Olga
descend from Vostok , the train connecting Moscow to Beijing, Ulan Ude, the capital of the Buryat Republic. We are taking back what, until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, was the most important way of tea from China to Europe: Ulan Ude in those days was the "Eastern Gate of Russia".
Our new landlady at the window and waiting for us when we see it kicks and screams in French. It is the language taught at the local Polytechnic. We are welcomed in a nice apartment and elegant as ever, contrasts with the gloomy stairwell. In the first five minutes of talk time ago to tell us that Gorbachev was a reformer only in words, while Yeltsin and Putin are like the Communists, even worse, because they have censored the press and the salaries of university professors are low. I recall the conversation with Elena Ekaterinburg, another Russian woman who loves the French language. He was telling us that we must pay attention to women steering wheel because they often have buy the license from a police officer, obviously they have not learned to drive. "Our President Putin, however, - he concluded - is fighting corruption,"
The room in which sleep is the study of Olga and so I can browse through his photos of the seventies, which depict an exemplary in the shoes of the young intellectual, and browse through his books. There are Balzac and Moliere, La pensée européenne au XVIIIème siècle Paul Hazard, Traditions and Culture of the Buryats . The Buryat are one of the nomadic people of Mongolian origin who settled in this region after the Huns, the Kuricani and the Uighurs. They took shamanism, and not abandoned it completely even after the introduction of Buddhism Lamaist, indeed, the two religious practices have found a compromise and created an original synthesis. The first Buddhist monastery was built in 1741, when the Empress Elizabeth, the first among the European heads of state, officially recognized religion. An important role in the promotion of Buddhism in Buryatia took place, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Agvan Dorzhiev, director of the thirteenth Dalai Lama. The same Dorzhiev was representative of the Government Tibetan at the court of the tsar in St. Petersburg, where he built the largest Buddhist temple in Europe and where another Buryat, Peter Badmaev, practicing Tibetan medicine. A student of Badmaev, Gombozhab Tsibikov, challenged the ban on entry, and its death penalty imposed by the Tibetan authorities to foreigners. Then told his trip A Buddhist Pilgrim in Tibet Holy , a book which, however, never reached the fame of contemporary a Parisian trip to Lhasa Alexandra David-Neel.
From Ulan Ude: History and Modern Day learn, however, the history of Russian colonization in the region. The city was founded in 1666 by Cossacks as Ostrog , winter camp at the confluence of the rivers Selenga and Ude. The area was attractive to the possibility of river trade with China and the abundance of fur animals. The farmers arrived there only because forced to do so or exiled by the tsarist government, which was to cater for the needs of sustenance of Cossacks, traders and hunters. Even in this city when it was still called Verkhneudinsk, came the beneficial effect of the Decembrists were deported. Here the Soviets took six months of the revolution to triumph and had to capitulate in August 1918 in front of the Czech Legion, a group of ex-prisoners who had created a breakaway republic in Siberia, taking control of the western half of the trans-Siberian railway. In November 1917 the Czechs were 92,000 prisoners of war in Russia. Their leader, Tomas Masaryk, wanted to organize them in military formations that had fought on the side of Russia against the Central Powers and contributed, thus, the birth of independent Czechoslovakia. The Bolsheviks, however, put an end to the war and had to face Czechs a journey of 8,000 km to the east along the Trans-Siberian to reach Vladivostok, the only port from which, in that situation, they could embark for Europe. The clashes with the Bolsheviks began in May 1918, reached the extreme eastern regions of Russia, and culminated at the end of June, with the capture of Vladivostok. In July, the city was declared a protectorate of the Allied-occupied Czech and so it was that began to flood the Japanese and French contingents that would later clash with the Red Army. Meanwhile, the Czech Legion, working backward, seized and went to Irkutsk to Ekaterinburg and Kazan.
The Red Army recaptured only in 1920 Verkhneudinsk, whose name was changed to Ulan Ude in 1934 by the Central Executive Committee of All Russia. The Thirties and, even more, those of the Great Patriotic War were the years of industrialization, when, as is this text written in 2001, "the people employed by sacrificing himself, ignoring the time, effort and rest. The collective effort of many companies was recognized by the leaders of the Party, and rewarded with the red insignia of the National Defense Committee. The intellectuals of the city gave a significant contribution to the victory over fascist Germany. Sampilov, for example, he painted numerous paintings patriotic including horses to the front of the kolkhoz .
Breakfast is the time of day when Olga depicts the contemporary Russian society. The colors are dark: the poor are left to themselves while the new rich have a lot of money how little culture. To stay in the neighborhood, traditionally inhabited by educated people, now beginning to appear intruders like the owner of a vodka factory, which moved with the armed escort. The new rich send their children to private schools, take them and make them go by car, do not let them play in the yard and instill in them the virus of classism. Quite the opposite happened when Olga was young, when the youth community life was among the pioneers of communism.
A Russian sailor met at the bus station in Vilnius, fond of naval battles, told me that the school in Russia is becoming increasingly expensive and that he was always around the world to work to ensure a good standard of living for his wife, his brother and pay studies in the future to their children. His theory on the revolution of 1917: dead or had escaped the more educated elements, the power had fallen into the hands of a generation of morons and only now the situation was slowly improving.
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