Sky Fire
If one comes from the sunshine into a darkened room,
is it possible to bring the sunshine along?
Our tour through Odessa gave me my first glimpse of what was once a part of the Soviet Union. Most likely, not much had changed. I had read about Kiev, Moscow, Stalingrad and other places, but had never actually been inside the Soviet Union while it still existed. Now, there was only Russia of it left. I had visions of old and massive buildings, huge parade squares, no cars, police on every corner of every block. But this was not the way Odessa was. Perhaps this brooding world had existed only in my dreams and in spy novels, as in the political propaganda that had degraded the Soviet world in order to keep the Cold War tensions alive.
I was impressed with what I saw in Odessa, even though the Ukraine, as a newly independent country, had been suffering terribly under the western looting imposed economic austerity that had totally destroyed its economic foundation. Some of this tragedy seemed to have vanished. A few faint signs of prosperity seemed to have returned, which belied the economic reality that I had been aware of about this country. We saw its spacious streets alive with people. The people appeared friendly, well dressed. I even recognized some Americans in the crowd, or rather, some American T-shirts, one advertising the Big Apple with a flashy "I love New York," printed in bold golden letters on the front and the back.
The Soviet era had ended, but the Union of republics and nations that once comprised the Soviet Union, I was told, had largely been reestablished after the holocaust. It had become an economic union, but also a broadly based political one. This new union also included all the other giants of Asia in a cooperative bond, such as China, India, and Indonesia. The new union had formed a survivors club of sovereign nation-states based on the platform of a community of principle and a common commitment to the universal development of the entire Asian region, and Eastern Europe. The union was founded in opposition to the free trade ravishing and speculative looting that the WTO/IMF Empire had imposed around the world, that had been tearing everything down to the lowest possible denominator. The forming of the survivors club had really been an emergency response. The western economic looting had cut so deeply into the fabric of the targeted nations, including Russia, that a German demographic institute found it necessary to warn Russia that it would loose 80% of its population through biological deficiencies over the next 50 years if no fundamental changes were made.
It appeared to me that the nuclear holocaust merely provided the final incentive for a whole range of long-debated changes to be enacted. The resulting grand political and economic union, thus created a world within the world. It created a shield against the shockwaves of the disintegrating Western world-financial system that had added one more dimension of chaos to the global chaos of the nuclear holocaust.
Naturally, we had had no idea about any of this. We had no idea that we had arrived at some kind of an oasis in an otherwise dying world.
We had lunch at a restaurant by the sea, a quiet place that once served as an officer' mess for the armed services. The meal was correspondingly plain. Fried fish with mixed vegetables was on the agenda, and milk instead of Cola for the kids. From the restaurant we drove to a military airfield ten miles outside the city, where an old DeHavilland Dash-Seven STOL-plane stood by, operated by an Air Force crew. None of the crew spoke English, as far as I could make out, or they didn't let on. The plane itself was probably older than the people were who flew it. Who knows where they dug this ancient relic up, I wondered. Still, the flight to Sergei's ranch was one of the loveliest flights I'd had for a long time. We flew low across rolling hills, endless fields, woodlands dotted with lakes, an industrial area black with pollution, a large reservoir that stretched on as far as one could see and would not end there. Sergei told us that this was a part of the country's hydroelectric infrastructure that is feeding the national power grid.
