When you take the ferry from Istanbul’s Eminönü waterfront at the base of the Bosphorus up the Golden Horn inlet, it’s impossible to miss the Phanar Greek Orthodox College high up on your left. Known officially as the Özel Fener Rum Ortaokulu ve Lisesi, nicknamed the “Red Castle” by the Turks and “Great School of the Nation” by the Greeks, the neo-Gothic high school overlooks the hills of the traditionally Greek Fener neighborhood, one of the city’s most historic.

But the building has been empty since last fall, forced to close to undergo seismic renovations. Because the school foundation lacks the over 10 million euros ($11.5 million) needed to fund the work amid declining enrollment, the landmark structure’s fate is unclear.

I took the boat on a recent morning when the school was still open. From the dock at the base of the hill, I walked up a steep, stone-paved alley.

The building’s fortress-like architecture attracts visitors from around the world, although most were only able to admire from the outside. Its red bricks, which earned its Turkish nickname, were imported from Marseille, and its large dome once housed an astronomical observatory with a telescope.

The school opened in another building in 1454, just a year after the fall of Constantinople, established by Ecumenical Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios, who appointed the Thessalonian scholar Mathaios Kamariotis as its first director. It served as the premier academy for the city’s Greek elite for centuries. Changing locations several times, it moved to its current home, designed by the Greek architect Konstantinos Dimadis, in 1882.

The school celebrated its 570^th anniversary in November 2024, the oldest surviving and most prominent Greek educational institution still in operation, kept alive by the Rūm, or Istanbul Greeks.

The principal Dimitris Zotos was waiting for me at his desk, surrounded by books. On one side stood the Turkish flag, on the other, the school’s flag. Behind him hung a panoramic photograph of the building with a portrait of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, above.

Besides serving as principal, Zotos has also taught mathematics for nearly 30 years. He was born and raised in the city.

“We Greeks are privileged; we are people with a rich heritage,” he said. “The concepts of democracy, philosophy, science: We must be proud to have them and the many people who carried them all the way to the present day.”

Classes were already out for summer when I visited, which allowed me to wander the airy hallways and empty classrooms. Some 450 to 500 students had attended in the early 1950s. But only 38 children between the ages of 11 and 18 celebrated the end of the 2024 school year. Eight graduated.

Today, the aging Rūm community numbers no more than 2,000, having steadily shrunk due to emigration and declining birth rates, from some 110,000 Greeks in the 1920s. The city’s other remaining Greek schools are now also almost empty.

“What will happen next, I really don’t know,” Zotos told me. “What can a school principal do about demographics?”

The Turkish Education Ministry ordered the Red Castle’s temporary closure in September after earthquake resistance testing revealed the building needs structural reinforcement and maintenance work to meet seismic safety standards. Classes have moved to a Greek primary school near central Taksim Square until the work is completed.

It’s not clear when the historic building will be able to reopen.

Demetrios Ioannou is an independent journalist and documentary photographer. He is based between Istanbul and his native city of Athens. He covers a wide range of stories in the region, including travel, culture, food, social issues and breaking news. His work has appeared in local and international publications including The New York Times, National Geographic, The Economist, BBC Travel, NPR, Politico Europe and The Daily Beast.

Reviewed in this article:

The Descent: Witnessing Russia’s Spiral into Madness under Putin
Bloomsbury Continuum, April 2026
by Marc Bennetts

The Closing of the Russian Mind: How Putin’s Ideology Took the Nation Hostage
Polity Press, April 2026
by Andrei Kolesnikov

On May 12, 80-year-old Nina Litvinova committed suicide in Moscow. A tireless dissident and human rights activist, she was the younger sister of Pavel Litvinov, one of eight protesters who famously demonstrated on Red Square in 1968 against the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia under a banner reading “For your freedom and ours!” Both are grandchildren of Stalin-era Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov.

Litvinova left a note saying that life had become “unbearable” since President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. She had worked unceasingly to help political prisoners detained in Russia for opposing the war. “I tried to help them,” she wrote, “but I’m exhausted, and I am tormented day and night by helplessness. I’m ashamed, but I gave up. Please forgive me.”

The tragedy of Nina Litvinova is just one small, heartrending moment in the history of Russia’s devolution from a flawed but aspirational young democracy in 1999 into an ugly, aggressive and ultimately self-destructive hybrid dictatorship under Putin. For many Russians and foreign Russophiles, wrestling to understand that process has produced similar results, to varying degrees, that it did for Litvinova—exhaustion, torment, helplessness and shame.

Two new books have appeared to shed light on what has been done to Russia—and what Russians did to themselves—over the last quarter century: The Descent: Witnessing Russia’s Spiral into Madness Under Putin by Marc Bennetts, former Moscow correspondent for The Times (London), and The Closing of the Russian Mind: How Putin’s Ideology Took the Nation Hostage by the veteran Russian journalist and political analyst Andrei Kolesnikov.

The breathless subtitles already begin to convey the tragic urgency of what has happened. Both merit attention not only for what they tell us about Putin’s horrific war of choice against Ukraine and its broad popular support but also for the warnings they’re flashing to Western societies, some of which also seem to be decivilizing at an appalling rate.

Possessed by a demon

Bennetts spent nearly 25 years in Russia, leaving shortly after the Kremlin launched its 2022 attack on Ukraine. By then, he writes, “the power of Putin’s propaganda machine was truly frightening. It was like nothing I had ever experienced or had ever expected to. Russians had already relinquished many of their democratic rights to Putin in exchange for his promise of economic stability—now millions appeared to be surrendering their sanity as well.” Shortly before he left, Bennetts stopped by a neighbor’s flat to say farewell, but when the subject of Ukraine came up, she “growled” at him “as if she was possessed by a demon.”

“This kind of craziness, I feared, was infectious,” he adds. “If we stayed much longer, would we also succumb?”

Both Bennetts and Kolesnikov marvel at the power of the Kremlin’s propaganda, which they see as the keystone of Russia’s transformation. It may be a cliché of sociology that a political leader can get a small number of people to do horrendous things by offering rewards, but to get a large number to do so requires some kind of ideology. The demons Bennetts describes are conjured up by emotionally driven creeds like communism, fascism or religion, as history has demonstrated.

But getting at precisely how the Kremlin’s malevolent propaganda has worked so effectively in Russia—a country where millions of people still had relatively fresh memories of repudiated state-driven political repression and where as recently as the mid-1990s people would stand in line for copies of formerly banned books by figures such as Vladimir Nabokov, Marina Tsvetayeva and Alexander Solzhenitsyn that were sold alongside bottles of vodka at metro station kiosks—is no easy riddle.

Still, well before Putin began stoking the flames of nationalism and anti-Westernism when he took power in the year 2000, Bennetts notes, Russians were already well-practiced at ignoring human rights abuses and eye-opening corruption scandals.

“Most people cared about little beyond their immediate families and the everyday business of living,” he writes. “Sometimes, they didn’t even care that much about those things. It was so easy for Putin to fill this vacuum with his own violent compulsions.”

‘Mental, intellectual, spiritual violence’

Kolesnikov—a longtime fellow of the Carnegie Endowment’s Russia Eurasia Center who still lives and works in Moscow—takes a more academic approach, broadly grounded in the literature of sociology and political science. But his conclusions jibe remarkably with Bennetts’s. He points to the direct relationship between the state’s ratcheting up of literal physical violence against Russians and what he calls “the mental, intellectual and spiritual violence” by the Kremlin’s ideological machinery.

“The state’s monopoly on violence is supplemented by a monopoly on the formulation, production, and implementation of ideology,” Kolesnikov argues. “The invention, production, and implementation of a systematized and de facto state ideology is becoming a distinct industry involving schools and universities; teachers and professors; television, press, and the internet; the education and science ministries; the Russian Orthodox Church; and the Culture Ministry. All these agencies offer serious support to Russia’s security agencies—and vice versa.”

Many Russians, he adds, were particularly susceptible because of their deep-seated “learned indifference” and “passive conformism.” They fell for the key illusions of “all totalitarian ideologies,” which, as described by the prominent Russian sociologist Lev Gudkov, include “an archaic and idealized idea of a lost original collective integrity…; an image of an enemy, which is presented as a metaphysical evil; and a utopia of revived collectivity projected into the future.”

Both authors identify key turning points in Putinist Russia’s history, the most important of which were the last major pro-democracy protests in 2011 and 2012 (triggered by Putin’s equally key decision to return to the Kremlin for—so far—a third, fourth and fifth term as president) and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine a decade later. The failed protests clearly signaled that Russian society could be corralled into going along with whatever vision of the future Putin would concoct, they both argue.

The Ukraine invasion signaled the end of the period when apathy and passivity on the public’s part were sufficient in the Kremlin’s eyes, and the beginning of its demand for active complicity. That came in the form of denunciations (Kolesnikov describes them as “a new social norm”), participation in the war as needed, support for the military-industrial complex and much more. “A young person taking an exam in the humanities can no longer enter adulthood without expressing public loyalty to the state,” he points out.

The speed at which Putin has pressed his advantage is also remarkable. “It is amazing that a contemporary, modernized and urbanized society can degenerate at such a staggering rate, especially in terms of morality and psychology,” Kolesnikov marvels. But for those with any official authority, from police to judges to teachers to petty bureaucrats, the post-invasion system demands the “public demonstration of super-obedience.” As conformity increases and becomes the norm, tiny nonconformist acts or omissions become more noticeable and thereby easier to persecute.

Of the two books, Bennetts’s is the easier read, full of colorful stories and pithy quotations from emblematic figures of the period including Alexander Gabyshev, an Indigenous Sakha shaman from Russia’s far east who was thrown into a psychiatric hospital for declaiming that “Putin is a demon…the antichrist” and a washed-up American mixed martial arts fighter named Jeff Monson, who converted his vocal admiration for Putin into a Russian passport and a political position in the Moscow suburb of Krasnogorsk.

The Descent tells the story of Russia’s deterioration through a mélange of small stories that, somewhat surprisingly, form a coherent and devastating whole. It lacks the power and immediacy of Bennetts’s excellent 2016 book about Putin’s dismantling of his political opponents, I’m Going To Ruin Their Lives: Inside Putin’s War on Russia’s Opposition, but it effectively conveys the author’s personal pain from losing friends, relatives and one cultural touchstone after another as Russia’s “madness” spreads. Although that suffering may be small compared to that of Ukrainians enduring atrocities and noble Russians like Nina Litvinova, it’s immediate and relatable.

Despite Kolesnikov’s more scholarly detachment, the story of democratic Russia’s demise touches him closely, too. A prominent liberal journalist throughout his country’s Westernizing 1990s, he now finds himself a lonely voice inside Putin’s whirlwind. He writes tersely about his mother, the daughter of a Stalinist “enemy of the people” who didn’t live to see her son branded a “foreign agent” under the new wave of dictatorship.

During the less restrictive earlier days of Putin’s rise, a prominent fellow journalist named Sergei Parkhomenko initiated a project to place small plaques on buildings where innocent victims of Stalin’s political terror had lived before their murders. One such sign honored Kolesnikov’s grandfather, but like many of the memorials across Russia, it disappeared as the Kremlin renewed the practice of rewriting its past myths.

“Russia is heading once more towards totalitarianism,” Bennetts quotes Parkhomenko as saying. “The aggressive nationalism that we are seeing now leads directly to the idea that the individual’s life is worth nothing and that only the state’s interests are important.”

Neither author offers saccharine predictions about where Putin may ultimately lead Russia or whether it will recover from its authoritarian ethos, although Bennetts is unable to surrender the hope he might someday return to Moscow. “I am not hopeful about [Russia’s] future,” he writes in conclusion. “Change may come, eventually, but I fear that much of Russian society has been hollowed out of the qualities necessary to build a freer and fairer country.”

“Evil and madness have the upper hand,” he adds, “and the road to normality, or something resembling it, has been rendered almost impassable by bullet-ridden corpses and the charred ruins of Ukrainian towns and cities.”

Robert Coalson is a retired journalist who spent more than 20 years reporting on Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the former Soviet bloc for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

The World Cup has descended on North America. In New York, it’s the talk of the town. But those with a team to cheer for the first time ever may be among the most excited.

The tournament’s expansion from 32 to 48 squads has opened the door for countries that rarely appear, and some, like Uzbekistan, are making their debut. Its team will play its first World Cup match on June 17.

Nowhere on the continent will the former Soviet republic’s entrance make more waves than here. Nearly half the country’s 60,000 global immigrants live in the New York metro area. Some will watch matches in person, many others in the city’s restaurants and bars.

Abdulla Kwaja, president of the Turkestan American Association who left Uzbekistan’s lush Fergana Valley in 1974, when it was still part of the Soviet Union, greeted the national team on its arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport.

“We are so excited!” he said. “Uzbekistan, now an independent country, will be in the World Cup!” He’ll travel with the team to Mexico, Houston and Atlanta for each of the group stage matches. “I will wear my Uzbek hat and carry our flag into the stadium.”

Before independence following the Soviet collapse in 1991, players had to compete under the Soviet Union’s flag. Later, the national team, called the White Wolves, just missed qualifying for three World Cup championships. But last year in Abu Dhabi, its hard work paid off with a victory over the United Arab Emirates. Uzbekistan is the first Central Asian country to participate.

It has only recently begun opening to the world. Former President Islam Karimov, the country’s onetime Communist boss who retained power after independence in 1991 until his death in 2016, was said to be paranoid on top of highly repressive. He saw enemies everywhere, not least in those who emigrated, whom he called “lazy people” who “disgrace all of us.”

New York’s Uzbekistani diaspora is very far from a single community, however. It’s split across religions, language, class and migration waves. Many Jews whose ancestors lived in the once powerful Silk Road city Bukhara arrived during the late Soviet period and built lives in Queens. Newer Muslim migrants concentrated in southern Brooklyn, many working long hours in the city’s service economy.

The borough’s Coney Island Avenue hums late into the night, sustained by delivery workers, rideshare drivers and recent arrivals finishing long shifts. The 24-hour kebab joint Urgut Osh Markazi is full of cantankerous taxi drivers and delivery workers switching between Uzbek, Tajik and Russian amid the beeping sounds of delivery apps as they wait to pick up mixed grill platters and large portions of plov, Uzbekistan’s national dish: rice often cooked with lamb, onions, carrots and cumin seeds.

Mirshod Rashidob, tall, slender and bespectacled, handed me a samsa, a flaky turnover baked in tandoor oven. Only 18 years old, he moved to the United States last year with plans to study mechanical engineering in the fall. “I’ve been so busy” since relocating to New York, he said. “Everyone here is so busy.”

Still, he hopes to catch his home team’s matches as well as the tournament’s championship at one of the FIFA fan zones near Rockefeller Center.

In leafy Rego Park, off Queens Boulevard in the eponymous borough, life is quieter. Mezuzahs line jewelry stores, groceries and real estate offices tucked beneath glass office towers and faded shopping arcades. Ilya Schumilkhay, a Bukharan Jew, moved from his native Samarkand—another storied Silk Road city—in 1994 to study fashion in Manhattan and now makes costumes for Broadway and films.

“They aren’t necessarily my favorite team,” he confessed of Uzbekistan’s team. (That would be Argentina, especially during the Maradona years.) “But I am proud of them.”

Separate migration waves reshaped the diaspora over decades. Some Muslim refugees arrived during the final Soviet years, but the largest post-independence influx came in the 2000s. They were aided by the United States Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, a lottery launched in 1995 to facilitate immigration from places underrepresented in the US.

“I hire them at my shop,” Schumilkhay said of newer immigrants from Uzbekistan. “They work in restaurants, drive trucks, take care of our parents. They work very hard,” he said. But other older Bukharan Jews remain wary and insular decades after arriving in New York, their attitudes shaped by memories of antisemitism and upheaval.

Bukharan Jews tend to associate more with the Soviet Union or with their religion than any feelings of Uzbekistani nationalism, says Central Asia expert Alexander Cooley, a professor of political science at Barnard College, especially after Karimov was replaced by the current leader Shavkat Mirziyoyev in 2016.

As Uzbekistan prepares for its inaugural World Cup appearance, several stars have aligned for the country, Cooley said. It is opening under Mirziyoyev, who’s leveraging tourism, technology and stronger ties with the diaspora to help make it a leader in Central Asia.

“Uzbekistan has become a national, regional and now a global player,” he said, adding that the tournament may have a galvanizing effect.

Diaspora communities are indeed rallying around the national team. After years suffering the agonizingly close chances, many Uzbekistani soccer fans in New York feel they’re finally being rewarded for their resilience.

But the going will be difficult. Currently ranked 50^th, the team will face stiff competition in the group stage, first playing Colombia, ranked 13^th, on June 17, and then Portugal, ranked fifth.

“We have tough teams to play,” Amir Huseini acknowledged standing below the bright white lights of his restaurant Afsona in Brooklyn’s Kensington neighborhood. “But we have tough players, too, and we have a great coach.”

Sharing plates of shashlyk and round flatbread, flanked by geometric and floral motifs, fans at Afsona spoke about the White Wolves coach Fabio Cannavaro in almost mythical terms. The Italian national, nicknamed “The Berlin Wall,” led Italy to victory in the 2006 World Cup.

The national team would rely on a disciplined defense, they said, with its back line including the team’s star, Abdukodir Khusanov, the first Uzbekistani national to play in the English Premier League. The plan will be to rely on the strong fullbacks and make quick counterattacks.

“All we can do is hope,” said Ashraf Zakirov, drinking green tea from a small bowl in his office nearby off Ditmas Avenue. He moved here in 2001 from Samarkand, like many in the area. He now works as a lawyer, realtor and head of the Central Asian Foundation.

Uzbekistan’s participation in the World Cup will raise the country’s profile regardless of the results, he said, adding that many people have trouble placing the country on a map, often confusing it with Pakistan.

But Zakirov told me he’s frustrated by the tough travel restrictions around the tournament. “Everyone got the ticket but most did not get visas,” he said, adding that family and friends won’t be reunited to join the World Cup festivities.

Nevertheless, he hopes to go to the game in Houston—where the team will play Portugal on June 23—or watch from down the road at Emir Palace, a dazzlingly white marble hall owned by another friend from Samarkand. The restaurant will show the first two games on a big screen but has scheduled a private party for the team’s third game against the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Steven Benjamin left Uzbekistan in 1992 as part of the mass Jewish exodus. Now he manages a barbershop near Brooklyn’s tony Prospect Park—far from other, more insular Uzbek enclaves—and still closely follows the national team.

“I couldn’t believe they made it that far,” he said of the squad. Working in a neighborhood shaped much more by West Indian families and young professionals than post-Soviet immigrants, Benjamin said the team’s World Cup appearance has unexpectedly become a source of pride not only for older members of the community but also his own American-born children.

“My kids understand everything,” he said about his ability to speak Russian, Uzbek and Tajik, “but they always answer in English.”

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

TROMSØ, Norway — “Have you heard Alex Karp has come to town?”

It was a sunny afternoon in April. I was sitting in a café called Tøllefsen with a Sámi politician named Anton Petter Hauan. He was in town for the weekend for an arts festival, and would soon be headed back to Kautokeino, the eastern city close to the Finnish border where he lives, populated mainly by members of the Sámi Indigenous people. We were deep in conversation about high north energy projects when a lanky older man approached our table and patted him on the back. Hauan quickly introduced us; this was Magne Amundsen, head of economic development for Tromsø municipality.

“An American journalist?” Amundsen said, raising his eyebrows. Then he asked the question that opened this piece.

Clocking my alarm, Amundsen quickly supplied the details: Alex Karp, controversial billionaire CEO of the American AI-powered data analytics company Palantir, had bought property in our city. Amundsen pulled out his phone to show me the article in Nordlys, the regional paper. In 2024, a mysterious company called Hohenems AB completed one of the city’s biggest residential sales, paying $3.2 million for a modern five-bedroom home with stunning fjord views. Intrigued by both the scale and secrecy of the sale, the paper had traced the company’s ownership back to Karp.

As it turns out, he has purchased several properties in Norway through Hohehems AB. But, Amundsen told me, he had reason to believe this one was more than a mere real estate investment. One of Amundsen’s friends lives just down the road from the property and this past winter had often spotted Karp’s unmistakable wild graying mane entering or leaving the home. On more than one occasion, an ever-present coterie of super-fit Norwegian security guards had frightened this man’s young child.

Karp is an avid cross-country skier, according to reports, and his rigorous training routine involves splitting time between ski destinations around the world. But for a man outspoken about his commitment to mass surveillance of civilians—one of Palantir’s stocks-in-trade—his sudden interest in these particular ski trails has raised suspicion.

At the center of Tromsø island, seven miles of carefully maintained ski tracks loop around the long north-to-south ridge. One of the most-trafficked loops passes an eerie and unmissable installation: a large field dotted with more than 30 white satellite dishes, many encased in protective domes and some as tall as a telephone pole. It is the global headquarters of Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT). The satellite arm of Kongsberg, a joint state-commercial defense company and major weapons manufacturer, it, like Palantir, has considerably profited from US contracts throughout the US-Israel war against Iran.

Palantir has also been rapidly expanding its space footprint, moving beyond defense contracts to building core operating systems for orbital and stratospheric operations. For many in Norway, Karp’s geographical proximity to the state’s satellite operations feels too close for comfort. And well-timed: last year, the European Space Agency announced it would build its new Arctic Space Center in Tromsø.

Nordlys had published an investigation in September 2025 and there was good reason for Amundsen to alert me about it now. On April 18—not long before our cafe introduction—Karp published a 22-point “mini-manifesto” on X outlining his vision for the future of the West. Among other points, he endorsed state mass surveillance of civilians, extolled American military might and called on Silicon Valley to prioritize AI-powered weaponry.

“The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose,” Karp wrote.

From the United Kingdom to France to Spain, state contracts with Palantir have drawn sharp criticism. In the UK, which has nearly $700 million in AI-powered big-data software contracts spanning the National Health Services, the military and various ministries, Karp’s April manifesto brought the controversy to a head. Thousands of protestors took to the streets and more than 200,000 people signed a petition calling to end the contracts. Parliament members have also raised concerns, according to The Guardian, with one calling the manifesto “the ramblings of a supervillain.”

Norway doesn’t currently employ Palantir. But it tried. The Norwegian state police adopted the company’s Gotham surveillance technology in 2016 until it terminated the contract in 2020, citing, among other concerns, the firm’s non-compliance with Norway’s strict data protection laws. (In December 2025, Switzerland’s armed forces also cancelled a contract after an audit detected data leaks to US intelligence.)

Still, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund remains one of Palantir’s largest European investors. That has attracted criticism at a time the fund has significantly downsized its Israeli defense investments. Palantir has longstanding contracts with the Israeli Defense Forces, providing the predictive systems that supported civilian surveillance and genocide in Gaza as well as operations in the West Bank. An Amnesty International report last year found that Palantir had also contributed to human rights violations by facilitating the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s unlawful arrests.

Over my nearly two years living in Tromsø, it’s happened a handful of times: a sudden vertigo-like sensation when my high north small-town bubble seems to suddenly pop. I felt it last year when our port police detained an alleged Russian shadow fleet vessel. I felt it in January, when Thomas Dans, the Trump-appointed chair of US Arctic research, arrived directly from Mar-a-Lago to attend a conference that saw the United States abandon its longstanding interests and partnerships. At a small cocktail reception, he told me, unflinchingly, that US Arctic research would turn its focus from “climate change and Indigenous-peoples-DEI stuff,” to focus on “the economic opportunities of the North.” (I wrote about those conversations for The Atlantic here.)

Any sense of isolation is an illusion, of course. Not just because Tromsø is a growing global tourism hub and geopolitical center. But also because, much like in most of the world, American AI companies are already infiltrating the fabric of many peoples’ personal and professional lives, prompting ethical debates.

The Arctic University in Norway, for example, has a contract with OpenAI to run its own internal, data-protected large language model, ChatUiT. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman entered an agreement with the US Defense Department in March, it raised alarm. Tromsø is a sister city with Gaza and pro-Palestine activism here is widespread and strong. Many students have expressed outrage that their work is helping train algorithms that are powering the US-Israel defense apparatus.

Among my friends at the university, I’ve heard debates questioning the very existence of an academic “GPT.” It raises all kinds of knotty questions: Whose knowledge was mined and repackaged to produce its answers, often without credit and always without compensation? How are such models trained and how might they be invisibly guiding avenues of critical thinking? What data are we revealing about ourselves from the content and sequence of our own queries?

As word of Karp’s purchase spread, I heard critical conversations among locals as well. There’s another layer of self-questioning behind them: In our countless daily acts of digital permissiveness, what’s the point of being so alarmed by Karp’s mere physical intrusion anyway? Do we need the embodied presence of an easily hate-able figurehead like him to question the inevitability-narrative of power brokers who have everything to gain from our accepting their terms?

Back at Tøllefsen, Amundsen departed, and my conversation with Hauan, the Sámi politician, turned to his own recent explorations with AI. He’d been talking with Claude, the chatbot created by Anthropic. Founded by former OpenAI employees, that company trained its bot on human rights principles and is considered a moral (and more accurate) alternative to ChatGPT. Lately, Hauan has been teaching Claude to speak northern Sámi. It’s an extremely quick learner, he said.

Hauan didn’t grow up with the Sámi language. He wasn’t raised as a Sámi at all. Thanks to more than a century of successful fornorskning, or Norwegianization, policies, his parents were “fully Norwegian” and didn’t talk about their cultural heritage. Hauan’s ancestors were sea Sámi, coastal fishers whose culture was systemically erased by a state eager to exploit fish-rich northern waters. Hauan has spent much of his adulthood rediscovering their silenced history. Integral to the process was learning northern Sámi.

Could large language models help preserve, and even spread, Indigenous languages? As it happened, that question had come up in another recent conversation. For nearly two years now, I’ve been meeting Risten Turi Aleksandersen, director of language, education and health at the Sámi Parliament, the representative body with which the government must consult on issues concerning Sámi culture and land. She recently told me that the Sámi University of Applied Sciences is developing a large language model of its own.

For the Sámi, language, education and health all go hand in hand, Risten said. Nearly 40 years after Norway ratified the International Labor Organization Tribal and Indigenous Peoples Convention (ILO 169) and abolished its assimilation policies, language revitalization is ongoing work. In many cases, there simply aren’t enough teachers to staff the region’s constellation of small and geographically distant communities. The subsequent language gap isn’t just a cultural loss affecting future generations. It can also magnify health risks for those who are native speakers.

Few doctors in Norway speak Sámi, let alone understand the lifestyle, values and worldviews that should inform consultation and diagnosis. If AI could at the very least help more doctors translate the basics, she told me, it could be transformative.

Risten also sees potential to help level a legal playing field as the state systemically expropriates traditional lands. She cited a landmark 2021 case in which the Supreme Court ruled the state’s permitting of the Fosen wind park unconstitutional because it violated the rights of Sámi reindeer herders. But it took two decades of legal battles to reach that decision. By the time the ruling came down, the park had already been built. Because the damage was done, the state was allowed to keep the windmills and merely pay a fine.

Risten, herself a reindeer herder, has spent a decade fighting a state-permitted wind park in her herding areas just an hour from Tromsø. Much of that fight has also been a sort of linguistic study, as she and her husband attempted to translate cryptic bureaucratic processes and legalese. Theoretically, Sámi-trained AI could help future herders quickly learn permit and approval processes and better defend their lands. Or a tool grounded in Sámi worldviews and trained in international human rights law might in turn be able to communicate those to states and corporations that have historically dismissed Sámi authority.

But even potentially helpful uses must be weighed against one glaring consequence: AI’s devastating environmental costs, and ever-growing demand for energy, water and space. Those, too, are swiftly coming to northern Norway. Just a few hours south of Tromsø lies the fjordside city Narvik, known for the World War II battle that marked Hitler’s first decisive defeat. On its outskirts, Microsoft will soon build a $6.2 billion, 230-megawatt AI data center promising to “deliver sustainable AI infrastructure to all of Europe.” Already, this Narvik center is raising concerns in the local reindeer herding district.

Indeed, northern Norway is quickly emerging as a leader in future European data center infrastructure. Not only is it among Europe’s least-populated regions but the Arctic climate also naturally reduces the energy required to keep the centers cool. Much like the many new energy projects crisscrossing the land, these centers will inevitably encroach on already-fragmented traditional Sámi herding grounds.

On that April afternoon in Tøllefsen, Hauan and I were in agreement: Karp’s arrival was alarming but his technologies had likely long since infiltrated our lives. His presence was merely an uncomfortable reminder of the far-flung, deep-burrowing global influence of a disturbingly small group of American men. Absent larger regulations, civilians now bear the weight of often queasy-making ethics. But rather than restricting those firms’ access to sensitive civilian data, many democratic states are still paying them for the privilege of being mined.

For now, we could hold out hope that Karp is interested in Tromsø only for the quality of its fresh powder. Perhaps, we mused, he may even notice the snow cover’s growing unpredictability, its rapid seasonal changes. Maybe in some future winter, as he wades through gummy slush, he’ll consider his own disproportionate contributions to the high north’s accelerating transformations and have a change of heart.

We laughed at the image of Karp suddenly growing a climate conscience. It felt about as absurd as state leaders expecting that his company, or any powerful technology firm, could be trusted to set its own ethical guardrails, let alone follow them.

Institute of Current World Affairs Fellow Brett Simpson is a journalist based 200 miles above the Arctic Circle in Tromsø, Norway—from where she’s investigating intersecting environmental, societal and political challenges across the Arctic, one of the earth’s fastest-changing environments. An alumna of Princeton and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, she’s written for National Geographic, The Atlantic, The New York Times and other publications.

The March on Washington in 1963 remains one of the most iconic moments in modern American history. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, the event’s highlight, continues to inspire people around the world. The protest helped build momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which helped lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the end of the Jim Crow era.

Activists around the world still see the March on Washington as a model. Because it was followed by the greatest victories of the civil rights movement, they assume the march caused those triumphs. In fact, that’s a dangerous misconception.

The civil rights movement didn’t become powerful because of the March on Washington; the event took place because the civil rights movement had become powerful. The march was part of a larger strategy, it didn’t create change by itself.

By 1963, activists were employing a wide variety of tactics, including lawsuits, boycotts, sit-ins, “Freedom Rides” and other campaigns. Each targeted specific institutions: courts, legislatures, corporations, unions, religious institutions and, of course, political leaders like President John F. Kennedy. It was Kennedy who introduced the civil rights bill to Congress and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, pushed the legislation through.

The march was successful because it was aimed at that specific target. On its own, it would almost certainly have fizzled. That’s what usually happens when people march on Washington. There have been more than 300 such marches. If you consider that the famous one was arguably the only such event to have had a historic impact, you begin to understand the challenge.

The odds appear even worse for activists on closer examination. The first march on Washington, the Woman Suffrage Procession in 1913, for instance, was a full-blown disaster. Disrupted by hooligans, it turned into a large-scale riot that greatly discredited the suffrage movement and particularly its leader Alice Paul. The campaign would take years to recover—and a shift to smaller, more controllable protests—before it was able to help finally win women’s right to vote with the passage of the 19^th Amendment in 1920.

Gene Sharp, the legendary scholar of nonviolent resistance, identified 198 methods of nonviolent action. Marches are only one, and certainly not the most effective.

So if marches don’t topple dictators, what does? To understand that, let’s leave the civil rights movement and move forward more than 30 years, to a small cafe in Belgrade in 1998.

How five kids in a Belgrade cafe brought down a strongman

One day in 1998, a group of five friends met in a cafe in Belgrade. Although still in their 20s, they were already experienced activists, and most of what they had seen was failure. They had taken part in student protests against the war in Bosnia in 1992, as well as in larger uprisings in response to election fraud in 1996. Neither achieved much.

Having had time to reflect on their successes and failures, they hatched a new plan. They knew from their earlier efforts that they could mobilize people and get them to the polls for a presidential election in 2000. They also knew that if he were to lose, President Slobodan Milošević, who ruled the country with an iron fist, would try to steal the election just as he did in 1996.

So that’s what they planned for.

The next day, six friends joined the five and together formed the original 11 members of Otpor, the movement that would go on to topple the Milošević regime. They began slowly at first, performing pranks and street theater. But within two years, the organization grew to over 70,000 members, with chapters across Serbia. They mobilized people, got them to the polls and helped win the election for the opposition leader Vojislav Koštunica.

Right on cue, Milošević tried to steal it. That’s what triggered the Bulldozer Revolution that brought him down in 2000. He would die in his prison cell at the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2006. His downfall shocked the world because no one had dreamed his brutal authoritarian regime could be taken down by nonviolent action.

But it didn’t stop there.

Members of Otpor followed by training activists in Georgia who brought down the former Soviet republic’s own leader in the Rose Revolution of 2003. Otpor also helped Ukrainians the following year in the Orange Revolution, where I was running a major news organization and witnessed the power of their work firsthand. Collectively, these became known as the “Color Revolutions” that changed the face of Eastern Europe and the course of history.

But it still didn’t stop there.

Then came the Arab Spring, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, the Maldives and so many more revolutions. To date, the same Serbians have been active in over 50 countries, helping countless others resist authoritarian regimes and build better lives for themselves. Many of the popular movements have since seen reversals but the fact remains that they were able to unseat powerful autocrats with the real promise of change.

At this point, we have to ask the obvious question: How did a bunch of kids work to bring down a seemingly all-powerful dictator? Not once, not twice but repeatedly over a period of decades?

The answer lies in a basic truth they learned from Gene Sharp: Every regime depends on sources of power to carry out its will, and those sources have an institutional basis. Authoritarians like Milošević, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s recent ruler Victor Orbán have been able to wield power not because of their special personal characteristics but their capacity to control and influence institutions. Take that away and the regime will fall.

The simple principle became the basis for the Otpor movement. Its members would identify institutions and develop strategies to influence them. Your targets determine your tactics, they would go on to teach others, not the other way around. That’s why you should never get tied down to any particular tactic. You want to preserve strategic flexibility so you can design strategies and tactics fit for each purpose.

Here’s how that looked in Serbia.

Designing an institutional battle plan

Otpor may have become well-known for its brilliant street theater and creative pranks but underneath them all was a strategy for everything. In Serbia, its leaders identified eight key institutional groups and built sophisticated strategies to influence each one.

Consider the police, a key institutional support for the regime. Control of law enforcement enabled Milošević to order arrests at whim. That struck fear into the general population, making it harder to recruit activists. If Otpor were to succeed, it would need to at least mitigate the effect of police action. But the group’s members did better than that. They actually turned arrests to their advantage.

It started with training. All Otpor activists were taught exactly what to expect when they were arrested, and how they should act and engage with police. Arrests were to be seen as opportunities for infiltration and to win officers to their side. Activists who were arrested were also given a cool “Otpor” t-shirt on their release, which they could wear to school the next day. The more arrests, the better the t-shirt they got.

Perhaps the most sophisticated aspect of the police strategy was something called Plan B. As soon as an activist was arrested, not only were lawyers immediately called to push for release but a secondary protest would be launched outside the police station, where a large crowd would gather. NGOs would be notified. Auxiliary groups such as “Mothers of Otpor” would show up to demand why the police were arresting harmless kids.

Soon arrests became less of a tool of intimidation and more of a liability. Arresting an activist meant lawyers and unflattering media coverage, not to mention growing protests outside your station. The added paperwork burden alone was a deterrent. You’d get nothing else done all day. It just wasn’t worth it.

Otpor developed similarly effective strategies for every institutional group they targeted, identifying their vulnerabilities and pressures that would be most likely to shift their behavior. In 1998, when the movement began, this is what the institutional environment looked like.

Two key institutions, the military and police, staunchly supported the regime. The education system and international institutions were seen as allies of the activists, and the civil service, Church, businesses and labor were all on the fence, with no love for Milošević necessarily but wary of change and the disruption it might bring.

Then events completely out of Otpor’s control produced a setback. After failed peace talks over Milošević’s incursions into Kosovo, NATO launched a 78-day bombing campaign from March to June 1999. It prompted a “rally around the flag” effect among Serbs and the movement lost ground.

When the conflict ended, the Otpor activists got back to work to win support. They continued mobilizing in the streets but always stayed focused on their institutional targets. By the winter of 2000, they were making progress again and had made up the lost ground.

By spring 2000, the momentum had begun to really shift. Two key institutions, the military and civil service, began to defect. Labor, once reticent to take a side, now moved firmly into the resistance camp.

By the eve of the election, Milošević had already lost power; he just didn’t know it yet. All the major institutions had shifted away from the regime. Even the once fiercely loyal police were taking a more neutral stance. Once the Bulldozer Revolution broke out and they were ordered to shoot protesters, they refused.

It was over. The regime had fallen.

Power ultimately rests on legitimacy. Once enough institutions stop believing a regime deserves obedience, its apparent strength can evaporate very quickly.

It’s the institutions, stupid

Today, a global battle is taking place between autocracies and the forces of liberal democracy. It is not a war about ideology, religion or even politics, strictly speaking. It’s about something far bigger and more consequential: control of institutions.

Autocrats work to undermine the independence of institutions. Some are political institutions, such as legislatures and courts, but many—corporations, unions, media, universities and civic organizations—are not. It is by gaining control over institutions that authoritarian leaders can replace competence with loyalty as the coin of the realm, making truth less a matter of facts or evidence than a test of fealty among subordinates.

It is on institutional ground that the most important battles are being fought. Is there equal protection under the law? Do businesses have the right to operate without fear of being shaken down by government officials and the agents of oligarchs? Do people have the right to feel safe in their homes and their communities?

It is the institutions that ultimately hold the answers to each of those basic questions. To build and maintain a free, strong society, you need free, strong institutions. That’s where every strategy for positive change must start: working to influence institutions to rebuild, reform and serve societies more competently and faithfully. That takes more than simply going out into the streets. It requires institutional knowledge, creativity and discipline.

That’s why so many recent movements that have successfully mobilized and brought impressive numbers of people into the streets also fail to achieve meaningful objectives. Unless your actions are aimed at specific strategic institutional targets, you’re just making noise.

Free societies do not survive because people occasionally flood the streets. They survive because citizens are able to build institutions over time worthy of public trust and strong enough to resist those who would capture them.

That’s why the last thing we need now is the belief that bigger marches will produce more change. What we need are strategies that identify specific targets and design viable ways to influence them. That’s how we can bring about a more just and prosperous world.

Greg Satell is co-founder of ChangeOS, a transformation and change advisory, a lecturer at Wharton, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, watch his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.

Neil Silberman is an archaeologist and historian who was president of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) International Scientific Committee on Interpretation and Presentation and a member of the ICOMOS International Advisory Committee and Scientific Council. He was a founder of the Center for Heritage and Society at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991. On his ICWA fellowship (1984–1986), Neil examined the political and cultural impact of archaeological research in the Middle East. He went on to write and co-author a dozen books, including The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, Archaeology and Society in the 21st Century, The Hidden Scrolls, and Digging for God and Country.

The year 1985 was a banner one for historical research in Israel, Neil reports in this October excerpt, with dozens of international expeditions excavating some of the country’s most important ancient sites. The period was also marked by a struggle over the country’s future direction, with Prime Minister Shimon Peres battling an economic crisis and confrontation abroad, including the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian militants. The excavations in Jerusalem met with strong opposition from religious leaders. The stakes were high, Neil writes, because the “struggle was for political and spiritual power within modern Israel.”

Jerusalem (October 1985) — Four summers ago, chanting crowds of bearded, black-coated protesters tried everything in their power, including violence, to shut the City of David excavations down. Their contention was that the area was the site of a medieval Jewish cemetery and that the digging there was nothing less than the callous desecration of ancient Jewish graves. In response, a panel of the country’s most prominent archaeologists and historians proved convincingly that there was never a cemetery at the site of the excavations, but their opponents refused to accept the evidence. The Sephardi and Ashkenazi chief rabbis issued a demand for an immediate end to the excavations and even threatened to excommunicate the minister of education if he refused to carry out the order.

Naturally, the real issue at stake was more than just the few bone chips that the protesters claimed they found in the piles of earth dumped down the slope by the excavation team. The struggle was for political and spiritual power within modern Israel, for the exclusive religious prerogative to interpret Jewish history and the significance of the Biblical text. For centuries the rabbinical authorities had reserved for themselves the right to speak definitively about kings David and Solomon and about their glorious ancient city. But now they found themselves face-to-face with competing scholars trained in the subtleties of ancient pottery and architecture, not religious texts. And what was worse, the impious curiosity of the archaeologists was defended by barricades and riot police.

Professor Yigal Shiloh, the director of the excavations, emerged from the confrontation as the spokesman for academic freedom in the face of a religious attack. He and his colleagues at the Israel Exploration Society and the Hebrew University, having failed at their attempts at reason, obtained a Supreme Court ruling that overturned the initial rabbinical ban on the dig. In the atmosphere of an impending government crisis, Israel’s attorney general arranged a compromise between the opposing parties that permitted a resumption of work at the site. And even though not a single medieval Jewish grave was uncovered in the subsequent seasons of digging, the leaders of the protest—the ultra-orthodox faction that calls itself Neturei Karta, “The Guardians of the City”—were not satisfied. Their continuing vandalism, even now, at the City of David Archaeological Garden, serves as clear warning that they see the archaeologists as their spiritual enemies.

The conflict between religious fundamentalism and archaeology is underway in many Middle Eastern countries, but in Israel it has taken an uncharacteristic form. Throughout the Muslim world, religious opposition to excavations has been directed mainly against investigations of the Jahiliya, or pre-Islamic period; the excavation of Islamic remains (with the exception of cemeteries) is seen as commendable validation for the ancient splendor of the Faith.

In Israel, the problem is different, for the excavation of remains of the Biblical periods is seen as an insidious challenge to traditional religious authority. And in a sense, there is some logic to that viewpoint, for the City of David excavations, among many others, have subtly changed the historical scheme of things. By placing the remains from the time of David and Solomon in a continuum that extends from the Chalcolithic period to the present, they have robbed the Biblical period of its previous chronological sanctity.

Every visitor to the City of David Archaeological Garden can see the continuum clearly as he or she wanders through the carefully landscaped and labeled building remains. The ruins of every period of Jerusalem’s long history rise from those of their predecessors and form the foundations for the ruins above them. Taken together, these layers forge the separate cultures and historical periods into a single monument to the city’s continuity. Maybe there is good reason for the fundamentalists’ battle with archaeologists in Jerusalem. The impact of archaeology is to break down the barriers of sectarian interpretation and to link the country’s cultural development with ancient civilization everywhere else in the world.

Each of the excavations I visited this summer represented a unique perspective on some of the most pressing problems facing Israeli archaeology—and society—today. Each excavation attacked more than a specific historical problem; its approach to the interpretation of artifacts and settlement levels reflected the new archaeological concern with understanding the mechanics of ancient societies rather than just historical events. The fact that the same problems of economics, military conquest, and ethnic interaction are facing the State of Israel holds out at least the possibility that archaeologists may be able to play a role in understanding the mechanics of modern society as well.

I don’t mean to say that archaeology can be a miraculous cure-all for a modern society’s problems. It’s just that there seemed to me to be the discussion of new ideas in at least some of the excavations in Israel this summer that contrasted with the general political atmosphere. The attempt at finding new solutions and understandings to age-old questions may not transfer easily from the Bronze or Iron Age to the present, but I think that it would be worthwhile for archaeologists in Israel—as elsewhere—to apply themselves to the practical application of their work. Otherwise, archaeology is in danger of becoming increasingly insulated and irrelevant, and the summer of 1985, like all the recent summers, will be remembered as just another season of digging in the ruins without having accomplished any lasting changes at all.

In France’s Aisne region, bounded by the rivers Marne, Oise and Aisne some 60 miles northeast of Paris, memories of World War I are kept alive through geography—each river gave its name to famous and terrible battles—and in cemeteries and ceremonies. On Monday, Memorial Day commemorations showed that despite the current transatlantic rift, Franco-American solidarity remains strong and still prompts warm exchanges.

Far from the Washington-Paris disputes over NATO and failing alliances, the relationship is lovingly and intentionally maintained. At the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, local volunteers and students place French and American flags next to 6,013 headstones each year just before Memorial Day. Mayors of the surrounding villages convene to place bouquets at the cemetery chapel.

Twenty miles away, more flags, and French gardeners lovingly tend to 2,300 soldiers’ graves at the Aisne-Marne Cemetery, near the site of the US Marine engagement in the Battle of Belleau Wood in June 1918, and just outside the city of Château-Thierry, where General John Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force fought during the Second Battle of the Marne.

Today, the Maison de l’Amitié France-Amérique in the heart of Château-Thierry keeps those stories alive with exhibitions and, because “fraternity is cultivated at the youngest age,” it offers children English lessons.

On Friday night, Château-Thierry hosted a US Marine band from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina for a concert in a city park. Some 300 residents turned out to cheer the Marines and take selfies with them after the concert. One Marine said this annual visit is so important “for the younger Marines to be here, where it happened.”

In addition to the 12 American military cemeteries and 13 monuments maintained in France by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), private citizens have maintained sites here, too.

A monument to the 42^nd “Rainbow Division” is carefully tended on a nearby farm where ferocious fighting took place in July 1918.

The tiny hamlet of Chaméry looks after the site where Quentin Roosevelt, a 20-year-old pilot and son of former President Theodore Roosevelt, was shot down by a German plane only days after arriving in France.

Villagers here tended his grave for decades until he was moved to Normandy to lie beside his brother Theodore Jr. in the World War II American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. (All four Roosevelt sons served in one or both world wars, and Theodore Jr. played a decisive role in the Normandy landings on D-Day.) The Normandy cemetery draws thousands of French tourists, as on this Memorial Day weekend.

Even though Quentin Roosevelt is no longer in Chaméry, he remains an integral part of the village. To thank them for their care, Quentin’s mother Edith Roosevelt gave the villagers a lovely fountain, from which neighbors still use water daily, and hikers fill their water bottles.

Back in Château-Thierry, French parishioners maintain the American Memorial Church, built in 1924 to honor the fallen and designed by Paul-Philippe Cret, the architect of the US Federal Reserve building in Washington, DC. The church’s largest stained-glass window celebrates Franco-American friendship with a time-bending fantasy meeting of General Pershing and the French hero of the American Revolution, Lafayette. “Lafayette, nous voilà,” the American supposedly said in 1917 on visiting Lafayette’s tomb—the tale is probably apocryphal but hugely popular.

In this region of France, the transatlantic friendship remains strong.

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

Ten years ago this month, I stood beneath the US Capitol dome listening to a Cameroonian activist describe the high personal cost of being visibly gay in the capital Yaoundé. The event was part of a daylong conference on the geopolitics of LGBTQ+ rights convened by the Institute of Current World Affairs to mark the return of its fellow Robbie Corey-Boulet. Currently the Reuters bureau chief for West and Central Africa, he had just finished two years based in Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire studying how sexual orientation and gender identity were lived and contested in West Africa. He’d asked me to moderate a panel on Africa, my first engagement with the institute whose board I now have the privilege of chairing.

I remember the day in fragments. Photographer Misha Friedman’s images, commissioned by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a nonprofit that supports breakthrough journalism, hung behind the speakers: a Russian couple in a sparse apartment, a Jamaican activist in profile, the brutal arithmetic of queer life rendered in light and shadow. Voices from Jamaica, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Russia, India, China, Colombia and Cameroon traded notes on what strategies had worked and what didn’t. At lunch, we ate outside with activists and diplomats from the Danish embassy, and I remember thinking with a clarity that now feels almost embarrassing that things would only get better, everywhere.

There were reasons to be more circumspect, however, for anyone willing to hear them. Some activists at the conference warned of hidden risks in a US-led approach to promoting LGBTQ+ rights. Ten years later, those dangers have materialized. What comes next will require a fundamentally different geopolitical imagination to help build a transnational movement that will be less dependent on a single patron.

In 2016, US political will had coalesced behind the movement. The Democrats were in power and determined to make LGBTQ+ rights both a wedge issue in domestic politics and a signature element of American soft power. Barack Obama was in his final months in the White House. Ambassador Randy Berry, who delivered the keynote that day, was serving as the first US special envoy for the human rights of LGBTI persons, traveling the world to push back against the criminalization of same-sex relationships.

The combination of a Democratic administration treating the advancement of queer rights as a moral signature and the institutional weight of the United Nations, where I had just started working, opened a window for fast-paced, coordinated global advancements. A month after the conference, the UN Human Rights Council established the mandate of its first-ever independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity. Ban Ki-moon, a strong ally, was the UN Secretary-General. Samantha Power, a champion of the issue, was US ambassador to the UN, effectively running the UN LGBTI Core Group, a coalition of member states that had pledged to support LGBTQ and intersex rights.

Multinational corporations were moving in parallel. Encouraged by the White House and the United Nations, they had leaned on Uganda over its 2014 anti-homosexuality bill, and in April 2016, 180 CEOs mobilized against North Carolina’s HB2 law, which barred transgender people from using public bathrooms corresponding to their gender identities. A year later, I would help launch the UN Standards of Conduct for Business, urging the private sector to fulfill its responsibilities but also “act in the public sphere.” Money, multilateral institutions and human rights language all seemed to be moving in the same direction.

But the day had its dissenting notes, and they have aged better than the optimism of the time.

Robbie himself—whose fellowship would inform his book Love Falls on Us: A Story of American Ideas and African LGBT Lives—warned against the disruptive force of Western templates imposed on existing communities. The Indian activist Tushar Malik echoed the same concern. The American narrative, he said, too often amounted to: “You must change your laws, you are regressive and you need to come to the better side of the world.” That’s why, he added, “it is seen as neocolonialism.” Andras Simonyi, Hungary’s former ambassador to Washington and a forceful ally, was still blunter. Affirming LGBTQ+ rights, he said, “should not be seen as an American endeavor because the United States cannot and should not do it alone.” If the movement were seen as US-led, he warned, it could become tangled in anti-American sentiment.

The scholar Amy Lind described that dynamic in a 2010 paper, “Development, Global Governance and Sexual Subjectivities.” The globalized backlash against sexual and gender rights, she wrote, was inseparable from “ongoing struggles concerning post-colonial nation-building” and “critiques of the US as empire and the accompanying notion of our world as unipolar.” In other words, the more emancipatory politics would travel under an American flag, the more reliably they would summon opposition.

In retrospect, the structural risk was even greater than the conference acknowledged. LGBTQ+ progress had come to rest on a narrow coalition—the international human rights framework, the US Democratic Party and a cohort of multinational corporations—an arrangement that was hard to question at the time because it came with cash, access and political weight. The 2021–2022 Global Resources Report documented roughly $1 billion in resources flowing to LGBTQ+ organizations and causes worldwide; most of it traced back, directly or indirectly, to the same handful of Western governments and foundations. Seventeen of the top 20 foundation funders were based in the United States.

The backlash of the past decade—from Uganda and Senegal to Hungary, Russia and dozens of American statehouses—demonstrated how fragile that progress became whenever it could be framed as foreign pressure or tied to the electoral fortunes of one American party. Uganda’s 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, Russia’s 2023 designation of the international LGBTQ+ movement as an extremist organization and Hungary’s 2025 constitutional amendment effectively banning Pride were all defended at home in those terms.

Ten years after the ICWA conference, the model came to a screeching halt.

In 2025, after American LGBTQ+ leaders had largely aligned with candidate Donald Trump’s opponent during the presidential campaign, his second administration abruptly disengaged from international LGBTQ+ work. The Global Equality Fund, a public-private vehicle that had bankrolled local activists in some of the world’s toughest places, was effectively dismantled. USAID evaporated. The UN Free & Equal campaign saw its budget reduced to a vestige. The State Department’s special envoy position was eliminated. The United States left the UN LGBTI Core Group. The corporate sector—the same one that had once threatened to pull jobs out of North Carolina—read the political winds and went silent, retreating from Pride sponsorships and rolling back internal diversity programs at speed hoping to secure seats at Mar-a-Lago. Within months, the funding and political architecture that had sustained a generation of global queer organizing were either gone or unrecognizable.

Edric Huang, ICWA’s David Mixner LGBTQ+ fellow in Taiwan from 2023 to 2025—who examined queer communities on the island and in Singapore, Nepal and Japan—reported that Trump’s halt to foreign aid assistance was instantly felt by LGBTQ+ groups across the region, and part of a larger wave of overseas development cuts by conservative governments.

Now the conversation among movement leaders is no longer about whether the old model can be repaired. The harder question is what will replace it.

What is emerging, slowly, is a different geopolitical map for queer liberation, adapted to a multipolar world in which the United States will no longer dominate the international order or reliably champion human rights abroad. The United Nations and other multilateral institutions now speak more softly on those issues. Corporations increasingly insist their only obligation is shareholder value. The old assumption that progress naturally flows from liberal democracy and Western institutions no longer holds.

But what the movement has left behind to date is also new. After several decades of growth, LGBTQ+ communities in some parts of the world possess greater numbers, wealth, visibility and political experience than at any earlier point in their history. Homosexuality was officially and permanently decriminalized in India in 2018. Mexico completed nationwide marriage equality in 2022. Thailand’s marriage equality law took effect in January 2025, the first such measure in Southeast Asia. Constitutional challenges to recognition are advancing in Japan. The center of the movement’s demographic and political weight has been shifting south and east for years; the events of 2025, as Edric’s fellowship demonstrated, made the shift visible.

That redistribution has begun to reshape the language of LGBTQ+ politics. Although the rhetoric of human rights remains indispensable, it has lost much of its persuasive force in many parts of the world. Anti-LGBTQ+ movements have spent a decade caricaturing it as a Western dialect, and the characterization has stuck. Where progress is being made, activists are increasingly making the case for inclusion in the vocabularies their own societies already use: constitutional dignity in India, family stability and economic productivity in much of Latin America, religious mercy and decolonization in parts of Africa and the Muslim world. Western pressure is no longer central to those arguments; in many places, it is now simply counterproductive.

The case is also being made by a wider cast of actors than the human rights pipeline used to recognize. Anti-LGBTQ+ movements understood years ago that they operate most effectively as a disciplined transnational network, exporting legislation (Uganda’s 2023 statute explicitly drew from Russian and American templates), narratives and culture war strategies across borders. Outside a handful of Western countries, the LGBTQ+ side has rarely matched that coordination. But the early outlines of a response are visible in newer formations: investor coalitions, regional philanthropic networks emerging across Latin America and Africa, and a generation of LGBTQ+ writers, showrunners and digital creators in Mumbai, Lagos, São Paulo and Bangkok whose reach now rivals that of any state broadcaster. A television drama in India, a Brazilian telenovela or an AI chatbot’s default tone on a question about gender now shape public attitudes with a speed no diplomatic communiqué could match.

If the past decade marked the high-water mark of a Western-led model of global LGBTQ+ advocacy, what is taking shape now may prove more durable: a movement that no longer waits for a political or geopolitical patron, no longer borrows its legitimacy from outside powers and no longer assumes history naturally bends in its favor. The pace will be slower, the alliances more complex and the leading voices less familiar. But the promise is long-lasting, context-specific LGBTQ+ power.

Fabrice Houdart is board chair of the Institute of Current World Affairs. From 2016 to 2019, he served as a human rights officer at the United Nations, where he co-authored the UN Standards of Conduct for Business in Tackling Discrimination Against LGBTI People. In 2022, he founded PRISM: the Association of LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors, and in 2024, he co-founded Koppa, the LGBTI+ economic power lab. He writes a weekly Wednesday Substack on LGBTQ+ geopolitics.

Willy Foote is the founder and CEO of Root Capital, a nonprofit social enterprise that supports small-scale sustainable agricultural businesses in Africa, Asia and Latin America, disbursing more than $2 billion to reach more than 2 million farmers and employees to date. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Young Presidents’ Organization, he serves on the Governing Council of Catalyst 2030 and the Strategic Advisory Council of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan. Willy studied the impact of free-market reforms on Mexico’s people, society and politics as an ICWA fellow from 1995 to 1997.

In this excerpt from a 1996 dispatch, Willy looks into a garbage crisis in Morelia, a city in central Mexico. Accompanying private collectors who face fierce and dangerous competition, visiting a hospital to learn about infectious garbage and a company that wanted to privatize garbage systems across the country, he investigates the issue’s complexity. The political significance rises to the national level in a country where the PRI—Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party)—effectively ran a decades-long one-party state.

MORELIA, Mexico (February 1996) — The best view of Morelia’s landfill is from the top of one of two yellow municipal bulldozers parked on the dump’s southern edge and used to spread trash around all day. From here one can look north across the flat-bed pudding of the 44-acre landfill toward the shimmering gray Sierra Madre mountains. A mile away in the opposite direction, a red-clay-colored cliff—part of a quarry—juts into a swirl of blue sky and clouds.

On our arrival, the clearing in the center was a beehive of activity. Forty or so people labored, surrounded by towering piles of clean cardboard, sparkling green bottles, a crayon rainbow of tin cans. From the vantage point of two mangy dogs dozing beside the bulldozer, the far-off stick figures must have resembled army ants carrying huge loads overhead and up wooden planks, dumping recyclables into one of five modern tipper trucks.

Later I learned this to be the final phase of the pepenadores’ (garbage pickers) work. The trash loads they lugged, already selected and separated, are trucked straight from the dump to the buyers. Aluminum goes to Mexico City and to Guadalajara foundries; glass is used by local artisans and sold to the transnational Mexican glass company, Vidriera Mexicana in Mexico City; paper is used locally for pressboard and for roofing materials; and beverage containers (glass and PET plastic) go back to the bottler.

The pepenadores’ work begins on the eastern border of the dump, along a half-mile swollen lip of rubbish. That’s where the Fausto brothers parked their Ford. The stench socked my nostrils as I opened the passenger door. No sooner had Carlos [Carlos Fausto Gutierrez, Willy’s guide and a garbage collector] killed the engine than people emerged from the craters of surrounding garbage, as though plodding the surface of some trash-made moon. But the children, parents and grandparents wore no protective suits as they pushed through Morelia’s bowels; rather, they dressed in sneakers, long pants, T-shirts, no gloves and bandannas covering their noses. Wading toward us along a nearby garbage shoal, a teenage boy jumped onto the truck.

“We can’t touch the trash now,” said Carlos, crossing his arms in indignation behind his pickup. Soon a trim, middle-aged man arrived, and the two pepenadores manually unloaded our garbage, plucking out bottles and tin cans as they went, stuffing them into a burlap sack. They never said hello, never asked for permission. Noticing the general lack of cordiality, I asked Juan [Carlos’s younger brother] why they couldn’t share the recyclables. He replied, very calmly, “because we’re at war.”

Who exactly are his adversaries? A total of 300 pepenadores who work Morelia’s garbage dump (80 at a time), all of whom belong to Antorcha Campesina, a violent peasant organization connected with the PRI. Mexico’s most notorious grupo de choque (roughly translated as “attack group”), Antorcha carries out much of the PRI’s dirty work, having reportedly formed death squads in the past in several states. Their mortal enemies are the rank and file of the PRD, Mexico’s leftist opposition party. The Fausto brothers belong to a PRD-affiliated union of garbage collectors.

Dump battles flared in the summer of 1995. Sparking one incident, Carlos and three union buddies brazenly defied the pepenadores’ trash-picking monopoly, repeatedly separating tin cans inside the landfill. One morning last August, approximately 80 Antorcha members armed with sticks and machetes surrounded Carlos’s truck, smashing his windshield and his friend’s face. Within minutes, 30 PRD union trucks came to the rescue, forming a rolling phalanx across the landfill. Antorcha withdrew, and Carlos carried his wounded friend away without further violence. That same day, however, the then-PRI municipal government impounded his truck. The mayor had enforced the recycling ban in the first place to placate Antorcha leaders, according to Carlos. Eventually, he got his car back. He hasn’t touched a can since (that is, while inside the dump).

Hoisting the burlap sack of recyclable spoils overhead, the Antorcha teenager walked away from our Ford toward the busy clearing in the center. The fumes of baking garbage between us made him and the view beyond appear fuzzy and dreamlike: Antorcha’s bottle-lined alleys glimmered like jewelry on display; great hills of Sprite and Campbell’s soup cans glinted like old Spanish silver; cardboard stacks cut neat pathways toward the tipper trucks, whose engines roared like circus lions.

I turned back toward Carlos as he admired a new semi-trailer that Antorcha had bought last November. Opening the driver side door, he paused and pointed toward the human ants climbing distant planks. “This is a good system, this landfill,” he said, as if acknowledging Antorcha’s achievements despite their conflicts. “Nothing’s wasted here, not even bones.”

Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of writing by Institute of Current World Affairs fellow Rowland Robinson. Read his full dispatch here.

Rowland is wrapping up two years investigating integrative health care approaches to problem substance use in the Netherlands, Portugal and Brazil. He’ll report on his findings and their lessons for the United States on Friday, June 12 in Washington DC. Register here to attend his talk in person or on Zoom.

BELÉM, Brazil — The lights of exclusive condominiums flickered faintly in the quick-settling dusk as the Rondônia set sail from this bustling port city 60 miles upriver from the Atlantic Ocean, gateway to the Amazon for more than 400 years. The late departure was surprising only for its relative shortness, a mere 45 minutes as dock workers stuffed the ferry’s bay with frozen chicken, new Toyota pick-ups, desk chairs, melons, oranges, electronics and other goods.

Passing the working waterfront of fishing boats and ramshackle neighborhoods to the city’s east, the ship soon turned westward toward the darkness of the rainforest under a starless sky. I was setting off to explore the river that bears its name, heading for Manaus, the jungle capital at the heart of the Amazon 1,000 miles away, a five-day trip.

By dawn, the three-deck, 210-foot vessel, unsettlingly called a gaiola, or cage, had made its way into one of the narrow tidal channels that connect the Bay of Marajó, which opens to the Atlantic, with the Amazon River’s main artery. Men, women and children who had spent the night in colorful hammocks on the first and second levels looked at their phones or observed the forest from the boat’s railing. There were 125 passengers in total, a fraction of the 500-1,000 people who make the trip in the tourist-heavy dry season. “We’d fit 2,000 if it weren’t for government inspectors,” a crew member said. A shuddering thought.

Nothing from my visits to photography exhibitions or nature documentaries about the virgin rainforest and its recluse indigenous tribes had prepared me for the view from the ferry’s top deck: teeming human activity.

Wooden stilt houses cut into the jungle’s edge lined the banks of the narrow channel. Some were mere shacks while others boasted several rooms with painted façades and decorative woodwork on their roofs and porches. Açai trees and government-financed solar powered generators surrounded the houses. Some sported TV antennae and others were even connected to the internet through Starlink satellites.

From the long, protruding docks, prosperity was also measured in the size of the boats: from traditional wooden canoes to brightly painted motorized launches known as popopos for the sound of their motors, with long drive shafts that locals steer from between their legs, to slightly larger covered craft that reminded me of Maine’s island-hopping water taxis.

As the ferry passed, young children ran from their houses and paddled out toward us. They giggled and shrieked as the waves rocked their canoes. A girl threw her arms up in the air in celebration after grabbing a floating plastic bag, her younger brother cheering from the back of the boat. “Those are donations of food and clothes,” said Maximus, who ran the upper deck’s snack bar. “Things are difficult for these families because we are outside both the açai fruit harvest and the fishing season.” Most locals survive on sustenance fishing and government assistance with the exception of a few local merchants. Spiking fuel prices and the accompanying inflation caused by the US-Israeli war against Iran have hit the already vulnerable population hard.

The plastic bag chase, a fun game for some children, seemed a heartbreaking disappointment for others as they returned empty-handed. A young girl who had paddled out alone from an unpainted shack hauntingly stared at the passersby and empty water separating her from the ferry. Those further upriver were also less fortunate as donations ran out.

Punctuating those unfamiliar scenes were innumerable churches. For every 10 houses, there seemed to be a congregation to serve them. Primarily evangelical, the Assembly de Deus denomination is most prominent, with a few Catholic parishes mixed in. The buildingds stood out for their fresh paint and electric lights. Over the past 40 years, evangelicals have quintupled from around 6 percent of Brazil’s population to nearly 30 percent, a seismic societal shift in a historically Catholic country that also extends to the ribeirinhos, river people, of the Amazon.

The abundant presence of religion has not ensured the safety of the most vulnerable, however. Many young children are forced by desperate parents into prostitution. The issue was widespread enough to prompt a national parliamentary inquiry in the late 2000s after a Catholic bishop accused parents of forcing young girls and boys to take part for food and diesel fuel, while other children completely disappeared. Continuing investigations by Brazil’s Commission on Human Rights in 2025 show that abuses are still occurring, adding another dark undertone to the scene of the children who so readily paddled out to the ferry.

As the sun began to set, the boat veered to port and the cappuccino-colored expanse of water stretched to the horizon. A distant bank was the only sign that we had finally arrived at the main artery of the great Amazon River, and not, by accident, the sea. Stretching from the Peruvian Andes to Brazil’s Atlantic Coast, the river and its 1,100-plus tributaries move around 1,600 square miles of water per year. That’s five times more than the Ganges, 12 times more than the Mississippi, 70 times more than the Rhine. Under its murky surface, it hosts more than 3,000 species of fish. The Congo River, the second-most diverse, counts fewer than 800.

The Amazon basin, 60 percent of which is in Brazil and which itself accounts for 60 percent of Brazil, is only slightly smaller than Australia by territory. Its tens of thousands of plant species, thousands of animal species and millions of insects make it the world’s most diverse ecological area. From the ferry, the wall of trees looked like an impenetrable labyrinth of green. Or so it seemed.

As the sun sank in pink, orange and red hues over the unbroken horizon of jungle, the ferry snack bar’s TV played a movie about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, while a speaker loudly played sertanejo, Brazil’s version of country music. Next to the light of a full moon, stars twinkled brightly. From the darkness came another unexpected twinkle, this one much nearer.

Local vendors on Mount Alegre’s docks were full of energy as they clamored for attention. While the ferry’s crew threw out two wooden gangplanks with which they loaded and unloaded passengers and cargo, these port hustlers reached passengers on the upper decks by pegging plastic bags stuffed with homemade snacks and juices to long wooden poles. At the top were plastic bottles cut in half where eager customers, sick of the mess hall’s monotonous menu of rice, beans and a protein, paid cash or used a QR code to pay in PIX, Brazil’s state-backed instant money transfer system. As the shouts subsided, the crew packed up and the ferry headed back into the river’s dark waters.

Each of the Rondônia’s 10 stops was memorable in its own way. From the railings, travelers laid inquisitive eyes on cities ranging from bustling Santarém with its 360,000 souls to Parantins, host of a renowned folkloric ox festival. Seeing them reinforced my dawning realization that beyond the virgin rainforest and 450 or so Indigenous tribes highlighted in environmental advocacy campaigns, the Brazilian Amazon is home to 28 million people. The stilt houses of the first day were an exception, not the rule, with as many as 80 percent of the jungle’s inhabitants living in urban areas along the river’s many tributaries and inlets.

New arrivals continue to search for economic improvement. “It is hard for the family but this is where the opportunity is,” a passenger named Milton told me. In his early 50s, he had a steadfast yet preoccupied look behind his tinted glasses. His wife and four sons, aged six to 17, lay in hammocks as we talked, their life’s possessions packed in bags on wooden pallets to avoid getting wet.

Having bought a plot of land a day’s boat ride from Santárem, he was relocating his entire family to farm guarana, a local fruit used as a source of caffeine in supplements and energy drinks. “Guarana won’t pay off for four years, so I will start by planting and selling bananas, melons and other fruit to bring in some money,” he told me. Next to him, his eldest son looked nervous.

Institute of Current World Affairs Andrew Weil Fellow Rowland Robinson is examining progressive policy and integrative health care approaches to problem substance use and addiction in the Netherlands, Portugal and Brazil. He’s spent time with people who use drugs as well as harm reduction workers on the streets and in care facilities, and speaking to policymakers and international experts with the aim of learning lessons for the United States. Previously, he was was a legislative assistant for US Senator Angus King and an opioid response project manager for the state of Maine.

A Brazilian in Lisbon recently explained to me with striking conviction why now is the right time to move to Russia.

Europe and the United States had unleashed war in Ukraine, he said. The West is decaying. The left has taken over schools and universities. Corruption and chaos suffuse everything. Russia, by contrast, is a place of “peace and clean streets,” where “the metro is efficient,” unlike in America and the European Union, where “everything is trash.”

I’d heard that story many times back home in Russia before I left for exile abroad in 2022. The tropes of Russian cleanliness and public order contrasting with a rotting West have been well worn by state-controlled media under President Vladimir Putin.

What caught my attention this time wasn’t just the unlikely source but also his delivery: ready-made, polished, consistent. And it didn’t appear to reflect his own experience. He was reciting a narrative taken from a burgeoning genre: expats living in Russia touting the good life, another plank of the Kremlin’s multifaceted propaganda machine. This one is aimed at appearing genuine and heartfelt, with the sheen of outsiders’ objectivity—and it seems to be working.

A familiar story

At least 650,000 people have left Russia since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 without returning, various researchers and media outlets estimate. At the same time, Russian officials and state media have been increasingly promoting a much smaller counter-current of Western relocations. Some 1,500 citizens of so-called “unfriendly” countries applied for Russian residence permits by mid-2025 under a simplified “traditional values” relocation scheme, according the state news agency TASS.

The significance is smaller in scale than media visibility and symbolic value. Parallel to those relocations, an ecosystem of pro-Russia expatriate bloggers and vloggers began to take shape online. Such projects number well over 100 across YouTube, Telegram, Instagram, and Russian platforms VK and Rutube, with a combined audience exceeding 3 million subscribers, based on a database compiled during my research, using deliberately conservative estimates that exclude many smaller or irregularly active accounts. Many produce content in not only English but also French, German and other languages, presenting Russia to foreign audiences through the lens of personal experience rather than official state messaging.

“At First Sight: Foreigners Share Their Favorite Places in Moscow,” “An American Came to Russia to See Lake Baikal and Stayed for Good,” “After the US, I’m Impressed,” “I’ve Already Helped 100 Brits Move Here,” “Fleeing the Criminals. A Village for Americans Is Growing Near Istra.”

Such stories circulate not only in marginal online communities but also through some of Russia’s largest tabloid and mass-oriented media platforms, including the nationwide print, online and regional editions of the popular papers Moskovsky Komsomolets and Komsomolskaya Pravda, as well as media groups such as Shkulev Media Holding, which operates dozens of regional news portals. From there, stories about Western expatriates praising life in Russia are frequently repackaged and redistributed through smaller regional outlets, VK communities and Telegram channels, amplifying their reach.

They arrive in clusters, often with several nearly identical accounts appearing within a few weeks. The repetition is hard to ignore.

The various pieces work together to create a single impression. Alexandra Yost describes Moscow as more developed and safer than Boston or Brussels. Daniel Castle speaks about Slyudyanka, near Lake Baikal, as if he’d always belonged there. Eric Piccione contrasts family life in Russia with the fear, expense and insecurity he says are rife in the United States.

Most such stories begin with the expectation of danger. Family members worry. Friends are confused. Someone recalls some atrocity seen on TV. In Canada, one protagonist was supposedly told directly: “They will kill you” in Russia. In Scotland, as Jim Brown put it, schools teach children that Russia is cold and threatening.

Then comes the reversal. Personal experience upends the inherited script. Russia turns out to be “safe,” “calm” and “clean,” even in the context of war and unpredictable drone attacks. Joseph Rose says he feels safer at night in St. Petersburg than anywhere else. Igor Parri describes Moscow in similar terms.

The aim isn’t making formal arguments about Russian superiority as much as accumulating anecdotes. It’s not “the West has failed,” but “there are rats and garbage in Paris.” Not “Russia is better,” but “you can walk here at night.”

The content creators don’t seem like classic propagandists. They act as intermediaries, bearers of experiences who are trusted more readily than official sources because they use the language of lived experience. The persuasive force lies in the small but vivid details that, with the help of repetition, are meant to stick in the mind.

Although a few of the bloggers appear to have some Russian roots, the vast majority seem to have had no previous connection to Russia. A small number also openly acknowledge they had worked for the state propaganda outlet Russia Today, or RT, before 2022.

The archetypal story continues. A short trip turns into a longer stay. An experiment becomes a decision. Almost imperceptibly, Russia becomes home.

Then the finale. “I’m happy here.” “I’m Russian at heart.” “Back in my country, I feel like a tourist.” Sometimes the formulation is dramatic; sometimes banal. In the end, the foreign protagonist is happily absorbed by the Motherland.

Deeper into Russia

In one account, a British expatriate named Martin Gorton temporarily moves to Russia’s Orenburg region southeast of Moscow and meets a partner, decides to stay and eventually acquires citizenship. His move is explained not only by his new relationship but also a sense of alienation from his native Britain and disagreement with the purported educational and cultural “agenda” associated with LGBTQ+ issues, together with the hobgoblin of “non-traditional values.” He posts a vlog aimed at an international audience that documents his life in Russia, presenting his experience as an example others might follow.

Gorton and his new family don’t reconsider their choices even after a flood destroys their home and all their belongings. The catastrophe is framed not as a reason to leave but confirmation of the right path, a “test from God” that must be endured. The story shifts into the realm of symbolic narrative, where Russia appears not just as a place to live but a haven for Christian faith and values.

A Danish expat named Lars Grebnev, who adopted his Russian wife’s surname, emerges as a celebrant of rural Russia. Despite having no experience, he’s hired to be an English teacher in a village school in the Kirov region northeast of Moscow. In a regional television segment, we see halcyon village routines, a family with three children and a wife working for the local administration.

Again, although the circumstances in each such piece may differ, the overarching narrative remains remarkably unchanged: First comes the language barrier and cultural differences: “Russian is very difficult for me.” Next, acceptance and integration: working with children, engaging with locals. Finally, the inevitable ending: Russia becomes a “second homeland,” where the protagonist has “truly found happiness.”

The Grebnev story popped up in another context. The director of a state program for relocating foreigners from “unfriendly” countries to Russia, Maria Butina (a member of parliament who made headlines in the United States after her arrest for trying to infiltrate the NRA and other conservative groups), mentioned his case in a recent statement lauding foreigners who “share our values,” have rejected “the hostile anti-values of neoliberalism” and “want to work for the good of the country.”

Such tales are no longer just individual journalistic accounts of personal journeys. Butina uses them to illustrate the supposed clash of civilizations between the “collective West” and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, examples of people whose lives are to be officially celebrated and reproduced.

Effective repetition

The protagonists of these formulaic stories don’t appear to be artificially selected. Among the dozens of such bloggers and vloggers (many more don’t publish but occasionally give interviews to Russian media) are people from various backgrounds, teachers, former military personnel, farmers, entrepreneurs, family members with children.

Some of their accounts include genuine rough edges: conflicts, everyday difficulties, critical observations. In the Irkutsk region in Siberia, Castle was once mistaken for a spy—his bag was torn and he was nearly drowned, according to an interview with Russian media. Castle himself later dismissed the attackers as “three drunk people” who did not represent Russia as a whole.

Gabrielle Duvoisin calmly notes that rural France is actually more developed than rural Russia, where the croissants are “terrible” and the language is hard to master. Many complain about the roads, omnipresent dill in cooking, interminable winters, lack of good seafood, bureaucracy and difficulty of the language. But those imperfections don’t disrupt the overall effect, they reinforce it by adding an air of credibility and objectivity.

Behind the stories

Over the past few years, expat bloggers in Russia have become the subject of an almost distinct strand of investigative reporting in Russian exile media outlets. Reporters have been looking into who helps the stories appear, how they’re scaled and what kind of environment enables the accumulation of such private experiences to become an export genre.

The Russian investigative website Important Stories has directly linked several English-language projects on YouTube and other channels aimed at international audiences—Russian Road, Real Reporter, Sasha Meets Russia—to staff and funding connected to RT. The journalists have been able to show the same faces and narratives migrating from one platform to another while maintaining the appearance of independence.

The case of American Alexandra Yost is illustrative. According to Important Stories, she was employed by RT starting in March 2023, roughly the same time her new vlog began to actively develop after her previous channel was blocked by YouTube moderators. The report even specifies her official salary: 160,000 rubles ($2,000) per month.

Direct payments aren’t the only rewards. There’s a broader support system of access, facilitation and institutional hospitality. It’s fuzzy, not always formalized, but no less visible. It includes tours of far-flung regions, invitations to state-sponsored events, appearances on national television talk shows, organized trips to World War II Victory Day parades, curated routes through Volgograd and St. Petersburg, journeys across the “real Russia” showcased for an external audience.

Narratives without sponsors

Some bloggers haven’t appeared in any investigative reports and have no publicly documented ties to RT but have nevertheless followed strikingly familiar trajectories.

Nick Darlison, a British expatriate who relocated to Khabarovsk in Russia’s far east, produces content that initially focused on Russian landscapes, Orthodox traditions, everyday life in the region and a new sense of identity outside the West.

Then he began to report from Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, framing it as an attempt to “see the truth” beyond Western media bias. He also describes the UK as a place in decline: London overrun by non-white migrants, with public spaces unsafe and degraded. “Liberalism” and “diversity” are immediate causes. In a recent post, he compares “London in 1960 (98 percent British)” to “London now (36.8 percent British)” together with reflections about cultural loss and personal memories.

Of course it’s very possible some Russia-bound expats are motivated by genuine enthusiasm or their individual pursuit of audience growth and monetization: Darlison’s example is notable for its absence of any clearly identifiable institutional sponsor. But perhaps that’s a reflection that organized messaging has already had its effect and evolved into organic expression. The narrative can be adopted, adapted and extended by people acting on their own.

From story to pathway

The government introduced its special relocation regime for foreigners who share the country’s “traditional spiritual and moral values,” run by parliament member Maria Butina, in 2024. It’s had the effect of providing expat bloggers with a practical frame as well as an ideological one—with intermediaries, consultants and relocation agencies channeling emotional narratives about clean metros into pathways for emigrating. Some bloggers and vloggers even glowingly describe cooperating with migration agencies that help foreigners start businesses.

In the more extreme cases, narratives shift from sympathy toward Russia and what it supposedly stands for to direct political and even military action. Affinity is no longer affirmed through the supposed sharing of “traditional values” but a desire to take part in Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Derek Huffman, an American who moved to Russia in 2025, enlisted in the military. From a combat zone in Ukraine, he publicly declared: “I received Russian citizenship and it is a great honor and pride for me to officially become a citizen of Russia… I want to thank President Putin, Russia, and the Russian people.” Patrick Lancaster, an American journalist and former US serviceman produces frontline narratives and stories about Ukrainian soldiers switching sides.

Subtle shifts

John Kopiski, a British expatriate who’s lived in Russia for decades and long embodied the classic narrative of a foreigner who “found a home” there, built a farm, started a business, spoke about the “Russian soul” and describes himself as a “Russian Englishman.” In 2025, his son joined the war in Ukraine, wanting to “continue family traditions.” The transition from a focus on everyday life, comfort and prosperity to the more extreme examples is gradual and almost seems natural or inevitable.

If frontline stories are partly meant to demonstrate Russian resilience in wartime, lifestyle videos perform an analogous function. Seemingly obligatory clips insist that Western sanctions “do not work,” featuring scenes of crowded shopping malls, visits to new restaurants and profiles about the latest delivery services—carefully staged impressions of abundance intended to dispel external expectations of scarcity.

The messages resonate among people discontented or displaced by the challenges of life in the West. In Lisbon and many other places, the arguments take root precisely because they’re not produced by Russian state media but are the seemingly heartfelt musings of Europeans themselves using their own experiences to depict an unlikely garden of Eden existing all around the jagged teeth of the Kremlin’s towers.

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.

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.