Vladislav Surkov on Allen Ginsberg

Russian businessman Vladislav Surkov's response to Western sanctions being imposed against him as a result of Russia's annexation of Crimea.

I see the decision by the administration in Washington as an acknowledgment of my service to Russia. It's a big honor for me. I don't have accounts abroad. The only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don't need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing.

I'm not sure how Allen would take such a comment, were he alive today. He'd be wryly amused, probably.

But Allen's memory of Russia ran as deep as the 20th century. He cultivated a relentless disdain for Joseph Stalin and would, at the least prompting, recite a litany of Stalin's crimes and the crimes of the Soviet state against the likes of Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Anna Ahkmatova, Eugenia Ginzburg, and many others.

Allen Ginsberg was a tireless voice on behalf of many persecuted artists in the former Soviet Union. He would harbor no illusions about present-day Russia, about Vladimir Putin, or about the fate of free speech in today's glowering Russian nation.

USSR in Color 1963

A collection of photographs of the USSR in 1963, in color. Photographer unknown. A long line of people waiting to see the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin. It's hard to think of the USSR in color. Enemies are always black and white.

Red Square, Moscow, 1963, photographer unknown

Tiger

A fantastic book, John Vaillant's The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Knopf, 2010). Far Eastern Russia, the taiga, bitter cold, hard people in a hard landscape. And tigers. And tiger lore and etiquette and myth. And men with names like Yuri Trush and Vladimir Schetinin and places called Primorski, Sobolonye, Vladivostock, the Bekin River (pronounced be-KEEN). The forest. The complex interconnectedness of Tigers and humans sharing a landscape.

This story is told in rich confident prose, and with great pacing. He weaves in and out of the main story - the stalking, killing, and devouring of a forest poacher by a vengeful tiger - with fascinating divergences into anthropology, tiger biology, tiger conservation in the Russian Far East, Russian history.

See Tim Flannery's essay at the New York Review of Books, it discusses The Tiger as well as Elizabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. For ongoing information on the Amur Tiger (commonly known as the Siberian Tiger) in Russia, check out the Tigris Foundation. Also 21st Century Tiger.