fuck you, Syrians, but they looked at the Syrians as they cursed. Siz geldiniz buraya, bizim huzurumuzu kaçırdınız. You came here and disturbed our peace.

The first strike supposedly brought the Syrians out, almost immediately, and with chairs, which they hurled at the men wildly. Later, they would proudly show security videos of their bravery, the adrenaline taking weeks to drain from their bodies. The young men had been left to their own devices; Majed, the owner, who, his sons casually noted, once killed a man in Syria in self-defense, had been out making a delivery.

His employees defended his sweets shop, as did his second-youngest son, Tarik, who, after all, was the one the toughs were really after. Hüseyin was at his Girit Market. He immediately exploded out of his shop, too, and into the crowd. Stop, stop, stop! What do you want? I don’t understand! He did understand; it would turn out he knew much more than he told me at first. Canan, one of Hüseyin’s sisters, a stout, unmarried woman in her 50s who sat at the counter of the Girit Market all day, threw herself into the street and at the chest of the main attacker, the leader, and wrestled with him; she ended up with a bloody scalp, probably from a flying chair. Someone slapped Hüseyin. Another woman ran outside in her nightclothes, and men yelled at her for running outside in her nightclothes. A man named Ibrahim yelled at Hüseyin, Why are you protecting these people? The tüpçü from next door tried to calm everyone down, but he was just a tüpçü, the lowest on the totem pole, the guy who sold the natural gas cans, sometimes driving through the streets playing a jingle like an ice cream truck. Otherwise, no one helped the Syrians, Hüseyin said. The butcher watched, the electronics shop watched, the bakers stayed inside, but some women came by and spat on the Syrians—a rumor I heard once and never heard again in any subsequent retelling.

Just down the street, five shops away, at Muhtar Ismail’s kahve, his all-male coffeehouse, the men were playing cards and okey, a tile-based game like Rummikub, on their raggedy felt tablecloths. As he did many nights, the muhtar—the neighborhood councilman, “one of Karagümrük’s most prominent men,” as Hüseyin once said—sat with his cane and his Marlboro Reds, talking to customers, some of whom he liked and some of whom he did not. The muhtar had heard the shattering of glass outside. The clacking crash of the okey tiles fell silent. What’s that? The other men playing cards looked up too, all turned toward the window, toward the street. Someone walked outside. It’s a fight, they said. They attacked the sweets shop. The men crowded onto the porch.

Ismail watched them from his seat. He had lived in Karagümrük almost all his life, and been its muhtar for almost three decades. He had watched since the 1950s as Karagümrük declined from an elegant, cosmopolitan wonderland of notable elites into this deteriorating labyrinth of roughnecks and Roma mafia, and he had watched Istanbul morph from a genteel imperial capital to a dusty, impoverished backwater to now, most terribly, Erdoğan’s glitzy, corrupt megalopolis, and so when the men in the kahve said they attacked the sweets shop, the muhtar grimaced, kept playing cards, kept smoking, because he knew this was a movie it was better he didn’t see.

Suzy Hansen is a former ICWA fellow (Turkey, 2007-2009) who lived in Istanbul for more than a decade, where she was a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and many other publications. Her first book, Notes on a Foreign Country, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction and the winner of the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award. She has taught writing at Princeton University, New York University and Bard College.

Meals conjure memories, just read Marcel Proust or the food writer Laurie Colwin. And recollections are often connected to eating. A memorable meal can capture the spirit of a place.

So it is at Ritalinos, a small, second-generation restaurant straddling Lisbon’s central Estrela and Campo de Ourique neighborhoods that has become a local institution firmly established in the community and its palate.

I remember my first meal there in 2022, of peixe-galo (John Dory fish), crisp white wine and moist bolo de laranja (orange sponge cake), as well as the unusually gracious welcome of owner Luís Catalino. I moved to Lisbon the following year and lunch at Ritalinos at least twice a week has become a tradition for my husband and me.

The menu includes outstanding versions of dishes home cooks have had on rotation for generations: porco preto (acorn-fed pork from the Alentejo region) and ervilhas (pea stew dotted with sausage, topped by a poached egg). Farm-to-table ingredients include seasonal vegetables and fruit from the huerta (kitchen garden) of Luís’s parents: jewel-toned persimmons, fragrant lemons, green and coral-hued squash and pumpkins, fresh favas picked a few hours before being shelled and transformed into a satisfying stew, cabbage leaves large enough to serve as umbrellas.

Peixinhos da horta (little fish from the garden), a classic starter of lightly breaded crisp green beans, may have influenced the invention of tempura, given that Portuguese merchants were the first Europeans to reach Japan in 1543. The provenance of this treat may be best argued over glasses of chilled Vinho Verde.

Pudim da avó (grandmother’s egg custard) is more than “Portuguese flan”: Even to this writer, a Cuban brought up on homemade flan, it’s unparalleled. Vintage dessert plates with equestrian and rural scenes echoing the azulejos (tiles) enlivening building exteriors and interiors across Portugal add to the charm.

Catalino’s parents Maria Helena da Costa Subral and Joaquim Catalino founded the restaurant in 1985 and passed down to their son their time-tested recipes now flawlessly executed by a dynamic duo in the kitchen, neither from a culinary background. Adilson de Jesus Gonçalves Oliveira has been with the restaurant for more than 10 years. Paulo (affectionately known as Paulinho) Jorge Sequeira Almeida, formerly a semi-professional footballer, worked at the restaurant in 2012-2014, returning in 2021.

Catalino refers to the restaurant as his “first house.” What’s now a small private dining room was once his boyhood bedroom. He remembers standing on a stool as a 6-year-old to make espresso, and reminisces about watching his parents host, when he learned the value of “embracing people.”

Six months before the Covid epidemic, Catalino took over. Keeping the business afloat required numerous pivots in addition to “leading with the heart,” he says. “Bem-vindo” signifies more than “welcome.” He conveys that it’s good you’re here, the dining room is better for your presence.

Over lunch last month at Ritalinos, I caught up with a Portuguese friend whose family also runs a restaurant. “Too often, when the business goes well, I see it scaling up until it loses its character and excellence,” she said. Not here. Ritalinos is firmly rooted in place, and, in Catalino’s words, the “deep memories and connections” each dish evokes.

Ritalinos
Rua do Possolo 2, 1350-046 Lisboa
+351 21 395 2496
www.facebook.com/restauranteritalinos

Felicia Gonzalez was born in Cuba. An alumna of the Hedgebrook Writers Retreat, she has received numerous awards, including artists’ grants to produce the chapbook Recollection Graffiti. She is currently working on a novel to be titled Swimming in Mercury.

Who would want to kill a pope?

The question raced through my mind on May 13, 1981 when I learned that a Turkish gunman named Mehmet Ali Agca had just shot Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square. This was electrifying news, certain to plunge the Catholic world into gloomy uncertainty and diplomatic chanceries around the globe into a frantic search for answers. One reason for the international tumult was that John Paul II was no ordinary pope.

I was NBC’s diplomatic correspondent at the time, based in Washington. Immediately, I threw myself into the story, calling a number of key sources in the US government, wondering what they knew. Not very much, as it turned out. At the time, everyone in Washington seemed preoccupied with another attempted assassination: Only six weeks earlier, the new American president, Ronald Reagan, had been shot by John Hinckley, Jr. near the Washington Hilton Hotel. Fortunately, Reagan survived but now faced troubling questions about the attempt on John Paul II’s life. Was there a connection? Did this story contain hidden mysteries? Who would want to kill a pope?

In the Vatican, the seriously wounded pope was rushed to the nearby Gemelli Clinic. Five hours of emergency surgery followed and his doctors were still uncertain whether he’d survive. The gunman, who had been seized by startled worshippers, was handed over to Vatican police. The many hundreds in St. Peter’s Square suddenly felt lost, robbed of their spiritual leader.

Initial news reports, rocketing around the world, mirrored television’s live coverage. The pontiff had been standing in his white Popemobile, riding through the crowded square, mingling on this Wednesday afternoon with his adoring flock, considering each person to be a special gift from God. With a smile on his face, he would occasionally stop his cavalcade of faith to chat with an old woman, touch an ecstatic teenager, offer a simple prayer, even joke with his Hallelujah people.

Everyone in St. Peter’s Square knew this pope was different. John Paul II was the first non-Italian pontiff in 455 years, the first Polish-born successor to St. Peter, conservative in his theology, daring in his defense of Poland, the communist country nestled uncomfortably alongside an insecure Soviet Union. His nationalism was indistinguishable from his Catholicism, a dangerous combination for anyone, certainly a Polish-born pope, at the height of the Cold War.

At 5:17 p.m., a hand with a gun rose above the crowd and fired three bullets at the passing pope, hitting him with two of them, one creasing his left hand and shoulder, the other entering his upper abdomen, close to his heart, causing massive lesions and loss of blood. The third bullet wounded two bystanders, American tourists unlikely ever to forget their May 13 visit to the Vatican.

Agca, the 23-year-old Turkish assassin, already wanted for murder in Turkey, seemed under the circumstances to be remarkably casual about the seriousness of his crime, telling reporters that he meant only to “hurt” the pope, not kill him, and that he was “very sorry for [shooting] the tourists.” He identified himself as an “international terrorist,” who made “no distinction between fascists or communists.” Almost from the moment of his arrest, Agca tried to create the image of a professional killer operating on his own, linked to no specific national or ideological crusade.

But his effort defied belief, quickly losing credibility. Most observers wondered, more logically, whether he might have been part of a dark conspiracy involving Iranian or Palestinian extremists, neo-fascists in Turkey or certain communist leaders in Eastern Europe thrown by the sudden emergence of a Polish pope.

The story of John Paul II had already fascinated me. I’d been covering Eastern Europe for a long time. I was familiar with recent developments in Poland. I’d heard about the remarkable career of Karol Josef Vojtyle, the talented archbishop of Krakow who, although ambitious, probably never imagined that one day he’d become a pope. When he was selected in October 1978, I was astounded. Why choose a Pole when all of Eastern Europe was already aflame with danger and uncertainty?

As the first non-Italian pontiff in more than 400 years, he naturally attracted more than his share of attention. He was brilliant and controversial, balancing his fierce commitment to Catholicism with a powerful sense of Polish nationalism. He also attracted critics who later came to believe that despite his important role in fighting Soviet communism, his traditionalist views—including opposition to birth control and the ordination of women—served as a brake on social progress and helped conceal child sexual abuse within the Church.

After only eight months as pope, John Paul II decided to visit his homeland. While in Poland, he electrified crowds, bringing hope of freedom and promises of better times, a modern-day Beckett challenging the archaic rules of Soviet communism. He prophesized “some changes are coming. You can feel it.”

In August 1980, workers in Gdansk, inspired by the pope’s message, organized crippling strikes, demanding an independent trade union (later called Solidarity) and unfettered access to their Catholic church. In the communist world, those demands were unprecedented, and a crackdown seemed imminent, either by Polish security forces or the Soviet army, which had earlier crushed uprisings in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

But that’s not what happened. I learned that while tensions were dramatically rising in Poland, it was not the Russians who intervened; it was the pope himself. He secretly dispatched a personal envoy to the Kremlin with a handwritten letter in Russian to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, stressing that although he was the head of the Catholic Church, he was also a Polish patriot deeply concerned about the possibility of Soviet intervention. He hoped that intervention would not occur. But if it did, the pope warned, he would return to Poland and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his people. Given the impact of his recent visit to Poland, it was a warning Brezhnev had to take seriously.

An American-born priest and Vatican insider, Hillary Franco, told me at the time that “even though the pope belongs to the world, he’s human, right? A man who loves his own country, I am sure the pope will try, and would have tried, everything possible to stop an invasion of his homeland.”

Throughout this dangerous period, the Soviets conducted military maneuvers on the Polish border, suggesting an invasion could be just around the corner. In late February 1981, while addressing a Communist Party congress in Moscow, Brezhnev thundered menacingly that “the pillars of the socialist state were crumbling in Poland” and “strong action was required.” Surely it would not have surprised any serious observer if he were seen late at night wandering alone through the Kremlin corridors mumbling the Russian equivalent of “will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Several months later, Agca attempted to assassinate John Paul II.

My interest in the papal plot only deepened with time. Agca had close ties to a violent ultranationalist organization in Turkey called the Grey Wolves, which played a key role in the illicit smuggling of drugs and arms between Turkey and Bulgaria. The more I learned, the more I believed that Agca was part of a conspiracy managed by Bulgaria, a Soviet puppet state at the time.

Normally in the early 1980s, I would have been in a competitive war with other journalists, each struggling to uncover a new nugget of information about Agca’s attempt to kill the pope. But after an initial outburst of coverage, most reporters seemed to lose interest, their focus shifting to other stories of note. As a consequence, the assassination attempt fell off the front pages. For a time, it seemed as if I were the only reporter, aside from Claire Sterling of Reader’s Digest, who displayed any interest in the story. At NBC, I continued to broadcast radio and television reports about the papal plot, and NBC producer Anthony Potter invited me to help research and write a documentary about the event. Thrilled, I accepted, and off we went on an exciting adventure that lasted several months and opened my eyes to the hidden worlds of Vatican politics and global terrorism.

A few days before I left for Rome, I received an intriguing call from a friend who worked at the Central Intelligence Agency. “Can we meet tonight?” he asked. Strange, I thought, he rarely volunteered any information. Even a weather forecast seemed too sensitive.

“Sure. Where? When?”

“At the Watergate,” he whispered. “Outside, near the taxi stand. At 7:00 p.m.”

We met and he steered me toward a walk along the Potomac. “You’re going to Rome, I hear.”

“Yes.” How did he know?

“At the agency we got word today, not sure how reliable it is, but I wanted you to know there’s a hit job out on you, coming from somewhere in Eastern Europe.”

“What?” I was puzzled.

“A hit job,” he repeated. “I’m not certain the report’s accurate but it does seem somebody wants to kill you.” Why would anyone want to kill me? My mind raced over details of the papal story.

“You’re doing stories about shooting the pope, right?” my friend said, as if reading my mind. “The Bulgarians don’t like those stories and neither do the Russians. They’ve both denied time and again that they had anything to do with the shooting, but you keep linking them to the story.”

“Yes?”

“So they may want to frighten you. They may want to stop you from tying them to this story.” It all seemed too far-fetched, I told him.

“Well, you never know. Most of these threats do end up only as warnings, but…”

“I’m going to Rome anyway.”

“Good luck,” he said, patting me on the back. “I just wanted you to know, that’s all.”

We returned to the Watergate. “Good luck,” he repeated.

On my way home, I decided not to tell my wife about my friend’s warning. I didn’t really believe it; nor did I believe the Russians, who knew me well, would decide one day to kill me for something I had broadcast.

Rome proved to be a delightful destination as always, sunny, beautiful, splendidly historic. I arrived just as stories broke in the Italian press that John Paul II had recuperated from the attempted assassination and was back at work in the Vatican.

The NBC office was located downtown, a few busy blocks from the Coliseum and only a short taxi ride from the Vatican. On most days, I was busy talking to knowledgeable sources. I tried arranging meetings at historic sites, which, of course, included restaurants in a country where lunch or dinner was special, not just a meal but a culinary work of art. Which restaurant? There’d be a debate. What kind of food? From northern Italy or the boot? Would we sit inside or out?

Italian friends, diplomats, businessmen and priests soon helped open a few Vatican doors for me. I met cardinals willing to discuss the attempted assassination, and to do so on camera. In time, I also met a handful of attorneys with superb contacts in the slow-moving universe of Italian jurisprudence. Under pressure, key prosecutors had actually begun to crank into action, investigating Agca’s background in Turkey and, more meaningfully, Bulgaria, where he had spent two months.

The prosecutors organized Agca’s trials, the first starting in July 1981, the second five years later. Although one headline writer described the first as “the trial of the century,” it was unusually brief, lasting only three days. Agca opened his defense proclaiming he did not need a lawyer but the state provided one anyway. Instead he read a written statement, pockmarked with hyperbole, misdirection and blatant lies. Against heavy headwinds suggesting conspiracy, he kept emphasizing that he had acted alone, which few lawyers and fewer journalists believed. He was, he kept repeating, an “international killer.”

One lawyer at the first trial was the experienced Severino Santiapichi, an expert on global terrorism who marveled at Agca’s rhetorical jujitsu. He had “an exceptional ability,” he said, “to mislead the investigations.” Later, Santiapichi told me, “I believe there was a plot behind Agca’s crime, a plot hatched in other places, hatched by other brains.” Agca struck him as one of the central figures in the international conspiracy.

I also met Francesco Mazzola, at the time the skilled attorney charged with Italian state security. He took Santiapichi’s judgment two steps further. “Other places,” he believed, were Poland and the Soviet Union; “other brains,” he thought, were anxious communist leaders in Russia. After reviewing the evidence, Mazzola was convinced that Brezhnev, who had recently dispatched Soviet troops to Afghanistan, was considering the same option for Poland. Did he have proof of the Kremlin’s plans? No, he did not, he acknowledged, but believed the circumstantial evidence was becoming increasingly persuasive.

Covering the Vatican was an absorbing challenge, especially when the subject was a papal plot. In my experience, knowledgeable bishops and cardinals were gracious but reluctant to share information, partly because they did not want to damage their delicate dialogue with the Soviets, a strategy the Germans called Ostpolitik. According to Polish Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, there had been, thanks to the example of John Paul II, “an awakening…a spiritual mobilization” of millions of Catholics in different parts of the Soviet empire, but their political and religious position there was vulnerable. I thought the Vatican was actually trapped between a growing desire to publicly incriminate the Russians in the papal plot and a more compelling need to protect its flock living under communist domination.

During a long interview with Cardinal Silvio Oddi—a well-informed Vatican official with considerable diplomatic experience—marked on his part by caution and evasion, I asked bluntly, “Then what secret service did this job?”

Oddi squirmed. “What do you suspect? I’ve gone too far.”

“Alright,” I continued, “what possible motive could there be behind the attempt to kill a pope?”

“It could be almost anything. It could be fanaticism. Material self-interest. And perhaps,” Oddi paused, struggling for the words to camouflage what he really wanted to say, “and probably more to the point, international political strategy.”

“Spell that out for me,” I pressed.

“What the words mean, political international strategy. You understand well what I mean… This man was not a fool. There’s proof he is an intelligent man. He is a killer, a real professional. He was certainly acting in the name of others.”

Oddi tried to be helpful. He came as close as any Vatican official to publicly incriminating Moscow but left it to me to point the finger.

That night, proud of our Oddi interview, Potter invited the NBC News team to dinner in a restaurant not too far from the Vatican. The weather cooperated and we gathered around a large table, one among many on the crowded sidewalk fronting the restaurant. Looking inside, I couldn’t help but notice there was only one man sitting by himself at a small table in the rear. Everyone else was outside. Throughout the meal, more delicious with each course, the man, dark complexion, glasses, neatly dressed, kept staring at me. After a while he approached, apologized and asked in heavily accented English, “Are you Marvin Kalb?” Instantly, my CIA friend’s hit-job warning flashed through my mind. Did he have a gun? Was this to be my last supper?

“Yes,” I replied, not knowing what else to say, “and who are you?”

The man handed me a card. “I’m a travel agent,” he said. “I have been for years, but this visit to Rome is purely personal. I’ve always wanted to visit the Vatican.”

I cast a quick glance at his card. His name was there, likewise his travel agency’s, both located in San Jose, Costa Rica. “So what did you think of the Vatican?” I asked, playing for time. Our conversation widened into polite generalities about travel in Europe. Soon I rose, shook his hand, wished him a pleasant journey and promised to call him when next I was in Costa Rica.

“There is so much to see there,” he smiled, backing away and slowly returning to his table.

Potter, aware of the CIA warning, asked, “What do you make of that?”

In truth, I didn’t know. I told him that when I got back to my hotel room, I’d call NBC in New York and ask someone on the foreign desk to check the travel agent’s story. Was there a name and agency in San Jose such as those on his card? An NBC stringer in the capital checked and double-checked. An hour later, he called back. There was no such travel agency in San Jose, he reported; nor was there any such name.

“What do we do now?” Potter wanted to know.

“We finish our story and go home,” I told him.

For me, that meant spending a lot more time in the Vatican learning about a possible conspiracy. For my NBC colleague Bill McLaughlin, who had joined our team, it meant a reporting trip to Turkey, where he lifted the lid on Agca’s life—where he was born, his family, education and, most important to us, his critically important ties to the radical right-wing Gray Wolves.

Although we tried, neither one of us could get into Bulgaria, an inaccessible place for us NBC reporters at that time, but we spent another month exploring the story still further in Rome and Ankara. I then returned to Washington and Potter, McLaughlin and the camera crew flew back to New York, where the job of pulling all the pieces together began, including writing the documentary, which had always been my responsibility.

We had discovered a lot. By the time Agca reached St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, he had already proven his value to the Grey Wolves. He was a trusted gunman, had robbed two banks, for which he was handsomely paid, and he’d murdered Abdi Ipekci, a well-known, liberal newspaper editor critical of the Grey Wolves, for which Agca earned thousands of dollars and front-page coverage. He seemed ready for a major assignment.

The first two stops on his memorable journey to Rome, secretly organized by the Grey Wolves, were Teheran, then in the grip of the Islamic revolution, and Sofia, the capital of communist Bulgaria, where Agca stayed for seven weeks of intensive preparation. Was he told there that he was on a mission to kill John Paul II? Possible but unlikely. He was then only in the opening round of an international conspiracy that was to mushroom over the next nine months into an historic crime.

It was curious that Agca made no effort to hide during his time in the Bulgarian capital, even though he was a known killer who’d only recently escaped from a Turkish prison. While in Sofia, he lived the life of a footloose tourist, for whom money, liquor and women were never in short supply. Helping him was Omer Mersan, a key Turkish intermediary between Bulgaria and the Grey Wolves who booked room 911 for him at the fashionable Hotel Vitosha and secured him a Turkish passport in the name of Farouk Ozgun, the same passport Agca had in his pocket when he was arrested in St. Peter’s Square.

Collaborating with Bulgarian intelligence, the Grey Wolves had arranged for him to slip into tightly controlled Bulgaria without a passport. Such cross-border collaboration was common in the illicit drug-smuggling and gun-running operations both sides had been conducting for years. Could this lucrative backdoor arrangement have taken place without the Soviet KGB knowing about it and, possibly, demanding a slice of the action? Only if you believe in fairy tales. Vladimir Sakharov, a former KGB official who had defected to the West, told me the KGB “knew everything” that Bulgarian intelligence knew, and then some. “Everything,” he stressed.

In September 1980, with Sofia now behind him, Agca began an extraordinary nine-month odyssey through 12 different European countries without once being arrested, proof of his care and craftiness and police ineffectiveness. From Sofia, carrying $50,000 given to him by Mersan, he journeyed to West Berlin, where he tried melting into the crowds of Turkish “guest workers,” cheap immigrant labor allowed into West Germany to fuel its expanding economy. There were 1.6 million such workers. Several times, Agca was recognized. His photo as a killer on the loose had appeared in the German-language edition of the popular Turkish newspaper Milliyet on October 3, November 6, December 11 and December 29. Four times, the German police were informed of Agca’s presence. Four times, the Germans tried to catch him; four times they failed.

Assisted by “branch offices” of the Grey Wolves, located all over Western Europe, Agca slipped into Switzerland. While he was in Oldham, a Zurich suburb favored by Turks, the Grey Wolves purchased a Browning 9 mm revolver with serial number 76C23953 from Horst Grillmeier, a trusted Austrian collaborator, and hid it in a railroad luggage department in Milan. It was the gun Agca used in St. Peter’s Square on May 13.

In April 1981, after crisscrossing the continent, he finally reached Italy. He went directly to Perugia, a university town, where he enrolled in the University for Foreigners and, as a student, acquired a three-month visa, which he needed for his travel in Italy. He attended only one class, but he had his visa.

On April 13, Agca went to Rome and checked into the Hotel Torino, where he called a Grey Wolf contact in Hanover, West Germany, presumably for final instructions. While there, he met and conferred with members of the Bulgarian embassy and other Turkish gunmen. Together, they cased St. Peter’s Square, deciding where Agca would stand when he tried to kill the pope. Then, after brief stops in Germany and Switzerland, Agca traveled to Milan, where he checked on the revolver hidden in the railroad luggage department. He then purchased a two-week trip to Mallorca, eager, as much as possible, to avoid detection by the Italian police. He stayed at the Spanish island’s luxurious Hotel Flamboyant but kept to himself. Every morning, he jogged for two hours on the beach. One day, according to Italian prosecutors, he met with a Grey Wolf emissary who confirmed he would be paid 3 million German marks, roughly $1.75 million, to kill a very prominent European.

On May 9, Agca returned to Milan, where he went to the railroad luggage department to pick up his revolver. He stuffed it into his suitcase and spent the next two days touring the city, meeting no one.

Early on May 12, he boarded a train to Rome and checked into the Pension Isa, a 15-minute walk from St. Peter’s Square. The room clerk remembered Agca. “He came and went, ‘Good morning, good evening,’ he’d say, and that’s all.” In fact, Agca again met with Bulgarian and Turkish collaborators. They again walked through St. Peter’s Square, took photos, checked the angle of the sun at a certain hour so Agca could get a better shot. As usual, the Bulgarians gave the final orders. The Turks agreed. Everything seemed set.

On May 13, Agca got up at 7 a.m. and, after breakfast, took a long walk through Rome. In his pocket was a handwritten note of “things to do”—“Careful with food” was one cautionary reminder; “Wear a cross” was another. At 4 p.m., he approached St. Peter’s Square, already jammed with hundreds of people excitedly waiting for the pope’s Wednesday afternoon appearance. Again, Agca was joined by his Bulgarian and Turkish collaborators. They gathered with hundreds of others, waiting patiently for the pope to pass in his white Popemobile. At 5:17 p.m., as planned, Agca shot John Paul II.

The documentary I wrote told an exciting and important story. Called “The Man Who Shot the Pope,” it was broadcast on NBC in primetime on September 25, 1982. It received generally excellent reviews, and I was delighted, especially after learning that NBC, gratified by the popular reaction, intended to run an updated version of the program in January 1983, a rare tribute at a network.

Although the documentary pointed to the Bulgarians and therefore the Soviets as prime movers in the plot to kill the pope, one reviewer stressed that though my “evidence was powerful and convincing,” it was also “circumstantial,” lacking the “hard documentation” needed to prove Brezhnev ordered the papal assassination, or if not Brezhnev himself then one of his deputies, Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief, whose antipathy toward John Paul II was well-known in the communist world. According to this line of reasoning, shared by many US officials, one or the other would have had to order the killing, and a written record of this order would have to be somewhere in the Soviet archives and clearly referenced in the documentary. I did not have, nor did I reference, a written record of the order to kill the pope, and I did not believe such a written order ever existed. I still don’t.

Soviet defectors who had served in the KGB and veteran Western diplomats who had been stationed in Moscow during Soviet rule advised me that it was “highly unlikely” such an order would ever have been written. Or if one had been written, that it would ever have been put in a folder and saved for the historical record. No one would want to have his name officially associated with the order to kill a foreign leader, particularly a spiritual authority such as a pope, even though assassination had been widely practiced by both democratic and authoritarian governments for a long time. Without a written order, an experienced subordinate could still notice a nod, a phrase, a gesture, and then, without fuss, set the train of assassination in motion. In this particular case, it would have been from Moscow to Sofia and from the Grey Wolves to Agca, a secret journey shrouded in lies, cutouts and confusion, laced with heavy doses of duplicity and denials.

Recently, the pattern of putting carefully calculated distance between, say, a Brezhnev and an Agca has changed. Now it no longer seems startling to hear a president announce on television or social media that he had ordered the assassination of a foreign leader as a first step toward war. Now assassination has become an open act of war. Forty-plus years ago, it was still an embarrassment.

By January 1983, when NBC ran my documentary a second time, the story of the attempted assassination rarely made news, and there seemed to be two reasons. First, the pope had survived the attempt and thrived, his clerical tenure filled with important, eye-catching contributions to Catholicism and East European history until his death in April 2005. While in office, he privately met with Agca and then publicly pardoned him, suggesting to many “case closed.” Second, the Soviet Union and Bulgaria both vigorously denied playing any role in Agca’s plot, and no other nation appeared to want to challenge their chorus of denials. Why rock the boat in the midst of a dangerous period of the Cold War? An Italian judge noted, “We all remember that World War I began with shots fired in Sarajevo. No one wanted the third world war to begin with shots fired in St. Peter’s Square.”

Over the ensuing decades, stories about the papal plot did occasionally appear in major media. There’d be a spark of interest but nothing more. In Washington, several senators and congressmen demanded the Reagan White House produce a better explanation of the Soviet role in the papal plot than its series of awkward handoffs: “It’s an Italian investigation,” Reagan told a reporter, “and I have great confidence in their abilities.”

Italian magistrates did indeed preside over a series of trials and investigations, focusing on Agca, whose self-justifications varied like the weather, and a handful of Bulgarian diplomats who hid behind the legal equivalent of “Who, me?” Exasperated, the judges echoed the CIA’s pathetically weak conclusion to its lengthy, still top-secret study of the papal plot. “The event that has been touted as ‘the trial of the century,’” pronounced the CIA’s senior Soviet experts in September 2000, “produced more questions than it did answers. In so doing, it affirmed the view of many that the truth surrounding the attack against the pope may never be known.”

Only in 2006, a year after the pope died, was there some progress when three Polish scholars launched what became an exhaustive eight-year study of the papal plot, inspired by their own curiosity, an Italian newspaper article and the judgment of a prominent Italian magistrate. The article appeared in the March 30, 2005 edition of the respected newspaper Corriere della Sera, disclosing that East German Stasi intelligence documents proved there was a “plot orchestrated by the Bulgarians and the KGB, and the East German role (was) to cover their tracks.” The magistrate was the experienced Ferdinando Imposimato, who, after examining the records of the 1986 trial of Agca and a key Bulgarian diplomat, declared he had “no doubts the assassination attempt was ordered by the KGB, who tasked the Bulgarians with it, and they in turn hired the gunman.”

The three historians were Ewa Koj and Michal Skwara of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and Andrzej Grajewski, also an editor of Gosc Niedzielny, a Catholic magazine.

Their research included the exploration of literally thousands of Soviet, Bulgarian, East German and Polish intelligence files, the interviewing of major participants in the plot and the cooperation of many European judiciaries. But, amazingly, even their study, which advanced popular understanding of the assassination attempt, raised few eyebrows.

The report’s highlights were later reported in two books, Skwara’s Agca Was Not Alone and Grajewski’s The Pope Had to Die. Both contain fascinating and persuasive insights into the papal plot but, as the critic of my documentary had put it, no “hard documentation” definitively linking either Brezhnev or Andropov to the assassination order.

The authors had undoubtedly dug diligently into the data year after year but could not find the order that put the papal plot in motion. Why? Because, in their judgment, too, it never existed in written form. However, their impressive research and rich reservoir of information led to one unmistakable conclusion: It was the Kremlin’s idea to kill the pope. Try as the Russians might to point the finger of guilt at the Grey Wolves, placing the ultimate responsibility for Agca’s crime on the right-wing Turkish Mafia, their effort failed.

The reasoning also appeared clear. The Russians saw the Polish pope as an unmanageable irritant, a direct threat to communist interests and Soviet security, and he had to be eliminated. Too much was at stake, starting with Brezhnev’s East European empire. Challenging the Soviet Bloc in many different ways, John Paul II had boldly revived the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine; he’d also stimulated religious fervor throughout Eastern Europe, terrifying the USSR’s leaders with his electrifying visit to Poland, which had ignited Solidarity opposition to communist rule in his home country.

It wasn’t the first time Russia’s rulers believed a Pole was an existential threat. Anti-Catholic and Polish prejudice has been a recurring curse among Russians at least since the Time of Troubles in the early 17^th century, a period of political crisis and chaos that saw the rise of foreign pretenders to the throne and Moscow’s occupation by King Sigismund III Vasa of Poland.

Toward the end of his life in 2005, John Paul II hoped to reconcile theocratic differences between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church. It had become a priority for the failing pontiff. But, even at this time, the Kremlin’s Vladimir Putin stood in his way, claiming all the Vatican really wanted was the chance to proselytize ordinary Russians. Thus, Putin poured cold water on the pontiff’s hope to become the first pope ever to visit Russia.

In November 1979, a year after John Paul II had helped light the fuse of dramatic change in his homeland, the Kremlin distributed a warning through the communist establishment that the new pope represented “an enemy of peace” and had to be fought, undermined and removed. At the same time, Andropov was reported to have sent an urgent cable to KGB operatives in Eastern Europe “to obtain all the information possible on how to get physically close to the pope.” It was then left to the former KGB defector Viktor Sheymov to translate the odd Andropov cable into a meaningful, relevant order. “Everyone knew what it meant,” he explained matter-of-factly; “it meant they wanted to assassinate the pope.”

Not for the first time, the Kremlin had planned the killing of a political opponent. Such directives have surfaced all too frequently in Russian history like embarrassing bloodstains. Putin’s shameful ordering of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s poisoning in 2024—as top experts believe—was only the latest example.

During the Teheran Conference of World War II Allies in 1943, the usually cynical Soviet leader Joseph Stalin supposedly turned to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at one point and asked a strange question: “How many divisions has the pope?” Whether true or not, the question might more appropriately have been asked by Brezhnev, who could have imagined in a passing nightmare that John Paul II commanded so many divisions he would be able to actually topple his vast communist empire. More than anything, it seemed, Brezhnev feared the power of freedom and faith, represented in this case by a determined religious leader who was supported militarily only by a small contingent of Swiss Guards.

Marvin Kalb, the Murrow professor emeritus at Harvard, was for 30 years the Moscow and then diplomatic correspondent for CBS News and NBC News. He is also the author of 18 books, most recently A Different Russia: Kennedy and Khrushchev on a Collision Course.

Mornings, before dawn, I lubed my nipples, waist and groin with Vaseline, put on my running togs, downed a cup of French press and an Ibuprofen and took the elevator to my apartment lobby to meet my running buddies, the other teachers who didn’t mind rising at 5 or 4 or sometimes 3 a.m. before school for long distance marathon training. We ran out of habit, for health, discipline, camaraderie, endorphins: John, David, Jamie and me. As we loosened up, jogging down Haroun al-Rashid Boulevard, we passed flocks of pigeons and feral cats feasting on food scraps deposited by kindly garbage collectors: piles of rice, leftover lamb korma and fetid pools of chana masala.

We picked up the pace and crossed the Gulf Road, turned north at McDonalds and KFC. We passed seaside lawns strewn with garbage from the previous night’s Arab partying and picnicking, passed the jump-suited South Asian workers cleaning it up, passed strolling couples in abayas and dishdashas furtively holding hands in the predawn darkness. Increasing our pace, we arrived at the Corniche, the long, broad sidewalk that borders the Gulf. We dodged loose paving stones, coverless sewer ports, rusted post bolts, loops of wire and the obese fast-food rats that waddled between and under our feet, squeaking in the darkness. Beside us, on Arabian Gulf Road, helmetless young Arab men in jeans, flip-flops and t-shirts roared past on their motorbikes and ATVs, popping long high wheelies on the flat straightaways. We called them “the organ donors.”

Most mornings, we ran past the Saudi embassy and three identical mansions a Kuwaiti grandee had built for his three wives, past Green Island and the flagpole, turning back at the Ali Baba Beach parking lot, a 6-mile loop. Twice a week we ran further, past Wimpy, Costa Coffee, the Army Officers Club and TGI Fridays to the Kuwait Towers, a 10-mile loop. On weekends, we ran even further, past Dasman Diabetes Institute, Souq Sharq, the Fish Market, the Grand Mosque, the Sief Palace with its high walls and imposing machine gun emplacements, the National Assembly, the National Library and the long stretch of beach to the Kuwait Free Trade Zone, a 20-mile loop that left my heels aching and toes numb. At some point during those runs, the first blush of dawn would kiss the horizon, and the muezineen would awaken and bray the azan, the morning call to prayer, into their loudspeakers, into the darkness, first a single one, then two, then 10, then 100, each with a slightly different cadence, pitch and melody. This overwhelming atonal cacophony is my strongest aural memory of Kuwait.

Most mornings, we encountered two balding Arab men in polo shirts and shorts, one tall and clean shaven, the other short and bearded, walking together on the Corniche. Usually, they were deep in animated conversation. Sometimes they walked in silence. Occasionally, they walked separately, a hundred yards apart, causing us to speculate about a rift in their relationship. Then, after a day or week or a month, they were back together again. Always we waved and they waved, greeting each other with a jolly “Good morning!” Sometimes one of us added a comment about the weather, the heat or the wind. “Enjoy your running!” they would say. Individually, we called them Little Guy and Big Guy. Together, they were the Odd Couple.

Running was a habit I had developed in high school. For a variety of reasons—quiet temperament, fear of failure, poor coordination—I did not excel at team sports. In after-school street football pick-up games, I was invariably chosen to be center, my only job to hike the ball. No one ever asked me to go long and catch a Hail Mary in the end zone. Solo sports like skiing, rock climbing, hiking and running were less embarrassing. Although I was a slow runner, usually the slowest on the team, cross country fit my introverted teenaged personality. By the time I got to Kuwait at age 55 to teach art at the American International School, however, I’d evolved into a chatty extrovert. I loved talking with my running buddies about global affairs, philosophy, our families, school politics. I was still the slowest and now, by a decade, the oldest. We all tripped on the road hazards in the pre-dawn darkness but I was the champion, pancaking onto the pavers over and over again. To save my palms from yet more bloody contusions, I began wearing gloves. To deal with the aches and pains from the repeated falls, I took up yoga.

Late during my first year in the country, we saw an announcement for the inaugural Kuwait Desert Marathon, planned for the following November. We began training, following a weekly schedule of increasingly lengthy runs, interspersed with sprints and rest days. By September 2012, when we regrouped after our summer break, our longest runs were approaching marathon distances.

The marathon fee was 60 dinar, about $200. Late in October, a few weeks before the race, we drove over Mutla Ridge (at 460 feet above sea level, Kuwait’s Everest) into the northern desert to get a sense of what we were in for. One of the organizers met us there and explained the planned route, a loop that paralleled Kuwait Highway 80, the wide asphalt road that connects Kuwait City with Iraq. On February 26-27, 1991, during the brief American-led invasion that ended the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, the Iraqi army had used Highway 80 to make a panicked, disorganized retreat. Over 1,500 jeeps, water tankers, fuel tankers, tractor trailers, passenger cars and armored personnel carriers had clogged the six-lane road. Allied attack aircraft disabled the front and rear of the convoy, then spent the next several hours converting the traffic jam into a blackened graveyard of burnt corpses, exploded tanks and charred vehicles. American pilots called it “the Turkey Shoot.” Kuwaitis called it Tariq al-Mawt, “The Highway of Death.” Two decades later, the dead had been buried and the wreckage cleared. But there were still traces of the former carnage. The starting line for our race was next to a mound of shattered concrete, a former gas station.

Novembers in Kuwait can be quite cool: sweater weather. Race day, however, dawned warm. We all wore nylon singlets and running shorts. To prevent sunburn, we had coated our exposed areas with SPF 50. To prevent chafing, we had lubed up. To stave off exhaustion, we had stuffed our pockets with espresso energy gels. Everyone carried water bottles. We wore hats. John and Jamie wore long-billed running caps. I wore a cap with a Foreign-Legion style neck guard. David was bald and hatless.

“Sure you don’t want a hat?” Jamie asked.

“I never wear a hat.”

“It’s pretty sunny.”

“I’ll be fine.”

By 8 a.m., when the race was scheduled to start, the sky was clear and the temperature 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Some 400 runners milled around the starting line, a mixed group of Arabs, Asians, Europeans and Americans who were running the full and half marathons, the 10K run (which included US Ambassador Matthew Tueller) and the 3K fun run. Of this group, only 16 were running the full marathon. At the front were two wiry Jordanian runners—Salamah Al-Aqra’a and Mohamed Al-Suwaiti—red-shirted professionals who had been lured by the organizer to the event to give it some respectability and elan.

By 9 a.m., the mercury as registered on my friends’ Garmin running watches (I made do with a Timex) had climbed to 85. Blessedly, the humidity was low and I could feel a light breeze. Race officials fussed with race banners. I fussed with my race number: a piece of A4 copy paper attached to my jersey with safety pins. Next to an SUV marked “ambulance” with a magnetic sign and beneath a striped canvas tent, attendants arranged tables with a snack buffet and bottles of desalinated Abraaj water, Kuwait’s Evian. By the time the event sponsor, an elegant man in white dishdasha and idling Ferrari, concluded his speech about how the race would support diabetes funding, it was nearly 9:30.

“Diabetes is probably what he calls his car,” John muttered.

The sponsor fired the starting gun and we were off.

The pack quickly thinned. Jamie and David raced ahead, behind the Jordanians. John, knowing my slow pace and wary of the body-contorting cramps he had suffered in his previous marathon attempt, suggested we run together. This race he would finish.

The Kuwait desert is nothing like the majestic dunes of Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter, the Rub al-Khali. In Kuwait, it is hardpan, a flat expanse of dirt, sand, pebbles, rocks, scattered scrub bushes festooned with decaying plastic bags, rusting wire, broken concrete and, we had been told, unexploded depleted uranium munitions. Along the course, this cheerless landscape was punctuated by dust-covered solar arrays placed flat on the sand. Power cords lay across our route like trip wires stretched from the panels to low black Bedouin tents. To stay upright, we had to remain alert and keep our attention focused on the ground. As runners approached, Bedouin kids revved up their four-wheelers and carved doughnuts around us, created billowing clouds of choking dust, laughing as they shouted questions:

“Wain?”

“Kilo chem?”

“Enti may?”

Where are you going?

How far?

Want some water?

The continual exertion in the heat and aridity instantly evaporated our perspiration, caking us with white salt stains. The organizers had placed water stations at roughly 5-kilometer intervals, consisting of a plastic card table, several bricks of bottles, an Arab race official in jeans and t-shirt and a Filipino guy in scrubs and stethoscope, all baking in the sun. We would pause, the official would loop a colored elastic band around our wrists to indicate we had passed that waypoint, the medic would hand us two hot waters and we would trot on. By mile 10, my race number had disintegrated into ragged tendrils of paper pulp.

A regulation marathon is 26.2 miles. This race was a loop: 13-plus miles out and back along the same track. Long before John and I approached the halfway mark, the Jordanians passed us in the other direction. Ten minutes later, Jamie passed us, running strong. Five minutes after him, David followed, clearly struggling, his bald pate red and gleaming.

Not long after we had made the halfway turn, we caught up with him.

“You okay?” I asked.

David smiled weakly.

“You don’t look so good,” John said.

“Let’s get you the ambulance,” I added.

David looked up sharply, his eyes unfocused.

“No!” he muttered. “I’m finishing this thing.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“Absolutely!” He swayed a little and picked up his pace from a stumble to a stumble-trot.

At the next station, we pantomimed that our friend might be in trouble. We pointed. The officials nodded and gave us our water bottles and colored bands. We ran on. No ambulance appeared. The next station, and the next and the next were abandoned: a table, bands, bottles of stove-hot water but no personnel. And still no ambulance. I looked behind us. David was still running. For some reason, none of us were carrying our cellphones. David’s wife Christina was waiting at the finish. She could have easily driven up the Highway of Death and picked up her husband.

Suddenly, a black SUV with tinted windows swerved off the highway and roared up toward us, braking in a cloud of dust. A window rolled down. A male Arab face in baseball cap and mirrored shades smiled at us.

“Hot!” he said, gesturing at the sun.

“Yes,” I replied, bewildered.

“Ice!”

“Huh?”

“You like ice?”

“Yes!”

The stranger opened a cooler and handed me a steaming, football-sized chunk of ice. I thanked him and pointed behind us to the distant figure of David, shimmering in the heat haze.

“He likes ice,” I said.

The man gave me a thumbs up, closed the window, revved the engine and peeled away, spraying us with desert talcum.

John and I looked at each other. Looked at the ice. I scanned the ground and noticed a nearby concrete shard jutting from the sand. Wrapping the ice in my kepi, I smashed it against the cement a few times, breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces. I poured half into John’s hat, kept half for myself. We replaced our headgear and resumed running, ice water dribbling down our steaming heads. It felt glorious.

The final miles of the racecourse paralleled the Highway of Death. John and I began to walk-run-walk-run-walk. The sky was a brilliant blue, the sun an unblinking Sauron’s eye. Except for our breathing, the clump of our feet on the sand and the occasional blast of furnace air as vehicles shot by, the desert was quiet. It was nearly 2:30 in the afternoon when John and I sprinted across the finish line together, hands clasped high. Except for Jamie, Christina and a race official who handed us faux-bronze participation medals, the place was deserted. The sponsor and his Ferrari were gone, the buffet was gone, the ambulance was gone. All that remained were the stripped tent and several bricks of Abraaj water. Jamie handed us water bottles. Christina looked anxious.

“Where’s Dave?” she asked.

I sat down, pointed vaguely in the direction of Iraq, put my head between my knees and vomited.

“He’s coming,” John said.

Twenty minutes later, David staggered into view, crossed the finish line and collapsed, face first, onto the ground in front of the striped tent.

“We need to cool him off,” Christina said. “Get some water.”

“Water,” David repeated.

The only water around was in the bricks of sun-cooked Abraaj. Christina opened one and poured it over her husband’s head. Then another and another. Soon we were all opening and pouring, opening and pouring. Fortunately for David, he revived before we drowned him. Shakily, with Christina’s help, he managed to stand.

“That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he whispered.

Like frail men on an outing from their assisted living home, we doddered to the car, our medals around our salt-caked necks. Gathered, arms on shoulders. Smiled. Christina snapped a few photos with her iPhone before we piled into the SUV. As she drove us up Tariq al-Mawt across Mutla Ridge and back to Kuwait City, I looked out the window, marinating in the phenethylamine, endocannabinoids and β-endorphins that make long-distance running such an addictive sport. I tried to imagine what this quiet desolation must have been like in 1991, with US fighter jets raining death from the sky on the retreating Iraqi army, or in 2003 when American Shock and Awe rolled down this same highway for an unhappy tryst with Baghdad destiny. What I could not imagine in 2012 was that 14 years later, another American president would start another war of choice in the region, this time against Iran, inflicting more needless suffering and destruction on more innocent people. A new generation of Kuwaitis would endure, as the military euphemism goes, collateral damage. More hubris. More nemesis.

John opened a metal water bottle he had stashed beneath the seats. It was dripping with condensation. He took a long swig. Closed his eyes. Smiled.

“Ahhhhh,” he sighed and offered me the bottle. “Try some.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Kuwait Sunrise. Date rum and orange juice. I left it in the freezer last night.”

I made a face.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said, taking another pull.
I took the bottle. Tried a tentative swallow.

It tasted surprisingly good: syrupy, sweet, cold, with a kick that made my eyes water.

“You know,” John said, “according to my Garmin, we ran more than 26.2 miles.”

“How far?”

“27.”

“27?” David whispered.

“Guess the organizers don’t count so good,” Jamie said.

“Technically,” John said, taking another sip from the water bottle, “this was an ultra-marathon.”

The Jordanian runners had finished first and second, of course. Later I heard they complained that it had been the worst-organized race they had ever experienced. Of the 16 runners who started, only nine finished. Jamie was third. John and I were fifth and sixth. David was eighth. A Filipino runner, Rodel Argo, was last, crossing the finish line seven hours after we started.

The following year, we ran in the very well-organized Dubai marathon: race numbers on vinyl-coated paper; GPS chips in our shoes; bananas, gels and ambulances at every water station; mile markers and big digital clocks counting off elapsed time; porta potties, photographs of every runner crossing the finish line, cheering onlookers. This time, once I passed the 10-mile mark, the ache and numbness in my feet had escalated from intermittent to constant. Each step felt like someone was plunging a knife into my arch. Dubai was my last marathon.

We took a month off before returning to our early morning runs by the familiar cast of Corniche characters: the organ donors, the cats, the rats, the furtive lovers, the Odd Couple. The following year, John announced he was moving to a new school in China. Jamie and I put together a farewell video. We wanted to record goodbyes from everyone. Even the Odd Couple happily complied.

“Goodbye John! Goodbye!” They waved and smiled in front of Jamie’s phone, the ultramarine of the Gulf and a hazy azure sky gleaming behind them.

Afterward, we introduced ourselves and shook hands. Little Guy told us his name was Magid. Big Guy told us his name was Kasim. In our four years of greeting one another, it was our first actual conversation. Kasim asked us why we were in Kuwait and what we did for a living. We hesitated. But Magid and Kasim didn’t look like ISIS informers.

“You’re teachers?” said Magid, his smile widening. “Like us! We knew you were civilized people!”

Bryn Barnard is an artist, teacher and former ICWA fellow. He has worked with Far Eastern Economic Review, Asiaweek, National Geographic and NASA, and also with schools and universities in Kuwait, Korea, Singapore, the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. His books include Dangerous Planet: Natural Disasters That Changed History, Outbreak: Plagues That Changed History, The Genius of Islam: How Muslims Made the Modern World and The New Ocean: The Fate of Life in a Changing Sea.

Hungary’s opposition leader Peter Magyar announced plans on Monday for comprehensive change to reform democratic institutions, battle deep-seated corruption and restore his country’s commitment to the European Union after his Tisza Party’s historic landslide election victory on Sunday swept the authoritarian Prime Minister Victor Orban out of power after 16 years. It will take hard work, he said.

But voters who rejected Orban’s pro-Moscow, anti-EU rule on Sunday were still taking in the dawn of a new era for their country.

As election results rolled in yesterday evening, the capital Budapest surged with young people cheering and dancing. During an impromptu victory party that swelled beneath the national parliament, the building’s walls throbbed with the beat of a techno band staged between red, white and green lights.

Cheers rose as hundreds of phones lit up with Magyar’s Facebook message that Orban had telephoned him to concede.

As the news spread, the city’s long boulevards grew noisy with car horns and flag-waving partiers as young people made their way toward the parliament like an incoming tide.

It felt like a country achieving its independence rather than a mere election night. For the thousands of young people who have known only the power of Victor Orban, it was.

“It’s a new beginning for Hungary!” a first-time voter cheered. “We will have democracy!”

“They’ll stop stealing my money,” a young man said.

“We can stay in Europe!” his friend added.

On Friday night, musicians rallying the youth vote led chants of “Ruszkik Haza!”—Russians go home. During the weekend, many made references to the Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation in 1956, still memorialized in artworks around the city. Hungary’s rock stars exhorted young people to vote during a 7-hour concert in central Heroes’ Square.

Sunday saw a record 79.5 percent voter turnout, leading to Tsiza’s unprecedented supermajority of 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament. Magyar urged the current authorities on Monday to convene to parliament to form a new government “as quickly as possible” ahead of the May 5 deadline.

Elizabeth Wise is a former correspondent for The Associated Press and The Economist Group.

I entered my father’s date of birth as it appeared in his passport, November 15, 1947, and clicked Start. The website conflict calculator WarsinLebanon.com—launched after the latest combat into which Hezbollah dragged the country, an act of retaliation for the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—enables Lebanese citizens to discover exactly how many days of their lives have been spent in the shadow of conflict. In an instant, it provides a precise calculation and enumerates the main events of the time.

My father, who is nearing 80, lives with my mother in a small apartment my siblings and I rented for them in the Aley region of Mount Lebanon near Beirut. They have been there since the previous war, which began on October 8, 2023, when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel from Lebanon’s southern border in support of Hamas, a day after the massacre committed by Hamas fighters in Israel.

Entire lifetimes spent in wartime, calculated by the website in cold statistics, including 47.1 percent of my father’s: That amounts to exactly 36 years, 10 months, and 12 days—his life’s accumulated balance of conflict. War continues to carve furrows into his wrinkled skin with each missile and shell.

He was born one year before the Nakba (the Catastrophe), as Arabs describe it—when the State of Israel was declared and some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to become refugees. He has lived his entire life under the clouds of war, starting with skirmishes on the Lebanese-Israeli border in 1948 that led to the 1949 armistice. Conflict continued with the “mini” civil war of 1958, a symptom of the Cold War and regional struggle between Arab Nasserism—the secular, anti-imperialist ideology that emerged in the 1950s under the Egyptian president—and the Western powers (some of which had participated in what Arabs call the “Tripartite Aggression” against Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956).

Lebanon’s president at the time, Camille Chamoun, refused to sever ties with the West, declaring his support for the US-backed “Baghdad Pact” between Iraq, Turkey, Britain, Pakistan and Iran, aimed at containing Soviet expansion. It prompted civil conflict between Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims. The US military intervened, landing Marines on Lebanese shores. Although my father was a child of only 11 then, his memory stores many scenes and events from that upheaval.

Then, at the age of 20, he lived through the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which Arabs dubbed the Naksa (the Setback). My father was not a man of Arab nationalist leanings but amid the general frustration, he too felt the profound despondency of Arab defeat and Israeli victory. Two years later, he witnessed the legitimization of Palestinian armed action from south Lebanon via the Cairo Agreement between Yasser Arafat and the Lebanese army.

The south, where my father was born and raised, became a sanctuary for Palestinian fedayeen fighters to train and launch attacks against Israel. In his youth, he never felt the urge to engage in politics, join a party or bear arms under a militia. He always stood against weapons, even hunting rifles. He shunned my maternal uncle for months after he once left a Kalashnikov automatic rifle in his room in our house; my younger brother reached for it to play, setting off a burst of gunfire, the bullets lodging in the ceiling. That incident almost turned into a catastrophe. I remember my father’s expression of fear and his fury at my uncle. He passed his loathing of weaponry down to my siblings and me.

In 1973, war again erupted between the Arabs and Israel, and my father lived through its impact on Lebanon. No sooner had that regional war subsided than the “War of Others on Our Land” began, as many Lebanese call it. In fact, it was a civil war, which broke out in April 1975 and lasted until 1990. Fifteen years of checkpoints, kidnappings, bombings, sniper fire and “killing by identity card” as the sectarian violence came to be known. My father experienced it all, including the 1978 Israeli invasion of south Lebanon, known as “Operation Litani,” and a broader invasion in 1982 that reached the capital Beirut to forcibly expel the fighters of Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.

My father married my mother in that war, during a truce between two shellings. In their wedding photos, taken at a simple ceremony at my grandfather’s house, they look overwhelmed, exhausted and afraid. My mother smiles in those pictures, but I know well that behind her expression lay a genuine terror of war.

Often when the Litani River is mentioned in the news, she reminds me that she crossed that water holding me as an infant, fleeing north to escape Israeli soldiers. She could not swim and was afraid of the water. Her fear drove her across. She held no prophet’s staff nor did she walk upon water; it was horror and survival instinct that propelled her. The Israelis fired over the heads of the displaced people crossing the river, my mother remembers. In her terror, she dropped the bag containing my clothes and cloth diapers; she only wanted me to make it across. I was baptized in the waters of war.

I was my parents’ eldest, brought into the world during the conflict—just a few weeks after the February 6, 1984 uprising, when the Amal Movement militia, backed by the Syrian army, nullified the peace agreement with Israel the Lebanese parliament had approved on May 17, 1983. Then we lived through both “Wars of Elimination and Liberation” launched by Michel Aoun (who would later become president from 2016 to 2022) when he was an army commander—the first against the Christian Lebanese Forces militia, the second against the Syrian army between 1989 and 1990.

My mother was always more fragile than my father in their relationship with war. She would pray during every raid and bombardment in the ’90s, while we were growing up in the city of Nabatieh in south Lebanon. I remember her gathering my siblings and me, huddling with us in the narrow hallway of our house, away from the glass windows, murmuring her prayers from the Quran. My father was not religious; he would pace between the balcony and narrow corridor, stripped of supplications, bolstered only by sips of whiskey to confront the absurdity surrounding him.

In the summer of 1993, my father drove us in his old white Mercedes for hours along the coastal road from the south to Beirut, fleeing “Operation Accountability,” the offensive Israel launched to eliminate Hezbollah fighters. The car was heavy with suitcases, mattresses and my mother’s prayers. The scene repeated itself in April 1996 when we fled “The Grapes of Wrath,” known in Lebanon as the “April Aggression,” a 17-day campaign of the Israeli Defense Forces against Hezbollah.

In 2000, my father—like many other Lebanese—thought peace had finally arrived. Israel withdrew from the south and Hezbollah declared victory and “Liberation.” But Hezbollah’s “Divine Project” had only just begun. Its regional role controlling the state, its consequential choices and the fates of the Lebanese began to take shape following a speech delivered by party leader Hassan Nasrallah in the city of Bint Jbeil after Israel’s withdrawal. Nasrallah thanked two people and dedicated the “victory” and the liberated south to them: Ali Khamenei, the Iranian Supreme Leader, and Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian tyrant.

It wasn’t long before my father was displaced again. In 2006, after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers, waking the giant of war that had been slumbering for six years, my father was trapped with the family for days in the south before they managed to escape, piled into a small car stuffed with mattresses and blankets.

Between all these wars, my father lived through the bombings of terrorists from ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front that targeted Lebanon, roving political assassinations and civil wars both large and small. He was humiliated at the checkpoints of Lebanese militias and occupying soldiers—Israeli, Syrian and Palestinian. He has heard the impact of more bullets in his life than the number of white hairs on his head, which is thick with them. He survived possible death dozens of times, lurking in roadside bombs, shells and passing bullets. He has inhaled the smoke of some of those shells and missiles like the last drags of a cigarette; he smoked voraciously in shelters and on balconies overlooking destruction, stubbing out his butts as if they were the years crushed under the heel of a jackboot.

In October 2024, my father was on a fleeting visit to our village to check on our house when a major escalation occurred between Israel and Hezbollah. A good Samaritan gave him a ride to Beirut, joining a stream of people fleeing northward. They were stuck for over 12 hours in the traffic of displacement, an echo of the wars in which his entire life has been trapped since his birth in 1947—wars that continue to gnaw away at his life, day after day.

Amid the rubble of all the conflict, topped by the catastrophic Beirut port explosion in August 2020 and economic collapse, the Lebanese people were nevertheless pinning their hopes on a new era. It took shape at the beginning of 2025, following a ceasefire and talk of a “grand bargain” under which Hezbollah would finally agree to hand over its weapons to the state.

​With a new president and a technocratic government in place after decades of corrupt and ineffectual rule, my father—along with many Lebanese—felt it could finally be possible to break from the cycle of war and destruction. There was hope Lebanon would escape the regional “axis” conflicts for which innocent people have paid with decades of suffering.

​However, all hopes vanished when Israel resumed its airstrikes on the Iranian-backed militia and it became clear that Hezbollah’s talk of surrendering its arms had been no more than a lie. The group launched its rockets in retaliation for Khamenei, causing everything to collapse once again. Just like that, the “war counter” returned, stripping away still more days from my father’s life.

And now it was my turn to run my own birthdate through the website. I entered February 29, 1984, and hit Start. The result popped up: I have lost 62 percent of my life to war. Of my 42 years and 28 days on this Earth, 26 years and 29 days have been spent under the shadow of conflict.

I left Lebanon for good in January 2023, accepting a job offer in Washington, DC. I do not know if the last three years living abroad truly count toward that tally, although the weight of war at home follows me. I’ve returned to Beirut only once, in October 2023, after war had reignited. I went for 10 days to check on my parents, renew my passport and fly back. When I arrived and knocked on the door, my mother burst into tears as though she were seeing a child covered in blood and ash. She became a lake of tears, and I drowned in her. I struggled to stay afloat, trying to lift her up with me.

In the small apartment, my mother was forced to huddle with my father, my uncle, my aunts, my brother and my other brother’s wife and infant daughter. The war had tossed them all out of their homes in search of something—less than stability but better than death: survival.

I noticed my father lying on the living room floor, burying himself under two thick blankets while the rest of us ran a fan to try to break the unseasonable heat. His chills seem like the accumulation of decades of fires, wars and brutal massacres. Now, even in the warmth of a day like that hot one in October, when the news of yet another massacre blows from the television, he shivers with a cold no words of hope can heal.

Rami Al Amin is a journalist and multimedia producer for the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. He holds a master’s degree in Islamic-Christian Relations Studies from St. Joseph’s University in Beirut. His published books in Arabic include I Am a Great Poet, a poetry collection, The Facebook Folk and The Two Weeping Women: Biography of a Statue.

Editor’s introduction: A century ago, Russia and the rest of the neonatal Soviet Union were emerging from a decade of world war, revolution, civil war, foreign intervention and famine that left millions dead, and many more displaced and traumatized. After the October 1917 Bolshevik coup d’etat, the region was engulfed in violent conflict that pitted the Reds (Bolsheviks) against the Whites (a motley movement of monarchists, tsarist officers and other right-leaning forces mainly led by Admiral Alexander Kolchak). Fighting raged from the Baltic states and Poland all the way east to the Pacific Ocean. By the time it concluded in 1922, as many as 12 million people, mostly civilians, are believed to have been killed.

The USSR was proclaimed in late 1922, when the idealism that was part of the revolutionary period was succumbing to authoritarianism, political terror and, with Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, the rise of the dictator Josef Stalin. Some of the most probing insights into the complexities of those transitions came from the Siberian novelist Vladimir Zazubrin (1895-1937), according to the writer and critic Dmitry Bykov.

Bykov—one of contemporary Russia’s leading literary lights and author of biographies of Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky and the Soviet bard Bulat Okudzhava—argues that Zazubrin’s contribution is vital to our understanding of the early Soviet period. But his writing has largely been forgotten. Although popular in his time before he was swallowed by Stalin’s Great Terror in 1937, Zazubrin is so obscure today, there’s not even a page about him in the English version of Wikipedia. He was “posthumously rehabilitated” in 1957.

1

Vladimir Lenin and Maxim Gorky, two similarly prolific Russian writers of the first half of the 20^th century, agreed on many things and yet often quarreled. Despite his notorious sins, the Bolshevik leader had a developed taste for literature; Gorky, the leading Soviet writer, on the contrary—notwithstanding his widely lauded humanism—was less mature. The difference was particularly evident in their assessment of Vladimir Zazubrin (1895-1937), Siberia’s best writer, the greatest Russian chronicler of sexualized violence from whom readers and critics at the time expected brilliant success.

Lenin described Zazubrin’s Two Worlds (1921), a contestant for the first Soviet novel—which deals with the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution—as: “A very frightening, scary book; not a novel, of course, but a good, much needed book.” During a time of brutal violence, a “much needed” book could only be distressing in his calculus if it were to be objective about the time.

A radical innovator in politics, Lenin happened to have a remarkably traditional, even conservative understanding of literature; he wanted it to be realistic and useful. According to the novelist Tariq Ali, classicism was so deeply rooted in Lenin that it blocked him from appreciating many of the exciting new developments in art and literature that preceded and accompanied the Revolution.

Two Worlds reads like a succession of gruesome scenes that stirred the imagination of the 22-year-old Zazubrin during the war. Sadomasochistic episodes predominate. He is especially careful describing public executions, abuse of women and ubiquitous torture that makes the revolutionary Reds and counter-revolutionary Whites indistinguishable from one another. In one scene, he describes a shootout between a father and son on opposing sides during a brief let-up in skirmishes:

A broad-shouldered non-commissioned officer with a black beard slapped his side with his hand.

“Spiridon, you scoundrel, is that you?”

In an instant, Spirka recognized his father.

“It’s me, Dad, it’s me!”

The Reds and Whites, their eyes blazing with curiosity, looked on at the father and son.

“So, this means the little boy has raised a hand against his father? Eh? You’re a volunteer, aren’t you, cub?”

“I am, Daddy!”

“I left him at home, thought he’d help his mother with the household, but just look at what he’s done—he’s gone against his father!”

“I haven’t gone against you, Daddy—it’s you who flew at me, at the whole people, together with the officer scum, signed up as their flunky!”

The father exploded: “Don’t you dare talk back to me, lackey! Come over here this minute! Drop your rifle!”

Spirka laughed, patting himself below the belly: “Why don’t you get some of this instead, Daddy? Ho-ho-ho!”

“Ha-ha-ha! Good job letting your father have it like that, Spirka!” the Reds cackled.

The black-bearded man was choking with rage: “I’ll curse you, Spiridon, come to your senses!”

“We don’t give a damn about your curse, Daddy!”

The father raised his hand high: “You’re no son of mine anymore! Cursed you are, cursed forever...”

“You ain’t gonna shoot your daddy, though, Spirka—feel sorry for him, I reckon.”

Blood rushed to Spiridon’s face. He remembered how his father always brought him gingerbread from the market, remembered how he often carried him in his arms as a boy, taught him to ride a horse, saw him and the other kids off to the horses’ night grazing.

“He’s a volunteer for the bourgeois, he’s no father to me. He cursed me. No father means no father.”

For some reason, Spiridon tried to justify himself mentally in advance. The son quickly pulled the bolt, knelt down and fired. The bullet knocked his father’s cap right off. The father raised his rifle with trembling hands and responded to his son. The Reds and Whites silently watched the struggle. Completely confused, the black-bearded man was shooting without aiming, the rifle dancing around in his hands.

“Sonny,” he muttered, chambering a cartridge, “sonny, is that what you call sonny...”

Spiridon’s fourth bullet tore open his father’s side. The non-commissioned officer cried out, curled up on the ground. Medics ran to the wounded man.

“Be cursed, you patricide. A patricide is cursed, cursed, hrflfrihrrr...”

Isaac Babel’s “A Letter,” a better-known short story that deals with a similar conflict, appeared two years later. I don’t think it’s much better. For Zazubrin, the Revolution isn’t a political or social process, much less an economic one, but biological, smacking above all of perverted eroticism.

Sadomasochism is an exceptionally powerful narcotic from which it’s difficult to break free. Sexualized violence in particular is the central theme in Russian writing about the Civil War. Later, the torture conveyor belt of the Great Terror in the 1930s is otherwise difficult to explain in rational terms: Since investigating authorities could put anything they wanted into suspects’ interrogation records, they didn’t actually need them to confess. Nevertheless, torture appears to have been the principal occupation as well as secret pleasure of the secret police (at various times named the NKVD, KGB and today FSB). There was no pragmatic logic to its ongoing violence, inflicted with particular zeal on women and adolescents.

The orgiastic, ritualistic and maniacal nature of the country’s secret police is most fully and convincingly reflected in The March (1979) by W. S. Kuniczak—in my view, the finest novel about World War II. The KGB’s outrage on its publication was so intense that it attempted to discredit the author—a Pole who fled the 1939 invasion of his country and became an American citizen in the 1950s—by accusing him of being a covert agent. Later, they effectively banned him altogether: The Polish translation of The March appeared only in 2023; the Russian one will be published this autumn—abroad, of course.)

Reading Zazubrin, Lenin seems to have sensed something subterraneanly truthful in his attitude. Gorky, on the other hand, became angry. Discussing Zazubrin’s story “The Dormitory” in a letter to the author, he wrote: “[T]he reader draws a pessimistic and unfair conclusion: Under Soviet rule, sexual disarray is exacerbated by congested living conditions...” Then: “In your descriptions, you fall into the most vicious ‘Zolaism’ [i.e., discredited naturalism in the manner of Emile Zola]—vomit, snot, sweat, chamber pots, etc. What is that for?... You write badly and care little for precision, for clarity. Also, there’s too much ‘blackness’ in the story.”

In fact, Gorky was a fine one to talk. In emigration abroad before the Revolution, prior to taking up the Party line and becoming known as the father of Socialist Realism—the accepted Soviet literary style—he wrote “The Watchman” (1922), a story with enough filth and depravity to make Zazubrin seem tame. Gorky’s famous essay “On the Russian Peasantry” (1922) also brims with examples of sickening brutality not unlike Zazubrin’s. Intended for the Western reader, it was never published in the USSR. In post-Soviet Russia, it appeared only in 2023 in the specialized Literary Studies Journal.

2

In 1925, Zazubrin wrote a nonfiction booklet titled By Untraveled Roads, about an airplane trip across Siberia he had joined as a reporter for the literary journal Sibirskie ogni. The purpose was to spread Communist propaganda among the peasantry and raise money for aircraft construction.

Zazubrin had his own agenda, however. He wanted to see the place his idol Dostoevsky had briefly visited in the 1850s, when he was imprisoned in Siberia for four years. Even more important, Zazubrin was gathering material for what he intended to become his second novel but ended up in a story called “The Sliver.”

Written in 1923, it remained unpublished until 1989 because of its ideological ambivalence and the terrifying intensity with which Zazubrin describes how the Cheka, the early Soviet secret police, disposed of perceived enemies of the Revolution. He was especially interested in the story of Grigory Rogov, a pro-Soviet leader of Siberian partisan fighters, about whom he spoke to a veteran named Filipp Volkov:

Volkov trembles, cries, grinds his teeth, beats his chest with his fist.

“Believe me or not, dear Comrade Zazubrin, I was in Yakutsk together with Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], I was. [His fellow Bolshevik leader Mikhail] Kalinin, he was there, too. Oh, what a head Lenin has! He takes three steps around the room and there, he makes up his mind. Kalinin, he takes three days to do as much thinking as Lenin does. Believe it or not, dear comrade, politics took me from the Baltic Fleet to Yakutsk for penal labor. Me, I got there in the year seven, and Lenin arrived after me.” (I was told the same thing, word for word, by another Rogov man, Kopylov Vasily, who passed himself off as an electrician from the Putilov factory and a Party member since 1906.)

“Believe it or not, this is where those rods, those whips remain—right there.”

Hysterically, Volkov bares his back.

“Here, dear comrade, is what they did to us. And Kolchak’s men [loyal to White leader Admiral Alexander Kolchak], they cut off my wife’s breast. Well, of course, I was dousing them with gasoline and was burning them alive by the prison. This prison in the fortress, I burned it down with my own hands. As for the policemen Milyaev and Petrov, we sawed them up, my wife and I, and I keep that saw. Ah, dear comrade, I look at it sometimes—that, I say, was my power! I look at it and I kiss it.”

I ask to buy this saw for the Novonikolaevsk museum. Volkov agrees.

3

Grigory Rogov is a fairly well-known historical character of the civil war. Born in 1883 in the central Siberian village Zhulaniha, he had six children—equal numbers of boys and girls—and a relatively small household. He worked as a contractor in church construction and traded in liquor, fought in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and later, during World War I, rose to the rank of non-commissioned officer in a railway battalion. He was awarded three crosses of St. George, a military honor for courage.

After the February Revolution of 1917 [which overthrew the tsar and established a provisional government until the Bolsheviks seized power that fall], Rogov joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party; after the October uprising, he sided with the Bolsheviks. (He seems to have instinctively chosen parties and directions that enabled him to indulge his sadistic inclinations.) In 1918, when the Red Army was forced from the city of Biysk in the Altai region of western Siberia, signaling the temporary end of Soviet power there, Rogov established an underground partisan detachment of peasant anarchists. His reputation was of a brute who rejected any kind of discipline. The group grew; by autumn, when Kolchak declared himself Russia’s supreme ruler, it numbered more than 10,000 men.

The following June, an attempt was made to “Bolshevize” his detachment, or bring it under Communist control; Rogov and those remaining loyal moved to the small town of Kuznetsk southeast of Moscow, where they proceeded to carry out a massacre that was to become the main object of Zazubrin’s interest. He describes it in By Untraveled Roads:

Of the 4,000 inhabitants of Kuznetsk, 2,000 fell on its streets. They did not die in battle. They were simply led out of their houses, unarmed, then stripped and hacked to death with sabers right there at the gates. Especially “eminent” ones, and “persons of spiritual rank” were killed in the cathedral.

Rare was a woman or girl in Kuznetsk who escaped vicious rape.

People were chopped up, so to speak, “according to their class.”

To wit: soft hands—chop, a ring on a finger or traces of one—chop, a [Bolshevik political] commissar—chop.

A contractor in church construction under the tsar, a non-commissioned officer and a holder of a Cross of Saint George in the German war, Rogov became “red,” became a “revolutionary” during the Revolution. This “red revolutionary” pillaged, burned down churches, razed entire villages to the ground with fire and sword, plundered cities.

Rogov always tortured those who were executed—chopped hands and legs off living people, cut off their genitals, burned them alive. A curious detail: Files from local archives were almost always used as the fuel for bonfires (the most valuable Kuznetsk archive perished in flames).

But for all the straightforward primitiveness of the “class approach” to people, unimaginable confusion governed the head of this “revolutionary.” Thus, he didn’t burn, didn’t touch a single church that he himself had built. When joining with regular troops, he began to exterminate our commanders and commissars. His motives, of course, were the simplest: commissar means boss, boss means oppressor—chop.

By December 1919, Rogov had become a complete maniac; at that stage of his descent, Kuznetsk fell to the Bolsheviks. According to the prominent Russian physician Lev Shcheglov, who examined the connection between social and sexual Russian histories, the main goal—and ultimate delight—of every true maniac is self-destruction. (What can a superman strive for if not murdering a superman?)

Rogov’s final path was all-but predetermined: When the Soviet authorities began to correct what they called “excesses” in official language, they acted no less cruelly and violently. He understood he could not surrender: The Volkov couple’s sawing seemed it would be child’s play compared to what would be in store for him. He reasonably chose to shoot himself on July 3, 1920.

4

“The Sliver” immortalized Zazubrin. In 1992, the story was brought to the screen by the director Alexander Rogozhkin in a movie titled The Chekist. It speculates about what drives violence—not unlike Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial film Salò, through which the director appears to explore fascism’s sadistic blood lust. But the purpose may be closer to what, according to the composer Alexander Goldenweiser, Leo Tolstoy said about The Pit, a novel by Alexander Kuprin centered on prostitution: “[I]n exposing, he enjoys, and this cannot be hidden from a person of taste.” The pages of “The Sliver” almost physically exude the smell of fresh blood and raw meat. Reading it becomes a guilty pleasure, and the reader may feel antipathy toward the author, who clearly knows more about Russia, himself and even this very reader than is good for them all.

For Zazubrin, the Revolution’s violent underside overshadowed every other topic. It should be noted in all fairness that the point of the Revolution wasn’t actually to achieve social justice as stated but have a bloody feast and arrange, after long years of dull and boring timelessness, a banquet of the basest, most executioner-minded instincts.

Instead of its stated aim of destroying the old order and building a new one, something that fascinated and captivated Lenin, the Revolution focused on collateral executions, rape, public hangings and other erotic sadism. Exactly what had taken place during the French Revolution 130 years earlier. The Jacobins were also crazy about public executions and completely neglected the economy, diplomacy and agriculture. But honestly, how can one fight the addiction of sadomasochism with agronomy, however fruitful it may be?

I remember from my Soviet Young Pioneer childhood an article in the principal Communist youth newspaper, Komsomolskaya pravda, about a group of schoolchildren playing Gestapo. The author naively asks why they wouldn’t play with stuffed animals instead. Well, precisely because they were getting such a kick out beating a classmate. There’s no doubt that the next Russian revolution, when it comes, will also be accompanied by civil war because of the eternal passions and forces in Russian society. That war will also be accompanied by sadism with no impunity.

It was telling last September when many thousands of Russians in and outside the country took to social media to discuss the mastectomy of one of President Vladimir Putin’s biggest propagandists, the Russia Today editor Margarita Simonyan. Describing her own diagnosis, Simonyan referenced Nazis severing the breasts of young Soviet female fighters. That image is embedded in the Russian subconsciousness. In that sense, the saw used to dismember Kolchak’s supporters was the worthiest exhibit in the museum of the Russian Revolution, whose heart of darkness was Rogov’s Kuznetsk.

Zazubrin’s sexualized violence eventually contributed to his downfall. “The Dormitory,” where Gorky saw “Zolaism,” exposed him to a dangerous dressing-down. In 1923, the proletarian critic G. Lelevich accused him, characteristically of those times, along political, not literary lines:

We have not yet had such a shameful, disgusting, slobbering lampoon on the Revolution, on the Communist Party. This syphilitic delirium of a man who managed to turn the local organization of the RCP [Russian Communist Party] into some kind of continuous brothel... The reader, after reading this dirty story, is left with the nightmarish impression that the Revolution, that the Party has rotted to the core, and one must flee from this refuge of lepers.

Cursed and forbidden by the authorities, Zazubrin was forced in the early 1930s to write about industrial production. How can such a topic be of interest to someone so seriously poisoned by the times, who evoked the executions of naked beauties that fill “The Sliver?”

Although Zazubrin tried resisting, he eventually accepted the doctrine of Socialist Realism. He wrote a novel about collectivization in Siberia, approved by Gorky and other official critics. It was inevitably inferior to his earlier work despite his craftsmanship. At the height of the Great Terror in 1937, Zazubrin was arrested and shot; so were G. Lelevich, the critic’s father and, later, his son. Indeed, almost all writers, theorists and Party figures who had been of any importance in the ’20s were shot in the ’30s.

Is it possible to find a way out of this meat grinder? It’s still grinding. The author of this essay has been declared a “foreign agent” by the current authorities, as well as an extremist and terrorist. He has been prosecuted for discussing the shelling of civilians in Ukraine’s Kharkiv in a radio interview, and sentenced in absentia to seven years in prison. In 2019, he was poisoned on a plane. He’s been able to write all this only because he left Russia, jumping off the merry-go-round just in time.

In Kuznetsk, they try not to remember the violence of December 1919. A rare article in the local newspaper Kuznetsky rabochiy from 2021 reads:

The victims of the massacre were buried in the old Kuznetsk cemetery. And it is now...destroyed. In its place, the abandoned Garden of Aluminum Workers stands empty. The swings and carousels have disappeared; people do not make merry.

Lenin and Gorky may have had their differences, but they did agree on some things. Among them was a conviction that the world and its people could and should be remade by whatever means necessary. If violence was needed, it had to be used.

That attitude, very much in vogue in Russia, is spreading around the globe. The Revolution’s sadomasochistic horrors are far more relevant than we might believe them to be.

Dmitry Bykov is a US-based Russian poet, writer and literary critic who has written biographies of Boris Pasternak, Bulat Okudzhava and Maxim Gorky.

Editor’s note: Scott Erich was an Institute of Current World Affairs fellow in Oman in 2015 and 2016, when he examined the Sultanate’s society and history, together with cultural, political and economic ties across the Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. This dispatch was written from Khasab, at the southern shore of the Strait of Hormuz in December 2015. Some of the fears he mentions have since come to pass.

For centuries, Oman’s inhabitants have lived at the mercy of the ocean, drawing their livelihood from fishing and seaborne trade. Nowhere is that more evident than on the Musandam Peninsula, the country’s lonely exclave that reaches out toward Iran. Twenty percent of the world’s oil floats past its shores each day, past coves and inlets where Omanis live in stone villages accessible only by boat, making Musandam feel alternately like it is at both the center and edge of the world.

Geologically, the peninsula resembles a spike that pushes into Iran’s Hormozgan province, creating a divot near Bandar Abbas, that region’s capital and largest city. It is a mountainous, rugged and unforgiving landscape. Unlike the rest of the Hajar Mountains, Musandam has no coastal plain. Waves crash at the base of the mountains, in deep, narrow channels that resemble fjords (hence the somewhat confusing ecotourism tagline: “Norway of the Middle East”). As an exclave, Musandam is boxed in along its southern border by the Emirates, with just three overland crossings. The paved roads to the border checkpoints were sealed only in the 1990s, giving vital overland (rather than just sea) lifelines for this otherwise remote outpost.

Oman’s historical suzerainty over Musandam—itself a longer story about tribal allegiance and sheikhly dominions—became a strategic coup for the sultanate with the advent of oil and shipping in the region. It’s significant that Musandam comprises the entire southern half of the Strait of Hormuz, the erstwhile gateway to the Persian Gulf and waterway that the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has called the “world’s most important chokepoint.”

The EIA has estimated that 20 percent of all oil transported by sea passes through the strait, a total of 17 million barrels per day. The designated shipping lane that cuts through Hormuz is like a superhighway: a 2 mile-wide inbound lane, a 2 mile outbound lane, and a 2 mile median between. A constant armada of Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs), Ultra Large Crude Carriers (ULCCs), and supercontainers squeeze through the strait each day, with a steady swarm of fishermen and small-scale merchants ducking and weaving in their wakes. The lanes are largely within Omani territorial waters but also within Iran’s Air Defense Identification Zone (which is as subjective as the name implies).

The port of Khasab, Musandam’s largest town, is about 40 miles by sea from Iran’s shores, and about 65 miles from Bandar Abbas. Musandam was once part of Ormus, a medieval Persian seafaring kingdom that was eventually folded into the Portuguese empire. Bandar Abbas and Hormuz Island were, conversely, once leased to the Sultan of Muscat. That long history gave rise to Kumzari, an endangered language derived from Persian, Arabic, Portuguese and Hindi that is spoken in contemporary Musandam and the islands of southern Iran.

I went to Khasab hoping to learn more about what has been called “the most important nowhere on earth.” My ferry from Muscat was canceled due to choppy seas; instead, I caught an Oman Air flight to Khasab Air Base, an Omani Royal Air Force installation. A small building on the base serves as the commercial airport but the facility is staffed entirely by airmen save for a single Oman Air representative.

There are no taxis in Khasab so I walked the 6 kilometers from the air base to the port, where I had arranged to stay. Like many villages of Oman, goats wander indiscriminately throughout the town’s dusty streets and date palms tower above village walls. That night, as I ate fish kebab at an Iranian restaurant near the port, I heard a voice calling over to me.

“Siddiqi!” yelled a man smoking a cigarette, using the Arabic for “my friend.” He wore a Members Only jacket over his dishdasha and his turban was sloppily tied in the Bedouin style, cocked slightly to one side.

“Aywa!” I blurted mid-bite: “Yes!” We exchanged the usual greetings as his friends sat agape; Arabic-speaking Westerners are far less common in Musandam than Muscat.

“Ta’al, ta’al bil shai,” he said, signaling for me to join them for a cup of tea. He rose as I brought over my plate of fish and warmly introduced himself to me as Ahmed. A waiter brought a fresh pot of tea and empty cups, each of which had nabat (rock candy sugar) in it in the Iranian fashion. Ahmed explained to me how he had tea just like this when he visited Shiraz, something he seemed proud to tell me.

He and his friends were all fishermen and seafaring entrepreneurs, each with his own boat used for fish, tourists and hauling goods between Musandam’s many coves. They insisted on paying for my meal and giving me a ride back to my hotel, which was only a short walk away. As is typical of such encounters, I ended up spending the whole evening with them as they went about their evening errands and preparations for the next day.

The first errand: visiting every fish market in and around Khasab searching for kan’aad (Spanish mackerel or kingfish) for a fisherman named Abdullah’s clients for the next day’s boat trip. The clients were Emiratis, and kan’aad is a favorite there. As we rode around in a Toyota SUV, Abdullah was wringing his hands worrying they wouldn’t be able to find any. Finding none, they started calling restaurants, asking the kitchen staff if they could buy a fish from them.

Later, we stopped at another hotel in Khasab, which lies just around the other side of the cove from the main port and is geared toward Western tourists. We joined another table of seamen who were smoking and peering into their phones when an Italian man, looking lost, came out and was beckoned by one of our tablemates. It was an arranged meeting, I quickly learned, for the Italian to book a trip on Ahmed’s boat. I ended up being the de facto translator between them, and they agreed on 30 Omani Rials, or $75 for a trip to Kumzar Island, the northernmost tip of Musandam that looks over the strait.

As we drove through Khasab passing its Portuguese-era fort, Ahmed and Abdullah argued about which wind would be blowing on the way back from Kumzar tomorrow: the shamal or the suheili. When they took me to my hotel—nearly four hours after tea at the Iranian restaurant—a roadblock prevented them from getting closer than within a few blocks. The male half of a large wedding party was lined up on the street, its members beating drums, waving shiny swords above their heads and singing tribal songs, so we said our goodbyes and I passed through the festivities.

The next morning, I walked along the port’s jetty, watching fishing boats and tourist dhows ready themselves for the day. Khasab and Musandam are frequently associated with the smuggling trade with Iran, something I was eager to learn more about. I arranged to join some Omani tourists on a boat headed for Telegraph Island—named for the British communications station that once connected Bombay with London—and hoped that I would be able to catch a glimpse of some smugglers on the way.

I had heard that smuggling was on the wane, partly due to the resounding success of the Jebel Ali Free Zone in Dubai and the loosening of sanctions on Iran in light of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran signed during the Obama Administration). During the peak of smuggling, some estimates indicated that hundreds if not thousands of Iranian skiffs had arrived in Khasab each morning, small boats loaded with goats and fresh produce. On the return journey to Iran, they brought cigarettes, cosmetics, air conditioners and bulk food items like cooking oil, tea and flour. Khasab’s own marketplaces reflect this orientation: At the glistening new Lulu Hypermarket, air conditioners and washing machines dominate the appliances section, filling spaces labeled for fridges, stoves and microwaves.

That morning, I joined a group of Omanis from Nizwa, a few hours south of Muscat, who had come to Musandam to see the fjords. They were bundled up in jackets and winter hats, bravely facing the 65-degree temperatures. A Khasabi onboard told me he was showing his Nizwi friends around. We laughed as our wooden boat hit rough currents, creaking and moaning in the waves.

Thinking I might learn about the smugglers from my Khasabi boatmate, I asked about muharaboon, Arabic for “smugglers,” which unfortunately carries a more criminal connotation than the English. My new friend wagged his finger at me, saying “smuggling” was not illegal in Oman. Omanis don’t take boats to Iran, he told me, they just sell goods to the Iranian men who come to Khasab in the morning and leave in the evening. By his reckoning, it’s the Iranians who were breaking laws, not the Omanis. I could see how it might be exhausting to explain this intricate system of illicit international trade to curious outsiders and didn’t press the matter further; later, I overheard him talking about goats, electronics and cigarettes while pointing out a skiff to his friends from Nizwa.

The scholar Michael Benz has observed that most of the allure around smuggling in Khasab seems to emanate from travel writers and journalists who “systematically try to sound adventurous and mysterious” in their dispatches. To the more neutral observer, the industry is fairly quotidian. Shops in what locals call the “Iranian souq” are all licensed as import-export businesses and operate wholly within Omani law. At the port, trucks carrying goods to be sold to the Iranians pass through a Royal Oman Police checkpoint and a customs depot where their goods are weighed and taxed. For the three days I spent in Khasab, I saw no more than a few dozen boats that were obviously smugglers. And of those, I caught a glimpse of only one instance of a truck offloading its goods onto the dock to be sent to Iran: crates of Lipton tea. Iranians who come to Khasab risk their lives taking small boats on the high seas; to Omanis, they are just like any other guest workers or passers through, and just the most recent iteration of an interconnected, centuries-old form of trade.

Many writers have called the Omani government’s stance on smuggling a “blind eye,” which seems appropriate, considering the otherwise friendly relationship the sultanate has with Tehran. In December 2015, Oman and Iran held joint military exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, the latest in a series of occasional war games held by the two countries. Joint agreements were signed in both 2013 and 2015 to boost military ties between them, drawing the ire of perennially suspicious Western observers. Iran, for its part, claims it wants to be able to secure safe passage for shipping.

Iran’s state-run English language service Press TV covered the war games, reiterating that “Iran and Oman are both in charge of maintaining security and stability on the two sides of the Strait of Hormuz,” a fact many Western governments are loathe to remember. Iran has a long history of anti-Western and anti-GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) rhetorical grandstanding, and makes no exceptions for discussing the strait, which it has often threatened to close.

In April 2015, the container ship Maersk Tigris lumbered past the island of Kumzar when bullets whizzed over its deck. Within minutes, members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps had boarded the ship and redirected its course for Bandar Abbas. The ship and crew were detained by the military over a grievance issued by an Iranian court against the Maersk corporation, over containers it says were mishandled (and ultimately impounded) in Dubai in 2005. It was strange timing, on the eve of a breakthrough between the nuclear deal negotiators, and seemed less about the grievance with Maersk and more about reminding the West that the Iranian military has an expansive vision of its maritime jurisdiction. Oman played no role and offered no comment.

Many analysts have speculated that Iran will seek to control or even invade Musandam, giving it control of both sides of the strait. That seems unlikely. Khasab often feels like a military installation first and a port town second. The air force base takes up half the village, and Oman’s Royal Navy and Defense Ministry likewise have a substantial presence. Despite Oman’s close ties with Iran, it is also a direct and valued ally of the United States, and the US aircraft carriers that float around the Gulf would no doubt come to Oman’s assistance in the event of a crisis.

But considering Iran’s potential for increased antics, bypassing the strait is a logistical puzzle that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have all laid out plans to solve. Only the Emirates has the port of Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman side of the strait. But Fujairah’s overland pipeline is inadequate to transport quantities of oil from the UAE comparable to its loading terminals in the Gulf.

Similarly, the Omani government has poured billions of dollars into the redevelopment of its ageing ports and the construction of an entirely new deepwater port and free zone in Duqm, a fishing village of a few hundred people before construction began. With Duqm, the idea is that overland pipelines and trains for cargo from the UAE and Saudi Arabia might ultimately give them a way to circumvent the strait entirely and attract Chinese investments. Oman has thus hung its future ambition on the idea that it can be a strategically useful node in the logistics economy.

Until then, Musandam lends economic and political power and responsibility to Oman, gesturing at the sultanate’s maritime past and giving it a voice in contemporary geopolitics. The world’s superpowers and biggest corporations have all spent time worrying about the narrow stretch water offshore from Musandam, and many have expressed relief over Oman’s temperament of security and stability.

As the Nizwis and I arrived at Telegraph Island in our wooden dhow, deep in one of the rocky fjords of the Musandam, I looked out over the water as the Khasabi told me about a battle between the Portuguese and the Omanis in the 1600s.

“Makaan istratijia,” one of the Nizwis muttered. A strategic place.

Scott Erich is a visiting assistant professor at Washington College. His ICWA fellowship (Oman 2015-2016) explored the intersection of culture and rapid development, including ethnographic research on visitation rituals and the maritime history of the region. Scott researched Omani and Emirati fishermen facing environmental and industrial challenges for his doctorate in anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center. He also holds a certificate in Arabic language and cultures from the University of Chicago and a BA from Gettysburg College.

When I was very little, my mother owned one pair of stiletto sandals. For years, they were her only pair of fancy shoes. They had tiny flower-shaped perforations in the toe caps and thin leather ankle straps with minuscule shiny buckles. They were eggshell blue. Mama saved them for special occasions: a wedding, a symphony. There existed, in my mind, no more elegant thing in the world.

At first, when I would step into them, my feet fit almost entirely inside the pale blue toe boxes. But my feet grew, and when my heel reached midway up the arch, my mother said I would break the outsole and forbade me from putting them on. After that, just to touch something so feminine, so graceful, I would kneel in the anteroom of our Leningrad apartment on the old pile carpet, which it was my job to clean by coating it in spent tea leaves and then brushing them off with a short broom of bound straw, and slide my hands down the beige insoles smoothed by my mother’s fanciest journeys. The way the worn leather cooled the heels of my hands; the slightest indentations scalloped out by Mama’s toes and metatarsophalangeal joints under my fingertips.

Is it okay to think of this in Auschwitz? There is a display, in Block 5 of the Nazi concentration camp, of shoes. Heaps of them: children’s shoes, sandals, wing tips, winter boots, Mary Janes, a lady’s single red espadrille. The museum guide calls the exhibit “Deportees’ Shoes.” I read that there are 110,000 shoes here. This means someone must have counted the shoes, to know how many there are. I think of the many people who would have done the counting. First, the prisoners already interned when the shoes were confiscated from the new arrivals, deportees made to work in the camp until they could work no more, whose own shoes had been tallied by some previous prisoners. Then the Red Army soldiers, who had fought and killed and mourned their dead for months and possibly years before arriving in Auschwitz, where they were made to inventory the shoes. Then the conservators in the museum’s employ. I imagine slipping my hand into the red leather espadrille.

At the exhibit, I try to force my mind to see everything at once, to take it all in. But my mind rebels; it scatters, it wanders off, and then it is gone and the ghosts that have been stored in my eyes for years rise in flashback hopscotch spasms:

The mountain of shoes in a bombed-out school in Beslan; they have been sitting in the open only a year, but already they look the same as the shoes in Block 5, flat and halfway rotten; they are all children’s shoes; they belong, belonged, to some of the 1,100 students who were held hostage in the school gym rigged with homemade bombs. It was early September, hot; the hostage takers, who demanded that Russian troops withdraw from Chechnya, allowed the children to remove their shoes. They also allowed the boys to take off their woolen navy uniform blazers; the girls had to keep their dresses on, for modesty. After three days (three is a magical number, a number from a folktale), Russian special forces fired a tank gun at the gym; the blast and the explosions it triggered killed or wounded most of the children and almost all of their captors. The gym mostly collapsed. But the foyer remained, and for at least a year the shoes and the blazers remained in the foyer, in two separate piles, side by side, I remember each being as tall as my chest. Unlike the ones in the “Deportees’ Shoes” exhibit, these shoes were not arranged for viewing: They were left behind. Maybe the children’s mothers were too busy tucking in flowers on the tombstones to claim them. Maybe they were too devastated to claim them, the way the parents of the four boys from Forty Meters Street, my neighbors for a year in Mazar-i-Sharif, were too devastated to claim the mismatched sandals of their children. The boys had been playing in a ditch and saw the sheening curve of a shell—it could have been an aerial bomb left over from the Soviet occupation, or a projectile from one of the many times Mazar-i-Sharif changed hands in the internecine wars that followed, or an antitank mine the Taliban had buried when the Americans invaded, or an unexploded American bomb; impossible to know now—and they poked at it. The shock wave shattered windows five houses down the street, in both directions. My hosts and I heard the blast from our house, 10 blocks away. By the time we arrived to pay our respects, the men of Forty Meters Street had taken the boys’ remains to the parents’ homes and had begun to clean. They scraped the children’s blood off the dirt road with shovels, but blades fell off old handles with a clink, as though iron, too, failed in the face of such heartache. They scoured the children’s blood off their clothes under the corner water pump. And then a man picked up five singed flip-flops and dropped them into a ditch. Five. I remember the odd number.

I see a pair of a child’s flip-flops in other hands, a woman’s. She holds them out to me, one on each palm; they are that small. They belonged to her young son, she says, her boy, her little boy, who picked up a yellow cluster bomb an American warplane had dropped in his backyard. The cluster bomb had been the brightest thing in the village.

I see another woman holding one shoe, an adult leather sandal. The desert outside Babylon sags, similar to the way the desecrated earth of Birkenau sags with the ashes of the dead, but no valance of fog presses discolored grass over the mass graves. On the contrary, it is blindingly sunny, the earth is arid—arid, from the Latin arēre, “to be dry, like ashes,” from the proto-Germanic askon; both come from the Proto-Indo-European as, “to burn.” Scorching May wind blows tufts of hair against our bare ankles. (In Auschwitz, the hair of the dead is on display in Block 4. Visitors are not allowed to photograph the hair.) Not far from here, God jumbled men’s tongues and made us strangers to one another. Now, a single backhoe is excavating the remains of the hundreds of people Saddam Hussein’s secret police murdered in this field, and sometimes where the digging bucket jabs at the earth, it scoops several skeletons at once, and sometimes just pieces of a skeleton, and sometimes skeletons break. Or maybe they are already broken, from before. Spectral people walk among the remains, looking for relatives. Unthinking, with the tip of my shoe, I pry out of the soil what looks like a pottery shard and turn it over. An occipital bone. Immediately, a man appears and swiftly and silently scoops it into his hand, and walks away. In the distance, an old woman bends down, picks up a flat rotten leather sandal with both hands, brings it so close to her face that I think she is about to kiss it, then places it carefully back down on the ground. It is somebody else’s dead son’s sandal, not hers.

In the preface to their anthology of writing about the weather, Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan describe meteorology as “the art of looking up.” What is the word for the cursed art of looking at the detritus of our violence and our sorrow? The art of contemplating fundamentally human nature, of asking questions, filling voids, imagining and disturbing?

Literature.

Excerpt from To See Beyond. Copyright © 2026 by Anna Badkhen. Published by Bellevue Literary Press: www.blpress.org. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Anna Badkhen is the author of eight books of nonfiction, including To See Beyond and Bright Unbearable Reality, longlisted for the National Book Award. Born in the Soviet Union and a former war correspondent, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award for Excellence in Peace and Justice Journalism, among other honors. She is an artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia. For more information, visit www.annabadkhen.com or www.instagram.com/annabadkhen.

I had two reactions on seeing the results of last year’s USA Today award for best fast-food fried chicken. First, suspicion. When I saw Popeyes—the bona fide, bone-in crispy gold standard—languishing at the bottom, I wondered if someone had fallen asleep at the wheel. Rankings are subjective, sure, but this one seemed like a clerical error.

My second reaction was respect. The underdog, Jollibee, claiming the No. 1 spot is genuinely impressive—two years in a row, no less. The Philippines-based chain has a tiny presence in the United States compared to the fast-food juggernauts on the list. Its cheerful ethos and odd food pairings would seem to destine it to an uphill battle for the hearts of a culinary-conservative American crowd, myself included.

So I took the 7 train out to Woodside, Queens to Jollibee’s first New York location on a cold gloomy day. Listening to the loud metallic racket of the elevated track, I knew I’d made it to the Little Manila neighborhood. A gaggle of smiling Filipinos stood on the street, snacking on butter mamóns, Filipino sponge cakes. Pinoy (the catch-all term for Filipino cuisine) bistros, remittance centers and mom-and-pop groceries selling soy sauce and Filipino-style chicharon—crispy fried pork—line Roosevelt Avenue, also recognized as José Rizal Way, after the country’s national hero who worked to end Spanish colonial rule. I spotted a large, cheerful cartoon bee with a wide smile and white chef’s hat: Jollibee’s mascot, part-comic strip, part-icon.

Inside, Filipinos in matching Bass Pro Shop trucker hats were wrapping spaghetti around their forks as teens collected large brown take-out bags. A cheerful employee took my order: Chickenjoy fried chicken and gravy, Jolly Spaghetti, a side of adobo rice and a mango coconut quencher. I sat at a communal table with stools, next to a family whose dad—chicken in one hand, phone in the other—didn’t seem to notice, or mind, his daughter’s face smothered in red sauce.

A lady named May, with deep jowls and short wispy hair, sat across from me with a nearly identical order. “It’s nice to feel at home,” she said as she dipped a drumstick into a brown cup of gravy. A registered nurse in her 50s originally from Ilocos Norte in northwest Philippines, she has lived in New York for the last 20 years. She described her Sunday routine: calling her family back home, going to Zumba class and then coming to Jollibee. She likes meeting people and speaking in her native Ilocano or the national language, Tagalog, she told me. One Sunday here, she ran into a classmate she hadn’t seen since childhood.

I cracked open my box of Jolly Spaghetti, bemused by the bright red tomato sauce with coarse slices of hot dogs and bits of ground meat inside, topped with cheddar cheese. The dish looked like mid-century childhood comfort food from the Midwest, not what you might expect to find in a Southeast Asian archipelago. But as I slurped up sweet bits of the Bolognese adaptation, the provenance made sense.

Processed American staples such as burgers and Spam were popularized under the US occupation of the Philippines. During World War II, a shortage of tomatoes prompted the local development of red-dyed banana ketchup, which gives the pasta its signature tangy flavor.

“We stick to our culture when we are far away,” May said. I nodded understanding, now biting into a crunchy chicken breast that certainly deserved praise. The brown gravy added an intense umami, peppery taste. Nevertheless, it didn’t hold a candle to my own fried chicken dream, spiced by deep-aged cayenne lathered in a vinegary hot sauce.

A map on the wall showed Jollibee locations around the world, with the adorable cartoon mascot trying to fit in—surfing in Guam, wearing a canonical sun hat, bamboo stick in hand in Vietnam, climbing the Empire State Building in New York. Just like many industrious Filipinos, the poster seemed to indicate, Jollibee personifies hard work that yields joy and sweet things. Last year, the company announced it would more than double the number of its American locations to 300 in the next five years.

May described McDonald’s first opening in Manila in the early 1980s. It was quite a sight, she said, with lines stretching around the block and people proudly wearing McDonald’s hats they’d received as gifts.

But the US chain, expecting an easy conquest, was outmaneuvered by a little fish that ate the whale. Although Jollibee was barely three years old, founder and CEO Tony Tan Caktiong fought back by doubling down on the Filipino palette. It was McDonald’s that had to tack instead, even launching “McSpaghetti” and serving up sides of white rice. Today, Jollibee is the fast-food leader in its home country.

A woman joined in from across the table. Alma—who coincidently works at the Filipino Trade Commission—and her friend Karol were sharing a Palabok Fiesta, rice noodles covered in garlic shrimp sauce and pork rinds. Jollibee’s brand identity centered around family and celebration, she said. “Every kid will remember celebrating their birthday here.”

America’s Filipino diaspora makes up the third-largest Asian demographic in America today, nearly 5 million, half US-born. Jollibee’s incredibly loyal base serves as a springboard to reach American taste buds. Although the fried chicken is commendable, the real edge is sweet foods and wholesome social marketing.

Alma’s friend Karol shared her Peach Mango pie, a cult favorite. A painter, she explained that she was visiting New York to exhibit her artwork. She showed me a photo of a picture titled “Mabuhay Times Square,” or “Hello Times Square,” proudly pointing to a smiling red-and-white bee in the center of the action.

Joshua Levkowitz was an ICWA fellow from 2021-2023 in Turkey, where he wrote about issues related to migration and identity.

The leader of a Cold War nuclear superpower orders the invasion of a defiant southern neighbor. The brief campaign ends in total humiliation for the small, impoverished state. Western countries briefly protest the precedent-setting transgression of sovereignty but the victim’s not important enough for meaningful action, it’s a fait accompli.

Encouraged by his projection of power, the leader amasses his military forces to tackle something really big next time, something historic. A blitzkrieg that would right decades of injustice and restore national pride, he promises his supporters. That campaign is supposed to end in days.

Instead, he triggers an escalating regional conflict that engulfs many other countries, shaking up the post-war security order along with the global economy, with highly unpredictable consequences. He responds with a brutal bombing campaign, destroying critical infrastructure and killing thousands of civilians. Close allies refuse to support what even dubious actors understand to be an untenable moral position.

Still, the leader has the advantage of not caring, indeed the disruption of international norms is partly the aim. War with extraordinary powers appeals to him, and he controls his country’s nuclear codes.

Now it’s up to a wobbly alliance of liberal democratic countries to hold together the rules-based order undergirding the free world. Despite their overriding common interest, their governments struggle to agree how to oppose the wanton destruction threatening global stability and prosperity. Under pressure from their own burgeoning anti-democratic nationalist movements and mounting polarization, they don’t want to be seen escalating the conflict. How do they maintain a line in the sand?

By necessity, European countries have come a long way since Russian President Vladimir Putin undertook his first major incursion into another sovereign state by launching his victorious five-day war against Georgia in 2008, which reflected his decision to fully break from the West. Steeling for serious ostracism and exclusion back then, the Kremlin instead saw victory in Western countries’ bending over backward to justify Putin’s war, blame the hotheaded Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili instead and put the whole thing behind them.

The larger confrontation with the West, as everyone remembers, exploded with Putin’s launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. More than four years on, European members of the “coalition of the willing” are dealing with the loss of their main ally and security guarantor the United States, together with the European Union’s failure to agree to divert some $300 billion of frozen Russian assets toward supporting Kyiv earlier this year, and now the debacle in the Middle East.

The US-Israeli war against Iran is providing Putin a major boost, shoring up Russia’s petro-economy with ballooning prices for its most important export commodity, oil (together with natural gas and fertilizer), along with the suspension of US sanctions on sales.

Still, the allies’ biggest challenge from Putin may be deciphering his logic. His overarching aim isn’t necessarily taking all of Ukraine, or even just the Donbas—although he surely wouldn’t object—or otherwise achieving any conventional definition of winning the war. Like other consolidating authoritarian leaders, he fans foreign conflict for the sake of building personal power at home together with the necessary enriching of oligarchic interests that profit from financing and otherwise sustaining his rule. Ongoing war has enabled him to impose a previously unimaginable degree of neo-Stalinist repression and a level of administrative control not seen since the 1950s.

Periodic rounds of international negotiations—with zero intention of furthering peace on his part—have enabled Putin to exploit that conventional wisdom, including the idea that he’s acting in his country’s long-term interests and actually interested in Russia’s power—expanding Moscow’s boundaries and influence—ahead of his own. Remember when observers said the path to peace in Syria lay through Moscow?

But assuming his purpose is really guided by the Enlightenment principles that help define “rational” for most Westerners is actually dangerous when his real endgame has already been achieved: maximizing chaos.

The stakes in Ukraine are even higher now that international norms have changed, of course, with the United States, together with Israel, also bombing civilians and infrastructure in its own undefined war of aggression, joining Russia in pursuing a new imperialist vision of vassal states paying the great powers. The very idea of democracy promotion—until recently a key pillar of US foreign policy—is a direct threat to the new scheme of expanding spheres of corruption in the common interest of both countries’ ruling families. No surprise that accusations the Kremlin is providing the Iranian military help identifying American targets in the Middle East—the idea of killing US service personnel—elicited a mere shrug from President Donald Trump. He gets it.

For those still interested in liberal democracy and open society, maintaining a line in the sand will require remaining crystal clear about what the autocrats really want.

Photo: A bombing site in Kyiv, 2025 (Wikimedia Commons)

Gregory Feifer is executive director of the Institute of Current World Affairs in Washington. A former NPR Moscow bureau chief and author of Russians: The People Behind the Power, he is writing a biography of the Russian politician Boris Nemtsov.

In 2015, I spent several days in Isfahan, Iran and visited some of the buildings damaged in the current US-Israeli bombing campaign. Isfahan is a UNESCO World Heritage site that, until now, had survived many battles including the Siege of Isfahan and Battle of Gulnabad in 1722 that led to the deaths of 80,000 civilians, and the Battle of Murche-Khort and Liberation of Isfahan in 1729.

Isfahan has been inhabited since prehistoric times. In 1387, the city surrendered to the army of the Turkic-Mongol conqueror Timur (aka Tamerlane) but later killed his tax collectors. Timur ordered the inhabitants massacred, 70,000-200,000 in all, sparing the artists and artisans. Some of the heads were stacked into 28 towers of 1,500 heads apiece, a Turkic-Mongol practice immortalized in Vasily Vereshchagin’s 1871 painting Apotheosis of War.

Timur died in 1404 and his empire disintegrated but the Timurid style of architecture he patronized, with its emphasis on monumental scale and intensely colored tilework, had a lasting impact on Persian architecture. One has only to visit the Timurid capital of Samarkand—in present-day Uzbekistan—to see the aesthetic connection with Isfahan.

In 1598, the fifth Safavid Shah, Abbas I (aka Abbas the Great) moved his capital from Qazvin to Isfahan, to distance himself from the rival Ottoman empire and gain more control of the Persian Gulf, which had become an important trade route for the British and Dutch East India companies. He relocated Persian, Turkish and Armenian craftspeople to help build the new imperial city and ensure its prosperity. Isfahan’s most famous buildings date from that era.

Ali Qapu Palace

Ali Qapu (“Great Gate”) is an early 17^th-century palace, built during the Safavid dynasty under the decree of Shah Abbas I and expanded by Shah Abbas II. The six-story building is located on the western side of Naqsh-e Jahan (“Exemplar of the World”) Square, an oblong collection of palaces, mosques and bazaars surrounding an enormous polo field. Ali Qapu underwent repeated renovations and expansions and was finally completed a century after its inception.

On the sixth floor is the palace’s most famous feature, the music hall, where the king would host receptions and parties often accompanied by live music. The hall is actually several halls, connected and arranged around a domed central space. The upper walls and ceiling feature a unique double-walled design of delicate plaster niches in the shape of cups, vases and other vessels. They are enhanced on the surface by polychrome arabesque and geometric patterns and inside each niche by alternating complementary red and green coloration.

According to the University of Isfahan’s Professor Mehrdad Hejazi, the plaster is so delicate that it “falls to pieces at the slightest touch.” The ceiling also features muqarnas, stalactite-like protrusions that are Islam’s unique contribution to world architecture. Typically, muqarnas are used to make the transition of a dome or drum onto square supporting walls instead of the pendentives, squinches and corbelling typical of European architecture. Muqarnas are also used decoratively in archways and niches.

The music hall is a sonically “quiet” space with no echo. Hasan Azad at the University of Tehran, who created a 3D model of the space, concluded that the combination of recesses and protrusions acts as a sound diffuser: The wall design ensured that the king’s guests would hear music with no distortion. The writer Goli Mohammadi calls this low-tech solution to room echo “the world’s first quadraphonic sound system.”

Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque

Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, named after a Shiite scholar who moved to Iran from Lebanon at the invitation of Shah Abbas I to spread the teachings of Shiism in Iran, is located on the eastern side of Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the center of the city. Completed in 1619, the mosque was reserved for the king’s harem. Possibly because the public was forbidden to enter the building, it has neither minaret nor courtyard, unusual in Iran.

Inside the mosque, walls are covered with intricately decorated blue tile mosaics and an ornate golden dome, the two connected by elaborate muqarnas. Today, this contrast of blue and gold is referred to colloquially as the “day and night ceiling,” one of those spots where photographers like I wait in line to lie on the floor to get a perfect shot.

The slowly rotating play of sunlight across the inner dome is referred to as the “peacock tail.”

Shah Mosque

The Shah Mosque employs a double-shell design, with a tall, slightly bulbous outer dome and drum, and a shallower inner shell. The space between acts as an insulator and acoustic amplifier. Because of this design, an imam standing at a particular stone on the floor and leading prayer or giving the Friday khutbah sermon can easily be heard throughout the entire space.

Construction of the Shah Mosque was begun in 1611 and completed around 1630. Located at the southern end of Naqsh-e Jahan Square, it is turned 45 degrees from the square so that it is aligned with the qibla, the direction of prayer toward Mecca. The mosque features a courtyard, four minarets and an enormous blue-tile drum and dome that has the opposite function of the Ali Qapu music hall. The domed space does not dampen echoes but amplifies them so that prayer can be heard throughout the mosque. Persian architecture researcher Zohreh Torabi and architectural engineer Reza Khoeini call it “a marvel of acoustic engineering.” The Shah Mosque features monumental iwan gates, walled on three sides and open on their façades that serve as arched portals to the mosque complex and the mosque proper. The ornamented projecting space around the iwans is called the pishtaq. The iwan and pishtaq are essential features of classical Persian architecture.

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Shah Mosque was renamed the Iman Khomeini Mosque. The entire Naqsh-e Jahan complex was named a UNESCO Heritage site the same year.

Since the United States has no diplomatic presence in Iran, American tourists are rare. The few like me who do visit must travel on a preset itinerary with a government-recognized tour company and are accompanied at all times by a tour guide/minder. In 2015, nationals from other countries were not thus constrained and Isfahan was full of independent tourists from Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Those rules changed in 2025, and all visitors are now expected to work with a licensed tour agency.

Bryn Barnard is an artist, teacher and former ICWA fellow. He has worked with Far Eastern Economic Review, Asiaweek, National Geographic and NASA, and also with schools and universities in Kuwait, Korea, Singapore, the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. His books include Dangerous Planet: Natural Disasters That Changed History, Outbreak: Plagues That Changed History, The Genius of Islam: How Muslims Made the Modern World and The New Ocean: The Fate of Life in a Changing Sea.

Suspended

I was met at Lisbon airport by someone from my previous life. We were from the same city but hadn’t seen each other in five years. He had long since left Russia and, a year before my move, relocated to Portugal from Hungary, where he had completed his master’s degree. In many ways, it was his decision that had pushed me toward applying for a PhD program and choosing Lisbon. I had expected warmth, perhaps even relief at seeing a familiar face. Instead, there was something ambiguous in his expression—more tension than joy. He hesitated before hugging me, as if deciding whether the gesture was still appropriate.

At first, I rented a small room, then he offered to host me for a few nights. His flatmate had a friend staying over, a woman from eastern Ukraine who had long been living in Budapest. His apartment was a small, cozy place in a mid-century building, with wooden floors, plastered ceilings and a lightly refreshed interior that kept its old warmth. The atmosphere was polite, the discussion measured. We did not touch on the subject of the war, as if each of us sensed that one misplaced sentence could tilt the balance of civility.

My search for housing dragged. At one apartment, the landlady’s expression shifted the moment she saw my Russian passport. At another, the owner admitted she could not in fact legally rent the room and drove me across town to show a different place. On the way, she mentioned that she had once worked at Portugal’s foreign ministry, that she had seen Vladimir Putin in person at official events. She watched my reaction carefully, as if checking whether I admired him. Then she began recounting stories of people “falling out of windows,” assuring me that we Russians know far less than we think. Nothing came of that conversation, either.

I ended up staying with my friend far longer than planned. He invited me into his circle—fellow graduates from Hungary, Russians who had been living in Europe for years. It was an established group, stable and self-contained. I assumed I was included. I was wrong.

My academic path was treated as an oddity. I later understood that within parts of the Russian émigré milieu, backgrounds in IT, digital marketing, and other forms of portable, well-paid remote work are valued far more highly. Against the mobility and financial security of those professions, a PhD in comparative politics is seen as impractical, even marginal. Invitations gradually stopped.

It was against this backdrop—of suspension, temporariness and a slowly crystallizing isolation, when it became clear that the dinner invitations had quietly ceased for good—that small, unexpected new avenues of social life began to open: hikes, film clubs, grocery stores, New Year’s gatherings, accidental conversations. Brief forms of togetherness in which people met for a moment, avoided certain questions and promised nothing beyond the evening.

No winners

I arrived in Lisbon in October 2024 at the tail end of a fleeting surge of activity among Russia’s liberal émigré community. I managed to catch only a glimpse of it.

In the first days, I was welcomed by Portuguese colleagues from a research institute. From those initial conversations, something became clear: The city’s political atmosphere was tense but not for purely ideological reasons. Yes, they criticized the rising popularity of the Portuguese right-wing populist André Ventura and his party, Chega. But there was another recurring note: Life itself was becoming noticeably harder. Prices were soaring, rental housing in the capital was increasingly inaccessible even to locals, and in some neighborhoods, people felt as if they were no longer at home.

When I mentioned that candidates of Russian origin were attempting to participate in Portuguese elections, I heard something along the lines of: “Strange—now even migrants are running for office instead of Portuguese.” There was no outrage in the remark. There was fatigue and unmistakable skepticism about politics.

Parliamentary elections had taken place in the country six months earlier. Among the candidates was Pavel Elizarov, a Russian former member of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s team, running on the ticket of Iniciativa Liberal. The center-right party secured only eight seats. Elizarov did not enter parliament but was actively promoting a legislative initiative on humanitarian visas. As he described it, the proposed law would allow individuals facing political persecution—including in Russia—to obtain a special visa to Portugal, enabling them to enter legally and apply for asylum once in the country.

But Elizarov lost that battle as well. A year later, in May 2025, after the dramatic rise of hte far-right Chega Party, parliament voted to extend the required period of residence for citizenship from five to 10 years with no transitional provisions.

The shop window

In one of my first days in the city, I stopped in front of a bookstore window. On the cover of a prominently displayed book were the faces of Putin, the Kremlin ideologue Alexander Dugin and Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine was printed in bold across the title. The book presented itself as an attempt to “explain the war in its entirety” through geopolitics, the fate of Europe and a language of historical inevitability.

I bought it almost automatically, less out of curiosity than professional reflex. At the register, I was even given a small discount after showing a certificate from an international conference in Almaty, where I had been shortly before arriving in Lisbon. An academic credential, it turned out, could function as currency in a bookstore.

The author was Portuguese. He described himself as one of Chega’s founders, later expelled from the party. The book largely reproduced familiar Kremlin narratives about the war: appeals to “realism,” civilizational confrontation, a geopolitical logic that framed Ukraine as a pawn in a larger struggle. There was also clear admiration for Dugin’s ideas. Later, I discovered that the same publishing house had released Dugin’s own book in Portuguese, The Trump Revolution.

A few months later, in noticeably larger quantities, a Portuguese translation of a book about Alexei Navalny appeared on Lisbon shelves. In the capital of an EU country, one could easily purchase both texts associated with Russian opposition movements and works echoing pro-Kremlin ideological frameworks. Polarization over such issues here—shaped not only by attitudes toward Russia but also deeper domestic divides over the perceived influx of migrants, the financial and political costs of supporting Ukraine and the increasingly contested role of Brussels in Europe’s future—was not simply imported by émigrés. It was already present, articulated in Portuguese, printed by local publishers, circulating among local readers.

Multiple formats

Among the more common Russian-speaking formats in Lisbon are Mafia game nights, stand-up shows at the bar Sputnik, a tight-knit circle of padel players, communities of climbers and surfers, a film club, hiking groups.

There’s also a club for Russian speakers where festivals and themed lecture events occasionally take place. Its origins are not entirely apolitical: The founder was previously married to a Russian businessman whose name has appeared in Ukrainian media reports in connection with alleged pro-Kremlin business networks.

An unspoken rule governs nearly all these spaces: avoid politics. Don’t ask directly what passport people hold, what nationality they claim, why they left or what they think about the war. What matters more is whether you can play, hike, make jokes, discuss a film or exchange practical advice about adapting to life abroad. Political views are not formally banned but they are not a foundation for belonging, either. They hover in the background, acknowledged but bracketed.

At the same time, the figures who are regularly mocked on a local Telegram channel known for pro-Kremlin narratives are rarely discussed offline. Few people in these circles seem to follow the activities of liberal anti-Putin activists such as Elizarov, Ksenia Ashrafulina or Timofei Bugaevsky—people who appear on Portuguese television and in local papers and are sometimes better known among politically attentive Portuguese than among the recent Russian-speaking arrivals. For many in this newer wave of emigration, those names remain peripheral, as do Portuguese politics.

What emerges is a fragmented environment: Public Russian-speaking actors operate in one sphere, digital polemics unfold in another and everyday forms of togetherness occupy a third. Most of the time, there is no shared stage connecting them.

Migrant hostility

At the same time, there is another Russian-speaking milieu in Lisbon, one that’s barely visible offline. It does not show up at film clubs, hiking meetups, kitchen-table conversations about human rights or lectures by visiting historians and performers. It exists primarily on Telegram. There are no awkward pauses there. The language is not always direct but it is unmistakably sharp and often cruel.

In that channel, supporters of Navalny and other opposition movements are derided as “parasitic little fighters” or “ridiculous gnomes.” Sympathy for Ukraine—and Portugal’s assistance to the country—is dismissed as hypocrisy. The official position of the Russian embassy regarding an attempted march of the “Immortal Regiment” to honor Soviet veterans of World War II is framed as the only reasonable one. Jokes about “cultural enrichment” circulate freely, often aimed at non-white migrants. Portuguese tolerance of others is mocked. Sympathy for Chega is not concealed.

It is in this digital space that the erosion of empathy becomes most visible. When a well-known figure within the newer wave of Russian migrants in Lisbon went missing and people began searching for him, the Telegram channel quickly filled with speculation. Commenters wrote not with concern but overt disdain that he was gay, a “fixer” helping other newly arrived Russians with paperwork, flooding Portugal with freeloaders like himself, and that he had probably fled the city to escape justice. There was no alarm in those messages. Only mockery.

Polarization does not always manifest itself in open debate. Sometimes it takes the form of separate registers of speech: In one, caution and a desire not to inflame tensions; in the other, a readiness to label, ridicule, exclude. People may walk the same streets and shop in the same grocery stores but still speak about the world as if they inhabit entirely different countries—countries that ceased to recognize one another long ago.

Sailors: symbol and person

Over the summer, an incident in the municipality of Setúbal just south of Lisbon drew wide attention in the Portuguese press. Sailors from a Russian vessel arriving from Brazil entered a restaurant wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “It’s Russia’s Time.” Ukrainians were present in the restaurant. An argument broke out and quickly escalated into a scuffle. Video clips and reports circulated across news media. The story became another reminder that the war does not remain outside Europe—it travels with people, with symbols, with tones of voice.

That episode lingered in my mind. Later, a friend and I were walking one night along the Lisbon waterfront when a voice called out from the darkness, sharp, with a slightly rough, streetwise edge. For a second, tension rose. We saw two men who introduced themselves as sailors from a Russian ship that had come in from Ireland.

The conversation unfolded unexpectedly calmly. One was a Ukrainian from Crimea holding a Russian passport. The other was Azerbaijani. They asked about housing prices, about everyday life in Lisbon. There were no slogans, no talk of “Russia’s time.” The Crimean man said something that stayed with me: “I don’t even know who I am now—Ukrainian or Russian.” He said it without drama, almost wearily. “At sea, it’s easier. You don’t have to decide every day.”

The scene did not negate what had happened in Setúbal. Those T-shirts were real. The fight was real. But the quiet exchange on the waterfront was also real. The category “sailors from Russia” isn’t monolithic. In one case, identity played out through a slogan. In another, uncertainty and fatigue. That gap felt important to me. In exile, as in war, it’s easy to generalize. Much harder to hold on to complexity.

The store

One day, I found myself in a small shop selling goods from Ukraine and Germany, the kind of place people visit not for exotic delicacies but familiar flavors. Bread, sweets, buckwheat, pickled vegetables—the ordinary staples of everyday life back home. The regular customers were immigrants from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus. No one asked where you were from. No one requested a biography. The shop operated by its own logic—calm, polite, resolutely domestic.

After a closer look, details began to stand out: posters in support of Ukraine on the walls, shelves stocked mostly with German-produced goods carrying Russian-language labels, alongside Ukrainian brands. Products from Russia were rare—likely less for ideological reasons than because of sanctions against Moscow, broken supply chains and the company’s own production facilities in Germany.

At the checkout, a woman spoke to the cashier in confident, almost patronizing Russian, as though she were returning to a well-established routine. The subject was the cancellation of special discounts. From the exchange it became apparent that she was a relative—the wife, probably—of an employee at the Russian embassy. She inquired about the price reductions that had previously been extended to “embassy families.”

The cashier responded gently: Those larger discounts had been discontinued, too many relatives, too many losses for the business. The woman quickly adjusted her argument. If not as an embassy wife, then surely as a loyal, longstanding customer, she deserved an exception. She emphasized how much she bought there. The evidence lay in her shopping basket, full to the brim.

The cashier remained impeccably polite. There was no irritation in her voice, no coldness. She listened, smiled and eventually found a compromise: To accommodate this important customer without formally breaking the new rule, she applied a standard loyalty-card discount and entered it as a birthday promotion. The gesture was discreet, almost ritualistic—a small administrative maneuver that allowed everyone to preserve dignity.

Later I thought that scenes like this perhaps best explain how the city functions after the rupture caused by the war and the arrival of new diasporas. People whom the same conflict had pushed to opposite sides of the divide: embassy-linked Russians, Russians who fled their own state and Ukrainians whose own experiences of the war shape their attitudes toward both groups in different ways. They now stand in the same queues and shop for the same everyday goods. No agreement is required. No reconciliation. No alignment of symbolic worlds. It is enough to remain courteous, uphold the ritual, avoid tearing the fabric. Politics don’t vanish in such spaces, they simply recede, giving way to conversations about discounts, birthdays and the plastic bags into which groceries are carefully packed.

The cinematheque

One evening I found myself at a small Russian-speaking film club founded by a few guys from St. Petersburg. The setup was modest, improvised: a projector, mismatched chairs, tea in paper cups, conversations held in lowered voices. That night, we were watching “EuroTrip”—an early-2000s American teen comedy that had once felt light, chaotic and almost carefree.

After the screening, discussion quickly gravitated toward the film’s romantic momentum and naïve optimism. The national stereotypes—English football fans of vaguely criminal appearance hurling insults at “frog-eating” Frenchmen, a caricatured German family with a child who draws Hitler mustaches under his nose and begins to march—were recalled as relics of a time when such stereotypes did not seem dangerous. The Europe on screen looked self-assured.

Someone suggested that back then, there simply was no “agenda.” I ventured that perhaps the difference wasn’t only about cultural norms but also the absence of war. In the early 2000s, the word “fascism” had long receded into the archives of history. Today, with war as the background noise, it has returned as a live label.

Not everyone welcomed that line of thought. Some shrugged it off. Others preferred not to engage. But the man sitting next to me muttered something under his breath, not in disagreement but seemingly in frustration with those who insisted on separating the film from the present—as if war had no bearing on what we find funny or consider permissible today. It was not an intervention, not an argument, just a quiet murmur of alignment.

The disagreements did not escalate. The interlocutors simply grew more careful. We remained in the same room, speaking the same language, reflecting on the same film. And yet it was evident that even here, there was no shared way to speak about past laughter without inevitably confronting the present.

The old New Year

Sometimes tradition and innovation combine in the most unexpected configurations. On New Year’s Eve, the most important holiday of the year back in Russia, I was in a gathering organized by a group of lesbian women. There was no grand plan. One had recently broken up with her Brazilian girlfriend; another had not yet found a partner; the roommates in the apartment where we gathered had no other large, noisy parties to join. The evening was assembled almost accidentally by people who, in many cases, were meeting for the first time, united by little more than coincidence and a shared reluctance to spend the night alone.

The conversation gradually shifted toward how exactly to mark the moment. Almost without discussion, everyone agreed we should open a bottle of Soviet champagne—bought at the Ukrainian-German grocery store where the Russian embassy wife had argued at the register. We timed the celebration not to local time but the Kremlin’s midnight chimes. Not because anyone insisted on “tradition,” but as if by inertia, as something self-evident to do.

However, the chimes come bundled with an obligatory preface, the president’s traditional New Year’s address. Not everyone was eager to listen. As Putin spoke, curses directed at “the old man” flew; someone turned away demonstratively, someone else rolled his eyes. But for the sake of the ritual, the precise timing of the chimes, the speech was endured, like a sequence no one dared interrupt.

As a counterbalance, once the toast was made, one of the women insisted that we watch another New Year’s address, by the political commentator Ekaterina Shulman, a leading exile. That decision did not please everyone, either. Some found it too bleak, too long, ill-suited to a festive night. And yet the fact that, in the same apartment, at the same midnight hour, the voices of Putin and Shulman followed one another back-to-back felt emblematic—a collage of incompatible layers of reality compressed into a single moment.

There was no irony, no carefully staged performance. It simply reflected how life after rupture functions: Some old rituals persist but filled with new meanings and new voices. Innovation does not displace tradition; it inserts itself, awkwardly at times, irritably at others, but almost inevitably. Soviet champagne, the Kremlin chimes, the presidential address, an independent political analyst, a gathering far removed from any conventional New Year’s table—all of it coexisted for an evening without resolving into harmony but also without falling apart.

Nothing is fully canceled, nothing fully embraced. Tradition no longer belongs to those who once claimed ownership. It exists in borrowed apartments and improvised communities, reshaped and repurposed, accompanied by the lingering sense that, for now, there may simply be no other way.

Andrei Prudnikow is a political scientist, former Russian journalist and doctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon studying conspiracy narratives and political discourse in contemporary Russia.

Last month, five independent laboratories in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden published analyses of biosamples taken from the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin died in prison two years ago in Russia’s far north, aged 47. Officials stated that his death was caused by natural causes. Navalny’s team members said they were able to collect his tissues and pass them on for examination.

You may have seen headlines announcing that all five labs discovered a lethal tree frog toxin. Given that European governments are suggesting Putin’s assassins were responsible for Navalny’s death, that might sound bizarre. But despite news media reporting, one shouldn’t be imagining Russian agents carrying hundreds of slimy amphibians from Ecuador to Siberia—the story has very little to do with frogs, much more with very well-equipped Russian labs and a strongman leader.

Some 50 years ago, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington named John Daly collected dozens of specimens from a frog in the cloud forest near the town of Santa Isabel in Ecuador. He injected extracts from the frog’s skin excretions into lab mice, looking for unusual reactions. One sample, labelled 208/210, produced a particularly striking response. Daly recorded “agitation, labored breathing, rigid, strongly elevated tail, running convulsions, rolling convulsions, arching back, extending hind feet…cannot locomote.”

He did all that for a reason. The amphibians he was studying are called dart frogs because Indigenous people used to rub darts against the skin of some frog species to use for hunting small animals. Today, scientists know of hundreds of active molecules present on the skin of various species of dart tree frogs, including some that could have potential as medicines.

Back in the ’70s, Daly suspected that the samples he had taken contained a previously unknown substance with strong painkilling properties. He named it epibatidine and went on to study it further for possible practical use.

But he soon ran into an obstacle. Several frogs were required to yield a sufficient amount of epibatidine to achieve any noticeable effect on mice; hundreds would be needed to act on a human. More often than not, wild-caught frog skin didn’t yield much toxin at all.

That’s because, as we’ve since learned, dart frogs derive their poison through a diet of ants, centipedes and mites. Specialized glands concentrate the toxic alkaloids and secrete them onto the skin surface.

Captive-bred dart frogs denied their normal diet don’t produce the toxins. Even in the wild, as Daly documented, frogs taken from a banana plantation that probably feasted on fruit flies produced no toxin at all.

So epibatidine could be studied further only if scientists took a next step: lab synthesis. Since then, there’s been no need to extract the toxin from frogs. That’s what makes last month’s headlines seem strange. We don’t call aspirin “a chemical from willow bark” or atropine used to dilate your pupils a “deadly nightshade toxin.” Once synthesis has been mastered, you forget about the substance’s origins and focus on its use.

Epibatidine proved to be 200 times more active than morphine as a potential pain killer. But it also proved just too toxic; no one was able to develop it for practical use.

Well, no one, it seems, except for chemists working at the Russian State Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology in Moscow. Twelve years ago, they published a paper on their own lab synthesis of epibatidine. Although it describes the toxin’s painkilling potential, that idea has long ago been abandoned by mainstream science. So it’s quite likely their real interest was in a different property, that of a chemical weapon.

Here’s why experts think that’s probably the case: The same institute was responsible for the creation of Novichok, a nerve agent used in the failed 2018 assassination attempt in the United Kingdom targeting Sergei Skripal, a spy who defected from Russia, but took the life of a bystander named Dawn Sturgess instead. A UK court proved Russian special forces were behind the operation, for which Putin’s direct order was named as a cause.

When Navalny was first poisoned in 2020, he was taken for treatment to Germany, where chemists were able to determine he was also attacked with Novichok. The substance is known to have been involved in several more botched assassination attempts.

I called the doctor who treated Alexei Navalny in Moscow back then. His name is Alexander Polupan. He found it strange at the time that he wasn’t allowed to wear his own scrubs while caring for Navalny; anyone in close proximity to the opposition leader was asked to wear a disposable uniform and gloves, a sign the intelligence services probably knew a toxin was present and that it was highly dangerous to anyone in its vicinity.

That’s why Navalny’s second, fatal poisoning may have been carried out with a different toxin. Unlike Novichok, epibatidine has no known antidote and doesn’t harm bystanders.

So, again: This story has very little to do with frogs and more with the moral choices Russian scientists make when they work for the state.

Ilya Kolmanovsky is host of a science podcast named The Naked Mole Rat, where he covers research into synthetic biology and evolution.

This account is from a resident of Kuwait who prefers to remain anonymous.

March 5: It is 5:56 a.m. here and I want to share a brief update because what will likely appear in the news in the coming hours may not fully capture what it feels like on the ground.

Last night the US base was on fire. The flames were visible from the school housing area where many of my staff live. Because of current security restrictions, I cannot post photos, but it was a shocking and unsettling sight.

At 4:00 this morning the sirens sounded again. It was one of the most intense rounds of attacks we have experienced so far. The silence yesterday had almost allowed people to breathe for a moment, which made this morning’s alarms even more jarring.

Yesterday we were cautiously discussing re-entry plans for school. I even left the house briefly to get urgent paperwork translated. Driving through Kuwait right now feels very different from normal. Much of the city is dark. Lights on military buildings are off. National Day decorations and government building lights are off. Buses are running without interior lights, and many bridge and highway lights have been switched off for safety. For a moment I genuinely questioned whether I was even driving the right way because everything looked so unfamiliar.

Kuwait’s air defenses are working incredibly hard intercepting incoming missiles. If you look at the numbers of interceptions, it is genuinely heroic work. Unfortunately many Kuwaiti servicemen have already been injured overnight.

There are many rumors circulating right now. Some say the hospital where Aziz recently had surgery was hit just in front of it, that a Kuwaiti army base was struck, and that a seaside hotel was damaged. I cannot confirm any of those reports at this time.

What is clear is that Kuwait has been drawn into a conflict it never asked for. Like several Gulf states, it is absorbing collateral impact from a wider regional escalation. The US military presence that once served as a stabilizing factor now also makes these locations targets, and Kuwait’s military and citizens are paying a heavy price for something they did not start.

Public sentiment here is shifting and some of that is now being expressed very openly regarding American presence. That is understandably worrying. In addition, some more volatile armed groups in the region are becoming emboldened and using the moment to flex influence. In certain places sectarian tensions are also increasing, which is particularly dangerous in an already unstable situation.

From my perspective, the situation feels like it is escalating rapidly though we are having long stretches of silence and normalcy.

There have also been confirmed intelligence briefings in the region indicating that some of the attacks on US embassies and oil facilities may not actually be coming from Iran—let that sink in for a moment. That is a significant development that will likely shape the narrative in the coming days.

Regarding evacuation, it appears the US State Department is attempting to organize something, but it is difficult not to feel like Americans on the ground here are an afterthought. If we had truly been a priority, half a million US citizens would not still be here waiting for guidance.

More than anything, this needs to come to a diplomatic and humanitarian pause as soon as possible. Too many innocent people across this region are already paying the price.

Please keep everyone here in your thoughts and prayers. None of the people living here wanted this.

In recent decades, American foreign policy rested on the assumption that the United States possessed a broad, flexible toolkit for influencing global developments. Military power was part of it. It also included economic reconstruction, political alliances and sustained engagement with civil society, which were treated—at least in principle—as serious strategic assets despite their limitations. Together, they formed a three-legged stool of diplomacy, defense and development that underpinned American power.

The stool was never balanced. The legs were unequal in size and political weight. But it existed, however imperfectly.

Today, it does not. Instead, it has joined a growing pile of discarded tools of American influence as Washington pursues a policy of conflict and coercion leaning heavily on tariffs, sanctions and episodic intervention while dismantling the capacities that once enabled earlier, cheaper and more flexible engagement. The near-overnight dismantling of USAID by the Trump Administration was not the inevitable endpoint of long-term bureaucratic decline but a deliberate rupture. But the need for foreign assistance—and its importance to US national security—has not disappeared. The question is whether in the future the United States can learn from how it was built, weakened and ultimately dismantled.

After World War II, the United States confronted a devastated Europe, collapsing empires and an emerging strategic competition with the Soviet Union. The response now feels almost radical: a recognition that American security depended not only on defending borders but rebuilding other societies. That logic informed three initiatives that defined US power for nearly 80 years—the Marshall Plan, NATO and later USAID—each addressing a different dimension of global competition.

The Marshall Plan was the clearest expression of the strategy. Grounded in a hard lesson from 1930s Europe—that economic collapse breeds authoritarianism—it committed the equivalent of roughly 2 percent of US GDP between 1948 and 1951 to stabilize Western Europe. Aid was tied to cooperation, reform and Western integration. The payoff was extraordinary. Economies recovered, democratic institutions gained legitimacy and Western Europe’s political future tilted decisively to the transatlantic alliance.

NATO institutionalized the military side of the alliance. It deterred Soviet aggression, anchored Europe’s security and outlived the Cold War that gave birth to it. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has underscored that NATO’s original mission remains essential. But it was designed to deter tanks, not counter political subversion, economic coercion or democratic erosion.

That gap was meant to be filled by USAID. Created in 1961, the agency became Washington’s primary vehicle for shaping political and institutional environments without resorting to military force. I spent much of my career there, working in contexts where elections, courts, media and civil society mattered more than troop deployments. In post-Cold War Europe and Eurasia, those efforts were rarely glamorous or well-known but they helped sustain pluralism during periods of extreme volatility and bought time where coercion would surely have backfired.

In the aftermath of the communist collapse, former Warsaw Pact countries faced the task of building the basic institutions that governed the Western order. Through sustained foreign assistance, the United States helped Central and Eastern European societies lay the foundations over two decades. The results were uneven and imperfect but tangible: judicial reforms that enabled EU accession, independent election commissions that facilitated peaceful transfers of power and investigative media that exposed corruption when domestic accountability mechanisms were still fragile. Without those interventions, democratic backsliding would likely have come sooner and more decisively.

Unlike NATO or the Marshall Plan, however, USAID never enjoyed durable bipartisan support. Even as its mission expanded after the fall of communism in the 1990s and again during the post-9/11 engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, its institutional standing eroded. Development and governance assistance came to be treated as discretionary spending—useful in good times, expendable in bad ones. According to the Congressional Research Service, all US foreign assistance has typically amounted to roughly one to 1.5 percent of the federal budget, with democracy and governance programs comprising only a small fraction of that total. But they were among the first accounts traditionally targeted for cuts—and, in 2025, among the first to be dismantled almost entirely.

Inside Washington, the consequences were visible well before the collapse. USAID officers increasingly spent more time defending the legitimacy of civilian engagement than designing it. During the early years of Russia’s war against Ukraine, proposals to sustain support for independent Russian media and anti-war civil society groups—crucial partners for opposing the Kremlin’s aggression—stalled for months amid political review even as the strategic costs of disengagement were widely acknowledged. Over time, a quiet but fateful choice took shape: Military power would remain sacrosanct while civilian capacity would be allowed to hollow out.

What happened next was an intentional act of demolition. The Trump Administration did not seek to reform US foreign assistance but ended its role in building independent expertise, international engagement and values-based policy. The question now is whether future leaders will be prepared to act decisively to rebuild it.

The stakes could not be higher. The unraveling of the American-led post-war order has been marked by confusion about US purpose and a shrinking political tolerance for sustained engagement. Although the war in Ukraine temporarily revived transatlantic unity, it also exposed the limits of an alliance-centered strategy. As the conflict drags on and European governments struggle to align rhetoric with long-term defense production and spending, NATO increasingly resembles a holding action rather than a solution.

Meanwhile, great-power competition has assumed different forms with new technologies. It plays out through institutions, markets, information spaces and legal systems as much as on battlefields. China’s use of development finance to shape regulatory standards and political incentives across the Global South is one example; Russia’s export of legal repression—through “foreign agent” laws and managed civil society—offers another.

The United States will face this environment with a narrowing set of tools and alliances if not a lack of power. Any serious effort to restore balance will require early, visible action. A future administration should move quickly to reconstitute USAID as an independent agency, rebuild its professional cadre and protect it from politicized dismantling through statutory safeguards. It should reinvest in State Department civilian expertise, clarify the national security rationale for democracy and governance assistance, and prioritize early engagement in politically contested environments before crises metastasize. Congress should be drawing up a clear day-one blueprint now, insulating it from political sabotage and reintegrating development and governance into US strategy as instruments of national security—rebuilding institutional capacity will be far harder than tearing it down.

Eighty years ago, American policymakers built an ecosystem of institutions that reinforced one another in service of US interests and values. Under a future administration, neglecting civilian engagement will heighten risk by deferring foreign intervention to later stages, when options are fewer, costs higher and outcomes harder to shape. The question isn’t whether America will be able to afford to rebuild its civilian capacity, it’s whether it will be able to do it quickly enough to help restore US national security and a rules-based international order based on the common good.

Suren Avanesyan is a professorial lecturer at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and a distinguished senior fellow at the university’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, focusing on Russian law, governance, civil society, and Track II diplomacy. He is also a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

The email’s subject line read “Invitation.” It announced a gathering to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of my school-leaving examination. I felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of seeing how the 19-year-olds I once knew—with whom I had shared the boredom of lessons, the panic of exams, the vague misery of adolescence—had turned into men and women in their late 60s. I had not seen any of them for half a century.

A dozen of my former classmates had been meeting every five years but I had never considered joining them. One would call to tell me about the reunion, and I remember feeling relieved I did not have to invent an excuse: I always had prior commitments that made travel impossible. I left the country soon after university and had not returned except for my parents’ funerals, 20 years apart. I bear no hostility toward the place but had not felt especially connected to it either. I’m one of those people who have never experienced homesickness.

My decision to leave Croatia, made when I was still a teenager, had been shaped by my mother’s treatment of me, although not because I needed to escape her long silences, which made me feel like a ghost in our home. They had taught me something more enduring: that I could never become the person she wanted me to be. Leaving was not flight but recognition. I needed to free myself from expectations rooted as much in class and culture as in family. I knew I would have to fashion myself elsewhere.

But the invitation to mark the 50^th anniversary of our baccalaureate was a landmark. Given our age, there could not be many more reunions to come. I decided I would attend.

Later that day, energized by the thought, I swam vigorously in the village pool a few kilometres from our house in France’s Deux-Sèvres, my body cutting through the water while my mind rehearsed the meeting. I pictured the old school, a sprawling Austro-Hungarian building with a grim art-deco façade, and imagined us gathering on the semicircular steps outside, eyeing one another with tentative curiosity. Is that her? Has he really changed that much? At this age, perhaps more than any other, one takes stock of one’s life. However disappointing the balance sheet, it can usually be improved by comparison with others who appear to have done less well.

The plan was to visit our former classroom, exchange memories, meet the current principal—our teachers were either dead or too frail—then go to a nearby Italian restaurant. I had already checked that it could cater to vegans.

And yet, when I replied to the woman who had contacted me, I wrote that I would try to come but other commitments made it unlikely. Yes, there were other plans but the trip was far from impossible. I had arranged a holiday in Burgundy with my husband and, before that, a short trip to Paris for a medical appointment. The timing of the invitation surprised me. I had expected the reunion to take place in the autumn, although June was the month of our examination. Traveling to my country of birth for two or three days just before our holiday seemed inconvenient, even though I would already be in Paris, with several daily flights to Zagreb. My contact wrote back saying that she was looking forward to seeing me. Please try, she added. It’s been so long.

Looking back, I still wonder what prevented me from telling her I was coming. I was eager to go. What unconscious impulse created the space where I could hesitate and change my mind?

On the eve of our trip to Paris, we were invited to a friend’s house for dinner, where I mentioned, almost in passing, my fantasy of gathering together in one room all the people who still occupy a place in my memory, the living and dead alike. We would sit in a circle and take turns describing what had happened to us since we lost contact. To my surprise, everyone at the table had an opinion.

A woman I had never met before said the idea reminded her of a magazine question about which famous people, dead or alive, one would invite to a dinner party. Another guest said he could not see the point. He felt no curiosity about people who were no longer part of his life, not even those he had loved or lived with. The only reason to contact them, he said, would be to resume a relationship.

Someone else suggested that my fantasy was typical of writers: a way of mining other people’s lives for their own material. Writers were selfish, she said; they plunder from friends and acquaintances alike. They ought to carry a warning label: I am dangerous. Keep away.

Another guest proposed a more charitable explanation. Perhaps I was still searching for my identity, looking back in order to understand who I was and where I belonged. That looking back, he said, involved defining myself in relation to other people from my past.

There was something to that.

The first post I accepted after earning my PhD in England was a university lectureship in Nigeria, mainly because I had imagined I could make it my homeland. Seconds before my plane touched down in Lagos, I understood my self-deception. Like many people, I had fallen for the myth that everyone needs to belong to a nation in order to know who they are. Ever since, my sense of identity has been fluid, mostly linked to art and literature, the only two areas that matter in my universe. The people I would have gathered at my fantasy dinner would have shared those passions.

The dinner host, who knew me as well as anyone, expanded on her other guest’s idea . Each of those people, she said, the quick and the dead, real and fictional, would have contributed to my sense of who I was. The gathered would have been an international bunch enhancing my feeling of being a citizen of the world. Seeing them all in one place, she said, would have helped me feel complete which, in turn, would improve my self-confidence, a virtue usually in short supply. You are always comparing yourself to others, she said. You are not jealous of professional success but you are relentlessly hard on yourself. It is as if you are trying to persuade yourself that you have not completely failed. She reminded me how, on our walks in the park, I read the dates on memorial benches and become anxious when I realize I am older than the person being commemorated, as if I were living on borrowed time.

I smiled and shrugged, my mind on the planned meeting with my former classmates. To what extent did they make me? How much did they contribute to my sense of being different, being the other? I used to dream of the unknown elsewhere, while they felt firmly rooted to Croatia. I wondered whether the years living outside the country of my birth, my being older and slightly more at ease with myself and the world, would make me feel more or less out of place, more or less awkward in their company.

I worked out the timetable for the coming week. It was possible to meet my classmates and return a couple of days before our holiday. There were suitable flights in both directions and short-term studio apartments within walking distance of the school. I could already imagine myself in their spare, white interiors. I rang my brother. Our relationship, while courteous, is distant because we are both aware that we are very different. We do not share the same passions. He is a lawyer and I couldn’t imagine him trying to live in a foreign language or dedicating his life to an activity that doesn’t make money. He said he could collect me from the airport, recently rebuilt, he added. I was looking forward to seeing him, his daughter, her toddler and his new partner. I planned to ask about the political situation, of which I knew nothing, and determined not to express an opinion. I knew from past experience that my views would be angrily dismissed as coming from someone “who doesn’t live here and doesn’t understand.” Still, it would be nice to see him after so long.

Another possibility contributed to the excitement: I would be able revisit the galleries where I had spent much of my free time as a student. There was also the prospect of seeing the Museum of Broken Relationships, which I had wanted to visit for some time. Everything seemed easy enough to arrange. Since there was no urgency, I told myself I would book the flights the next day.

I woke during the night and could not fall asleep again. My half-conscious mind began to question the decision I believed I had made. What was the point of traveling at such an inconvenient moment to meet a group of old people? The thought startled me. They were my age. Like most people, I thought of myself as younger than I am. When I catch sight of myself in a mirror, I feel tempted to paraphrase George Oppen: What a strange thing to happen to a little girl.

Why did I want to see these people? We had little in common at school. I had always been the odd one out. While the girls admired football players and pop stars, I loved a poet who had died almost half a century before I was born. I couldn’t tell anyone about my visits to his grave, red roses in hand. None of my former classmates were artists, the people with whom I usually feel at ease. Most had become doctors. Being the daughter of one, and having known quite a few, I have found them, apart from rare exceptions, anything but inspiring.

There was also the question of language. I had barely spoken Croatian since leaving. I think in English with the occasional intrusion of French. I would understand my classmates without difficulty but speaking would require a level of concentration that would surely soon give way to English phrases slipping in unbidden. For my father’s funeral, I had written my speech in English before translating it. Once, in a bank, I was told that I spoke well, although with an English accent. My former classmates might laugh at me or take me for someone pretentious.

I spoke to my husband about my doubts. He asked why I wanted to go at all given my list of reservations.

There was my brother, I said. His family. And yet I sensed no particular eagerness on his part. As days passed and I failed to confirm my plans, I half-expected him to call and ask whether everything was in order. He did not.

But there was that new museum. I checked the opening hours. Oh no! It was temporarily closed for renovation.

The airline sent reminders warning that seats were disappearing. They were not. The same flights remained available. All that was missing were my credit card details. My suitcase, meanwhile, was packed.

More time passed and my emotions assumed a state of disarray. My enthusiasm for the trip remained but so did my anxiety. I began to dread the idea of walking the streets of the city where I had grown up feeling lonely and uncomfortable in my perceived eccentricity. Planning the journey revived the unease of those years, when I had lived in the shadow of my mother’s silences. When she had disapproved of something I had done, she would ignore my presence for weeks. The silence was painful, oppressive. I felt as though I were inhabiting the empty spaces of a De Chirico painting, perhaps “The Anxious Journey” (1913), in which repeated archways are painted in dark colours, framing a distant railway engine with smoke billowing. No human figure, no animal or plant is in sight. The desolation and bleakness of the landscape are unsettling.

Later, when I discovered Edward Hopper, I learned to value silence differently, as a space that encourages thought and creativity. The loneliness imposed on me became the solitude I eventually recognized as necessary. Once I left home and the country, my relationship with my mother improved but the memory of those silences remained. Planning the trip made them palpable again. I told myself that facing the city of my adolescence might help me confront those old fears. They were no more than demons, after all.

On the morning of our departure for Paris, my husband said there was still time to book the flight. It would mean that he would return alone to our French village while I travelled on to Zagreb. I said no. I had already unpacked my suitcase. It could easily be repacked but I felt paralysed. I wanted to go. I did not want to go.

In Paris, he repeated that there was still time. I checked the flights. The same seats were available. But Zagreb was experiencing extreme heat and I had brought no suitable clothes. The thought of arriving ill-prepared felt oddly decisive.

We returned home. There was no longer any possibility of changing my mind. The week of hesitation had exhausted me.

Two days later, I received an email from the woman who had organized the reunion. Only 12 people had attended, as one of the regulars had died a few months earlier. She attached photographs of the group standing on the steps of our former school. I barely recognized them at first. She identified each person and added brief updates about their lives. They had decided to meet annually, she wrote, aware that the group would only grow smaller.

There would be another reunion the following June.

Looking at the photographs, I wondered how different I might have been had I not left Croatia. I might have mellowed. Time might have softened my awkwardness. I might have fitted in. The thought did not convince me. Even then, as I knew very well, I had been ill-suited to belonging.

One of my former classmates, I learned, had published a book. I looked it up and felt unexpected relief on discovering it was the only one, a compilation of lectures. I kept returning to the photographs. Most of the faces were unhealthily overweight and appeared older than I felt myself to be.

I am not unaware of how ungracious such comparison might sound. If there is any mitigation, it lies in knowing myself. My Latin teacher used to remind us that the greatest failing was ignorance of the self: Nosce te ipsum, she would say, as we sat in silence, uncertain of what she meant. Now I know that what stopped me from traveling may have been the unspoken fear that returning would force me to question the central decision that has defined my life. The excitement I felt on receiving the invitation may have had less to do with my former classmates than my desire for confirmation that leaving had been the right choice.

I have marked the week of the next reunion in my diary. Whether I will attend remains uncertain. The decision to leave was made long ago. Everything that followed, including this hesitation, belongs to its afterlife.

Born in Zagreb, Vesna Main has lived most of her life in Britain. With a degree in comparative literature and a PhD in Elizabethan drama, she has worked as a lecturer in literature. Now a fiction writer, her publications are published include Temptation, a short story collection (Salt, 2018) and Good Day?, a novel in dialogue (Salt, 2019) that was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Her other novels are Only A Lodger… And Hardly That (Seagull Books, 2020) and Waiting for A Party (Salt, 2024). Two of her stories have been published in Best British Short Stories (Salt 2017, 2019); many others have appeared in journals in print and online. Vesna divides her time between London and rural France.

With the New START Treaty—the last strategic nuclear arms control agreement between the major powers—now defunct, the fact that the United States and Russia are unleashed and free to enter a new arms race, with China hot on their heels, might have been expected to finally send the world into a new bout of apocalypse angst, Cold-War style. But it’s no secret that the threat of instant annihilation doesn’t seem to be registering on any disaster scale in the collective psyche.

That was not the case in the 1980s, when the Reagan Administration’s decision to deploy Pershing II nuclear ballistic missiles to Europe to counter Soviet SS20s helped prompt the Nuclear Freeze movement. Some 300,000 protesters assembled in Bonn in October 1981, nearly a million gathered in New York in 1982, and in 1983, 200,000 Germans formed a 65-mile human chain from the US Army headquarters in Stuttgart to the gates of Wiley Barracks in Neu-Ulm, the site of one of the Pershing battalions. They were joined by a million protestors in Bonn and thousands of others in capitals across Europe. Greta Thunberg would be envious: The scale and longevity of anti-nuke protests eclipsed the size of today’s climate protests.

It may be that the threat of global warming has pushed nuclear fear out of the collective imagination. Especially with the Trump Administration gutting the Environmental Protection Agency, the global population may feel it has more pressing worries than being vaporized were someone to push a red button in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Paris or Tel-Aviv.

But the nuclear threat is only growing. Since the signing of the first strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT) in 1972, cooperation had enabled Washington and Moscow to reduce their nuclear stockpiles from some 70,000 warheads at the height of the Cold War to a “mere” 12,000 today, according to the national security analyst Joseph Cirincione in a recent op-ed for the French daily Le Monde. While that number is still high enough to prompt an apocalypse, the downward trend is now reversing with the development of new weapons, unless presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin negotiate a fresh nuclear weapons limitation treaty, an option they don’t seem ready to discuss. Cirincione also points out that 96 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads is currently in the hands of authoritarian regimes—among which he counts the current US administration.

That stark description, along with Trump’s comments last October that the United States would resume nuclear testing, are cause for serious worry. But even last year’s release of “A House of Dynamite,” a major Hollywood film about nuclear apocalypse, failed to do much more than generate comparisons to the Cold War.

It was a different story seven decades ago, when Fred Astaire and Ava Gardner made history together in Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film “On the Beach” (although they never danced together onscreen). Now forgotten by all but a few movie buffs, the film was testimony to the angst that seized a world confronted with the prospect of total annihilation were World War III to break out.

Adapted from the eponymous novel by the British author Nevil Shute—who’s also slipped into the dustbin of history—it’s required viewing to better understand the path that led the Americans and Soviets to negotiate the first nuclear arms control treaties.

Shot on location in Melbourne (“the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world,” Gardner quipped at the time to the dismay of her Australian hosts), “On the Beach” tells the story of a US submarine captain, Commander Dwight Lionel Towers (Gregory Peck as his most tenebrious self), docking in Australia after the rest of the planet’s population has been wiped out by nuclear war. The Aussies are the last to survive due to the remoteness of their continent island but will soon suffer the same fate.

Although Towers knows his wife and children must have died in the holocaust back home, he’s in full denial, which helps him resist the fully deployed charms of an alcoholic woman he meets named Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner).

Entrusted with a mission to return to California to seek the source of a series of persistent, garbled Morse code messages, Towers departs with his crew and an Australian nuclear scientist named Julian Osborn—Fred Astaire—in charge of monitoring radioactivity levels along the journey.

Finding San Francisco a ghost town, Towers, his crew and Osborn return to Melbourne to await certain death. They’re given just enough time to find love (Towers and Davidson) and, Osborn, a car enthusiast, to drive a Ferrari to victory in the last Australian Grand Prix (don’t ask…).

The incredulous plot might raise chuckles today, but the film’s reception in 1959 was serious business. Asked for help with props during the filming, the US Defense Department wanted nothing to do with it and refused any collaboration. The production was carried out on a British sub instead, and the Australian Navy generously provided access to an aircraft carrier. The movie was simultaneously released in Hollywood and 18 cities worldwide, including Moscow, the first time an American movie premiered in the USSR.

Peck and his wife attended the screening along with 1,200 foreign dignitaries. The New York Times called it “the most elaborate international premiere in movie history…because the film is of such international interest.” I was born two days later, and the first 25 years of my conscious life were spent awaiting imminent nuclear doom before I was relieved of my angst by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

How much the film’s wide distribution and publicity prevented an “On the Beach” scenario from becoming reality is open to debate, but the story did have some impact on world peace: John F. Kennedy read the novel and remembered it some three years later during the Cuban missile crisis.

Gone are the days when an American president might read a book and draw lessons. In that regard, “On the Beach” may tell us more about the evolution of the US presidency than protest movements or the respective popularity of Fred Astaire or Greta Thunberg. In any case, it helps illustrate the change in public concerns and priorities.

It appears, as Osborn (Astaire) says in the film, that “people [have] accepted the idiotic principle that peace can be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn’t possibly use without committing suicide.”

Anyone suffering apocalyptic nuclear war angst today, just duck and cover.

Jean-Louis Doublet was a US correspondent for French media and a White House reporter during the George W. Bush Administration.