Back in the USSR

My brothers Alex and David were born in the Soviet Union. It was at the height of Stalinism. 1936, 1937. My parents were American true believers, or rather my father was a true believer and my mother believed what he believed and that being the belief in the Revolution, the superiority of socialism, and the inviolate rigidity of the “ends justifying the means.” They believed that if you made too much money, you did on the back of a poor person and they believed that compared to the suffering of children in Africa, my suffering, an individual’s suffering didn’t amount to a hill of beans. It goes without saying that my parents did not believe in God or modern psychology.

They were part of a wave of foreigners come to help Stalin move Russia out of the Middle Ages into the modern world. My mother justified it this way: “Stalin always knew he’d have to fight the Germans. And besides: it was the depression and there were jobs; 35,000 foreigners from around the world were working in the Soviet Union.“

My father had recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture, a classically trained architect in the Beaux Arts style right on the cusp of the modernist vanguard. Frank Lloyd Wright was “the master” and Louis Kahn, the ultimate purist, a few years behind my dad at Penn.

He went to Russia as part of Stalin’s “5-year Plan” to modernize the country devised by the American “father” of industrial architecture, Albert Kahn, the visionary powerhouse who in 1930 signed a contract to become the consulting architect for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union. Russia was so backward that Kahn created a library surveying all the natural and human resources across the vast Republic. Since there was no construction industry, listed in volume after volume were maps that showed where to get peasants off the land to help with building and most of my father’s work force came from the villages and the woods nearby. My father’s first assignment was to build a factory for the recovery of heavy metals in the middle of Siberia. But first, he had to build the building to make the bricks to build the factory. The laborers worked all day and at night they went to classes designed to train them to run the machines they were building the factory to house.

My mother always described their time there like a gay European adventure. She worked for Walter Duranty, the New York Times Bureau chief, later discredited for being an apologist for Stalin. The American Ambassador, a homosexual (hush hush wink wink), was in love with her. After all the other guests at all the parties had gone home, he gave her gifts: kid gloves from Paris, a fur coat, expensive and luxurious items that she prized in spite of her leftie views.

While my father off designing factories and working on the Moscow subway, my vivacious mother engaged in a multitude of affairs with a host of men. At one point, she was having affairs simultaneously with a handsome Romanian engineer and his son! The result was the 100 lb. gorilla in our lives: my brother Alex is not my Father’s son. From this deeply buried black hole, the web of relationships and emotional fields and dysfunction spread with each member of the family assuming their role in the drama to KEEP THE SECRET at all costs.