No sabía cómo celebrar las fiestas en medio del duelo. Pero un misterioso visitante vino diariamente a tocar la puerta y a regalar un poco de alegría

Por Charlotte Maya

31 de diciembre de 2022 a las 05:00 ET

Read in English

El timbre sonó una tarde de mediados de diciembre. En aquellos primeros días tras la muerte de mi marido recibía visitas inesperadas: a veces traían la cena, a menudo con lágrimas. Pero cuando mi hijo de 6 años abrió la puerta, no había nadie.

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En su lugar, en el tapete de la entrada, había una caja triangular, un kit para hacer una casa de pan de jengibre, adornada con una cinta plateada y gruesa, y una nota que decía: “En el primer día de Navidad…”

Un misterio.

Sam había muerto de manera repentina en otoño. Suicidio. Había sufrido estrés laboral, como la mayoría de la gente; dolor de espalda crónico, que llevaba controlando desde la adolescencia; preocupaciones económicas, como muchos padres que tienen hijos pequeños, una hipoteca y un perro. Me tomó por sorpresa cuando se quitó la vida aquella tarde azul y despejada de octubre en Los Ángeles, y me dejó viuda y madre soltera de nuestros dos hijos, de 6 y 8 años.

Mis hijos y yo ya habíamos superado la Noche de Brujas, que adquirió un carácter espeluznante, la celebración del bar mitzvah de un sobrino y nuestro primer Día de Acción de Gracias sin papá, cuyos detalles se me escapan ahora, pero que sin duda incluía una mezcla de cocina tradicional estadounidense con platos navideños cubanos y judíos, una fiesta unificadora para la familia judía de mi marido y la mía que es cristiana.

Aun así, temía la Navidad. ¿Cómo podía haber llegado un diciembre sin mi marido? No puse música festiva ni saqué los adornos navideños. Había mañanas en las que, después de acompañar a Danny y Jason a la escuela primaria, quería volver a meterme en la cama y no salir hasta que llegaran del colegio. Si hacía algo de los mandados o me acordaba de dar de comer al perro, daba el día por ganado.

La noche siguiente, el timbre volvió a sonar. Otro paquete. Dos tazas de muñeco de nieve, un paquete de chocolate caliente dentro de cada una, atado con la misma cinta plateada y con la misma tarjeta blanca que decía: “En el segundo día de Navidad…”

No oímos el motor de un auto, ni pasos que se alejaban, ni una risita ahogada. No vimos a nadie alejarse a toda prisa. Ni una figura, ni una sombra.

Estaba desesperada por hacer realidad la Navidad para mis hijos, pero no podía darles lo único que querían, así que me concentré en los juguetes. Si rezaba por tener algo aquellos días, era un Wii, el limitado y codiciado videojuego de 2007. A base de tenacidad y suerte, mi madre encontró uno.

Mi madre también había colgado nuestras botas navideñas en la repisa de la chimenea. Como no sabía qué hacer con la de Sam, la volvió a meter en la caja, como si pudiéramos olvidar que estaba muerto si su bota no estaba.

La saqué y la colgué en la repisa con las nuestras.

La tercera noche, encendí la luz de la entrada de la casa y apagué las luces de la sala para que pudiéramos ver quién dejaba los regalos, luego los chicos y yo nos sentamos en el sofá y esperamos. Pero a medida que oscurecía, se aburrieron y luego tuvieron hambre.

Fui a la cocina a preparar la cena. Cuando sonó el timbre, Danny y Jason corrieron a la parte delantera de la casa, pero lo único que encontraron al abrir la puerta de golpe fueron tres grandes bastones de caramelo. La misma cinta plateada. El mismo papel. El mismo mensaje con el mismo rotulador negro: “En el tercer día de Navidad…”

El laborioso duende entregó la ofrenda del cuarto día mientras estábamos fuera de la casa, quizá en terapia, a donde íbamos a menudo aquellos días, individualmente y en familia. Llegamos a casa y encontramos cuatro pequeños adornos para el árbol, envueltos en la cinta plateada. El mismo pedazo cuadrado de papel. Esta vez la tinta era de otro color y la letra, más infantil.

De repente, esto me pareció el tipo de cosas que coordinaría mi amiga Caren, así que le mencioné lo del amigo invisible, pero ella insistió en que no lo había orquestado.

“En serio”, me dijo. “Ojalá hubiera sido yo”.

No solo eso, sino que sus hijos tenían edades similares a las de mis hijos, y dudaba que pudieran guardar un secreto así. ¿Quién, entonces?

Durante las dos noches siguientes, mis hijos merodearon cerca de la puerta principal todo lo que pudieron, pero invariablemente el portador de los regalos elegía el momento en que se marchaban para acercarse sigilosamente.

Cuando estaba embarazada de nuestro primer hijo, Sam quería saber si sería niño o niña. Iba a ser feliz de cualquier manera; solo quería estar preparado. Como padres primerizos, albergábamos la ilusión de que podíamos estar preparados para cosas como los bebés y la paternidad.

Dos años más tarde, cuando esperaba a nuestro segundo hijo, Sam quiso saber el sexo del niño otra vez, pero para entonces yo ya me había acostumbrado a la idea de no saberlo. El día de la ecografía, el bebé tenía las piernas cruzadas para que el médico no pudiera determinar el sexo y me fui con mi hijo escondido en el útero. No programé ninguna ecografía de seguimiento. El bebé nos lo haría saber a su debido tiempo.

El duelo también exige su propio desconocimiento, sin la ventaja de una fecha en la que todo será revelado. No sabía por qué Sam había puesto fin a su vida, qué le había parecido imposible, cómo había caído de manera tan profunda en la desesperación. No sabía que era eso que no vi, en qué fallé, si podría haberlo detenido, cómo seríamos nuestros hijos y yo sin él. En algún momento, tendría que aprender a vivir con tantas incógnitas. Y lo hice.

Había una cosa que sí sabía. En aquellos oscuros días de intenso dolor, alguien nos iluminaba con un mensaje sencillo pero poderoso: “No son invisibles. Hay alguien que los ama”.

Durante la semana siguiente, recibimos ofrendas cada noche. Siempre sencillas —seis manzanas, siete naranjas, ocho paquetes de chicles—, cada una adornada con el característico lazo plateado, la nota escrita en el pedazo cuadrado de papel blanco y la letra infantil.

Podría haber sido un esfuerzo coordinado, un proyecto familiar o un amigo muy inteligente. No lo sabía y ya no quería saberlo. Había algo en el desconocimiento que me atraía. Empecé a acorralar a los chicos en la cocina del fondo de la casa por las tardes, sobornándolos con postre o un capítulo extra de El milagroso viaje de Edward Tulane, para que el donante anónimo pudiera seguir siéndolo. Mi misión era proteger su acto sagrado y generoso.

Era una sensación extraña, sentirse tan desgarrada por el dolor y la oscuridad, por un lado, y tan atraída hacia la luz y la esperanza, por el otro. Sentirse despojada y abandonada, pero también sostenida, arraigada y apoyada.

Así era esta época, como suele decirse. La oscuridad era abrumadora, aterradora y completamente injusta cuando el tierno recién nacido entró en escena. Es difícil imaginar que la esperanza de un bebé pueda cambiar las cosas. Pero ahí está.

Después de 11 días de ofrendas, no estábamos seguros de qué esperar cuando nos acercamos a casa esa duodécima noche. Confiaba en que habría algo, pero después de todas las noches previas a ese momento, ¿se decepcionarían mis hijos? ¿Me decepcionaría yo? Se preguntaban en voz alta qué nos esperaría en casa. ¿Chocolates? ¿Una docena de galletas?

Dos meses antes, dos policías y un sacerdote me habían recibido en la entrada de mi casa para darme la noticia de la muerte de mi marido. Era difícil no revivir aquella explosión de pánico al girar desde la calle y subir la ligera pendiente de mi entrada, sin saber lo que podría encontrarnos al llegar.

A menudo contenía la respiración cuando llegaba a la casa. Aquella noche, me oí exhalar y sentí la familiar opresión en las mejillas mientras se me llenaban los ojos de lágrimas.

Parecía como si alguien nos hubiera entregado el contenido de un trineo entero.

Los chicos abrieron las puertas del auto y corrieron a la entrada de la casa, donde encontraron doce paquetes exquisitamente envueltos: cuatro para Danny, cuatro para Jason y cuatro para mí. Todos los tipos de papel, todos los colores posibles de cinta, varios estilos de letra. Juguetes, juegos, golosinas y una gorra de béisbol de los Bruin en mi tono favorito de azul claro.

La tarjeta blanca decía: “¡Feliz Navidad!”.

Quince años después, esos dos niños tienen 21 y 23 años y están en casa para celebrar Navidad. En cuanto a mí, que llevo mucho tiempo de haberme casado de nuevo y he sido madre de una familia mixta de cuatro hijos que han llegado a la edad adulta, he llegado a saber algunas cosas. Pero sigo sin saber quién nos dio esos doce días de esperanza en medio de nuestro dolor.

Y me alegro de no saberlo. Incluso mientras sucedía, no saber se convirtió rápidamente en mi parte favorita. Era una luz misteriosa que se abría paso en nuestra oscuridad inefable. No es un milagro. No es magia. Solo amor humano, generoso y desinteresado.

Elite Kyiv units and a Russian force of professional soldiers, recruits, mercenaries and prisoners are locked in a bitter struggle for control of the Kreminna-Svatove axis that will determine the next phase of Russia’s invasion

Captain “Ginger” brushes off his mud-splattered khaki pants, rests one foot on the trunk of a collapsed tree and readjusts his rifle. His efforts are futile. The forest is caked with mud. To the right and left, violent explosions shake the wild grove of the Sacred Mountains, on the road to Kreminna, one of the Luhansk strongholds in the east of Ukraine occupied by Russian forces in April during the early stages of the invasion. “They don’t give us a break, but we don’t give them a break either,” nods the Ukrainian captain. The pine forests bordering the Seversky Donets river have become the stage for one of the most vital battles of attrition in the latest phase of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The fighting is a classic battle of back-and-forth, trenches, raiding parties and ambushes in the undergrowth and mud in the heart of Donbas, where every meter counts and the days seem like months.

Hunkered down in trenches carved from the sodden earth among tall and thin pine trees, in small tents or makeshift foxholes, Russian forces occupy a part of the Sacred Mountain National Park and other positions in an area commonly known as the Yampil forests. “They want to advance and retake Yampil [liberated by Ukrainian troops on September 30] and Liman. Their commanders keep sending soldiers and recruits like swarms of cockroaches. And we crush them, like insects,” mutters Captain Ginger, square-chested and ruddy-faced like his nickname suggests.

Captain Ginger’s 5th Assault Brigade and other Ukrainian units are engaged in a grueling battle to push Russian troops from the forest and advance on two fronts: from the east toward Kreminna and from the north on Svatove, an axis that would provide the Ukrainian Army with a solid geographical and logistical foothold to extend their lines toward Lysychansk and Severodonetsk. Moscow captured these two cities in the Luhansk region in June and July after ferocious fighting and a brutal siege, and after Kyiv liberated the Black Sea port city of Kherson, they represent the Kremlin’s two biggest military achievements of the war.

The Ukrainian counter-offensive on Russian positions on the Kreminna-Svatove front was launched last autumn and is being carried out by some of Kyiv’s elite units. The muddy terrain is now more compact and intelligence reports and satellite imagery have provided evidence that the Russians have reinforced their positions and are making preparations for renewed attacks at various points on the front, leading Ukrainian forces in the area to tighten and streamline their own operations. As people the world over celebrate the Christmas holiday, Bushinka, a wiry private, smokes a cigarette on a corrugated iron roof blown apart by a missile. His nickname means “pearl” in Ukrainian, the mild-mannered and well-spoken soldier smiles, before re-entering the mined grove he has come to know like the back of his hand.

The situation in Donbas is “difficult and painful,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his daily video address on Monday night, which has become an indispensable war report for thousands of people who seek cryptic signals in his words, as in his Christian Christmas message when he spoke of a bright star over the sky of Kreminna. “The occupiers are using all the resources available to them – and these are significant resources – to squeeze out at least some advance,” Zelenskiy said.

Standing by the side of a vehicle covered with camouflage nets, Captain Ginger and his men survey the ramshackle road that winds toward the “gray zone” – no man’s land – that the forest has become. An armored car with a trailer carrying a huge piece of rust-colored steel limps across the precarious road, littered with potholes and debris from artillery fire. During the night, Russian forces blew up one of the pontoon bridges that provided passage over the river. The task facing Ukrainian troops now is to build another floating roadway under sustained shelling.

Despite the bridge setback, the Ukrainian Army has advanced around a mile over the past few days toward occupied Kreminna, according to Serhiy Haidai, head of the Luhansk Regional Military–Civil Administration. “We have ruined the offensive plans of the occupying forces. Things are going well,” he said in an interview.

Russia remains in control of almost the entire Luhansk region and Haidai has been in the Kremlin’s crosshairs since the beginning of the invasion, when he refused to collaborate with Russia. Nicknamed “Ronin,” he travels in an armored van wearing a bulletproof vest, crisscrossing Donbas, a region Russia claims it is trying to liberate with a hail of mortars and missiles, in an attempt to alter the course of a war that has not gone according to the plans of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Western aid has also changed the course of the battle in the forests, says Yara, who serves in a military intelligence unit. The slim young woman, her hair woven into dozens of small braids, says it is not only due to the “obvious” element of firepower the Western allies have provided to Kiev, but also logistics. “We used to move around in old tanks that could break down at the worst moment, as we have experienced, or in Mitsubishi vehicles and even delivery vans,” she says. “Now we have MaxxPros and Hummers.”

On the other side of the Seversky Donets river, Moscow has assembled a heterogenous but numerous force for another offensive, made up of professional soldiers, recruits from Putin’s partial mobilization, Wagner Company mercenaries and prisoners enlisted as military contractors from Russia’s jails. After a series of battlefield defeats in recent months, the Kremlin has now turned its focus primarily on Donbas, where prior to the full-scale invasion the Ukrainian army and pro-Russia separatist forces in Donetsk and Luhansk had been engaged in a fluctuating struggle in trenches and fixed positions for eight years.

Private Bushinka says most of the Russian assault groups in the area are well-equipped and trained, particularly the regular army units and mercenaries. Moscow has deployed tank groups in the forests of the Sacred Mountains and uses blanket artillery strikes – although various intelligence reports claim that the Kremlin has been experiencing ammunition supply problems in recent days – as well as assault brigades that attack in waves. The Russians alternate their attacks, says Yara. Sometimes the lead units are made up of “cannon fodder” – conscripts and untrained prisoners – and sometimes mercenaries and professional soldiers are sent against the Ukrainian lines.

Meanwhile, in a relentless dance, Ukrainian forces are also trying to advance. Military analysts believe the entire course of the Donbas winter war may depend on the battle along the Kreminna-Svatove line and the bitter struggle for control of Bakhmut, besieged by Putin’s forces and the scene of bloody street-to-street combat where Kyiv’s forces are mounting a fierce defense that has turned into another symbol of Ukraine’s unity and resistance. Regaining control of the Kreminna-Svatove axis would allow Ukrainian forces to drive a wedge between the Russian units assaulting Bakhmut. “That’s what this war is like,” says Bushinka, “Slow, nasty, grueling. But this is our land and it is worth everything.”

El Pais in English – December 28, 2022

In his final spiritual testament, released by the Vatican on Saturday evening, Benedict XVI urged resistance to secularism and reflected upon his life, saying he had many reasons to be thankful for God’s guidance through the moments of confusion.

“Retrospectively, I see and understand that even the dark and tiresome traits of this journey were for my salvation and, right in those, He led me well,” Benedict wrote, referring to God.

Echoing wording in the spiritual will of his predecessor, John Paul II, Benedict apologized to “anyone I have wronged in any way” and said “to all those whom, in some way, I was unfair, I heartily seek forgiveness.”

He also made a last plea to his followers, urging them to “stay steady in the faith” and wrote that, despite advancements in science and changes in societal views, he was certain that “the rationality of faith has and will emerge again.”

Benedict, who as pope had warned against the trend toward secularism in the West, wrote, “I pray that our land remains a land of faith and beg you, dear compatriots, do not be distracted from the faith.”

He thanked his father for his “lucid faith” that taught his children to believe; his mother, for her “deep devotion and great goodness;” his sister, who took care of him for decades; and his brother, also a priest, for his judgment and guidance.

Benedict also thanked his friends, collaborators, students, his Bavarian homeland and his adopted home in Rome and Italy.

“I finally ask you, please pray for me,” he said. “Despite all my sins and insufficiencies, may he welcome me in the eternal dwellings.”

New York Times – December 31, 2022

Geraldine Heusing, patinadora de competición, perfecciona sus movimientos en la pista Wollman en Central Park. 21 de enero de 1954Credit…Sam Falk/The New York Times

3 de diciembre de 2022

[Esta nota se publicó originalmente en inglés en 2018]

Todos los años, multitudes de aspirantes a reinas y reyes del hielo se tambalean sobre la gélida explanada de la pista Wollman de Central Park. Desde atletas talentosos hasta niños pequeños intentando conservar el equilibrio, todos buscan exhibir sus ochos y piruetas o simplemente poder moverse sin caerse. A veces es difícil mantener la frescura típica del neoyorquino que lo ha visto todo cuando te caes de espaldas, pero es el indomable espíritu de la ciudad el que nos hace volver a pararnos y estar dispuestos a más.

La pista de patinaje Wollman recibió a los patinadores por primera vez en 1950, como una alternativa más segura a la imprevisibilidad de patinar en el lago, una célebre tradición desde que el parque se abrió al público en 1858. Tras heredar una fortuna bursátil, Kate Wollman, filántropa y residente del Waldorf Astoria, financió la construcción de la pista. Esperaba que “les trajera felicidad a los niños que la usan”. A lo largo de los años, Wollman fue famosa porque se sentaba sola en una terraza con vistas a la acción, observando a los patinadores, y ella personalmente presentaba premios para las competiciones anuales de los niños. Más de 300.000 patinadores visitaron la pista en su primer año y, en 1953, recibió a su millonésimo visitante. Ese mismo año, una tal Mildred Donnelly trató de eludir la atención y rechazar el premio consistente en un par de patines; The New York Times planteó la hipótesis de que era porque ella y sus amigas habían faltado al trabajo para ir a la pista. (Ella insistió en que no era el caso).

Aunque Wollman es la pista pública más destacada de la ciudad, hay decenas de lugares para patinar en Nueva York, desde Prospect Park hasta Coney Island y Clove Lakes Park en Staten Island. De hecho, hay planes de convertir la Armería de Kingsbridge, en el Bronx, en un enorme complejo de nueve pistas. El patinaje es un fenómeno de toda la ciudad y así ha sido desde hace mucho tiempo.

En los años 50, los patinadores giraban y se bamboleaban con música envasada de órgano, rumbas y fox trots. Mientras limpiaban la pista, los visitantes se refrescaban los talones disfrutando de manzanas acarameladas, perritos calientes y pizzas de 25 centavos. A finales de los años 70, las pistas empezaron a experimentar con la música disco. (“Hace que los patinadores enloquezcan”, un gerente dijo en 1979, aunque no estaba claro si lo decía en el buen o en el mal sentido). Pero los madrugadores que lograban soportar el gélido amanecer para llegar a la pista de patinaje Lasker, en el extremo norte de Central Park, podían patinar sin música, acompañados únicamente por el meditabundo susurro de las cuchillas sobre el hielo recién raspado.

Pero el panorama de las pistas de patinaje no siempre ha sido sereno. En 1961, se produjo un pequeño escándalo con el anuncio de que subirían las tarifas: los días de las entradas por 10 centavos habían terminado y las cuotas de admisión se habían duplicado, triplicado e incluso cuadruplicado. “Me parece vergonzoso”, le dijo al Times Paula Ballan, de 16 años, ese año. “La razón por la que han cambiado el precio es para mantener alejados a quienes llaman ‘elementos de clase baja’. Es una pista pública. Evita que los niños se metan en problemas porque se aburren”. (En la actualidad, Wollman cobra 6 dólares a los niños de 12 años o menos).

Mundos incongruentes colisionaban en la pista, a veces literalmente. El cercano estanque de patinaje del Centro Rockefeller se ganó la reputación de ser un lugar para ver y ser visto y Wollman, con sus precios más asequibles (el Rockefeller siempre ha sido bastante más costoso), reunía a grupos de colegiales del Bronx con residentes del hotel Plaza, abrigos de visón y patines decorados en casa.

Los neoyorquinos llevan unos 70 años deslizándose, patinando y haciendo tripletes alrededor de Wollman. Y, cada año, los visitantes llegan en oleadas —sin inmutarse por las filas largas, sin preocuparse de codearse en un microcosmos de los cinco distritos— para pavonearse, caer de bruces y levantarse para volver a intentarlo.

Ukrainian officials are cracking down on a branch of the Russian Orthodox Church that they describe as a subversive force doing the Kremlin’s bidding.

KYIV, Ukraine — Andriy Pavlenko, an Orthodox church abbot in eastern Ukraine, seemed to be on a selfless spiritual mission. When war came, he remained with his flock and even visited a hospital to pray with wounded soldiers.

But in fact, according to court records, Mr. Pavlenko was working actively to kill Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainian activists, including a priest from a rival Orthodox church in his city, Sievierodonetsk.

“In the north, there are about 500 of them, with a mortar platoon, five armored personnel carriers and three tanks,” Mr. Pavlenko wrote to a Russian officer in March, as the Russian Army was hammering Sievierodonetsk and areas around it with artillery.

“He needs to be killed,” he wrote of the rival priest, according to evidence introduced at his trial in a Ukrainian court, showing he had sent lists to the Russian Army of people to round up once the city was occupied. Mr. Pavlenko was convicted as a spy this month and then traded with Russia in a prisoner exchange.

His was hardly an isolated case. In the past month, the authorities have arrested or publicly identified as suspects more than 30 clergymen and nuns of the Ukrainian arm of the Russian Orthodox Church.

To the Ukrainian security services, the Russian-aligned church, one of the country’s two major Orthodox churches, poses a uniquely subversive threat — a widely trusted institution that is not only an incubator of pro-Russia sentiment but is also infiltrated by priests, monks and nuns who have aided Russia in the war.

Recent months have brought a quick succession of searches of churches and monasteries, and decrees and laws restricting the activity of the Russian-aligned church, confusingly named the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. On Tuesday, Ukraine’s Supreme Court upheld a 2018 law that requires truthful naming of religious organizations if they are affiliated with a country at war with Ukraine — a law tailored to force the church to call itself Russian.

President Volodymyr Zelensky this month asked Parliament to ban any church that answers to Russia, though no details have been proposed yet, so it remains unclear how that would work. The Ukrainian authorities plan to revoke the Russian church’s lease on two revered houses of worship — the Holy Dormition Cathedral and the Refectory Church — in the Monastery of the Caves complex in Kyiv, a thousand-year-old catacomb cradling the mummies of the holiest saints in Slavic Orthodoxy.

The Ukrainian crackdown on the Russian church has elicited howls of protest from both the church and the Russian government, which call it an assault on religious freedom. On Tuesday, Metropolitan Pavlo Lebed, the head of the Russian-aligned church at the Monastery of the Caves, appealed to Mr. Zelensky in a video.

“Do you want to take away faith in people, take away the last hope?” he said. “Do not tell us which church to go to.”

Mr. Zelensky, who is Jewish, and Ukrainian law enforcement agencies say the crackdown has nothing to do with religious freedom, which they argue does not extend to espionage, sedition, sabotage or treason.

For centuries, Ukraine’s Orthodox churches were under the Russian church, whose leadership in Moscow wholeheartedly supports President Vladimir V. Putin’s war. But in recent years, many priests and parishes, and millions of the faithful, have switched allegiances to the independent new Orthodox Church of Ukraine, a migration accelerated by the war. The two churches are virtually identical in liturgy; what separates them are politics and nationalism.

Early in December, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church called the accusations of collaboration between its clergy and Russia “unproven and groundless.”

The Russian-aligned church, which still represents millions of Ukrainians, insists that it cut ties with its Russian hierarchy at the onset of the war. The independent Ukrainian church calls that break insincere and flatly condemns its counterpart for not making a real break with Moscow.

“The Russian Orthodox Church is in reality a tool of Russian aggression,” Archbishop Yevstratiy, a spokesman for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, said in an interview in the St. Michael’s Golden Domed Monastery in Kyiv.

Outside military analysts have seen reason for Ukraine’s concern. The church of the Moscow Patriarchate “materially supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based analytical group, wrote in a research note on the role of the Russian-affiliated church in the war.

Evidence of churches being treated as instruments of Russian aims is commonplace. Searches have turned up wads of cash, flags of the former Russian client states in eastern Ukraine and pamphlets printed by the Russian Army for distribution in occupied territories, the Security Service of Ukraine, the domestic intelligence agency, has said in statements.

The archimandrite, or top religious official, of the Assumption Cathedral in Kherson in southern Ukraine attended a ceremony in the Kremlin in which Russia claimed to annex the Kherson province as part of Russia.

During the eight-month Russian occupation of Kherson city, Moscow’s forces cracked down on private charities in an effort to steer the population to Russian humanitarian aid programs, which required registration with occupation authorities. It was a policy of forcing dependence on Russia. When a priest nonetheless continued operating a soup kitchen, the Russian-aligned church excommunicated him.

Ukrainian officials say that priests and monks — or people posing as them — who are also spies have caused problems for Ukraine’s military. At one monastery north of Kyiv this month, the authorities said they found six men in monks’ robes — all of whom were athletically built, spoke Russian but no Ukrainian, and had no documents. The police arrested the men and are investigating whether they are spies.

“Being a priest is ideal cover for any intelligence agent,” said a Ukrainian intelligence official knowledgeable about the investigation of the Russian-aligned church, but who was not authorized to speak publicly. “People are ready to trust you, because you are a priest.”

For his part, Mr. Pavlenko, the abbot who was later convicted of espionage, took to visiting wounded Ukrainian soldiers at a hospital, according to Pavlo Dubyna, a former resident of the town and acquaintance of Mr. Pavlenko. After such visits, he would walk in the street and speak on his cellphone, Mr. Dubyna said.

Ukrainian authorities arrested the priest in April, when the Russian military was still bombarding Sievierodonetsk, which it captured in June. In an act they say proved Mr. Pavlenko’s culpability, Moscow accepted the priest in a prisoner swap for an American held by Russia, Suedi Murekezi, an Air Force veteran who had been living in southern Ukraine before the war.

Evidence from the trial opened a window into the priest’s blending of espionage and vendetta against priests in the independent Ukrainian church, which before the war had been winning away followers from the Russian church. Prosecutors presented what they said were short descriptions of the rival clergy, sent to the Russian Army by Mr. Pavlenko.

“The spiritual guide for the nationalist brigades and the Ukrainian Army in the Luhansk region,” said a March 15 note that said the priest in question should be killed.

Another message described another priest in the Ukrainian church whose brother was fighting in the war and said, “I think we need to put an end to him too, as he is not our guy.”

New York Times – December 31, 2022

In the mid-20th century, Spanish epigrapher Manuel Gómez-Moreno deciphered the writing of the peoples of Hispania, making it possible to read inscriptions, such as the recently found Hand of Irulegi

Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) is considered to be the father of modern Egyptology and has gone down in history for being the first to decipher hieroglyphic writing, in 1822. He did so thanks to the Rosetta Stone, a single text in three languages (hieroglyphic Egyptian; demotic writing, which was typical of the priestly caste; and Greek), which was found in 1799 during the Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt. For this reason, the brilliant French epigrapher is remembered in many articles, books, studies, films, documentaries, statues and street names. The same cannot be said of Spanish epigrapher Manuel Gómez-Moreno (1870-1970), who deciphered pre-Roman writings in the mid-20th century without a Rosetta Stone; he was armed only with notebooks and pencils. But now his name is back in the spotlight after the recent discovery of the so-called Hand of Irulegi near Pamplona, Spain. The Hand of Irulegi dates back to 2,100 years ago and features 40 characters written in the Proto-Basque language. Professors Javier Velaza and Joaquín Gorrochategui have translated the first word of the inscription, sorioneku, which means good omen. But how were they able to figure out its meaning?

The five great languages – Lusitanian, Celtiberian, Iberian, Proto-Basque and Tartessian – that were spoken when the Romans landed on the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC can be read and interpreted thanks to epigraphers such as the Marquis of Valdeflores (1722–1772), Gómez-Moreno and Antonio Tovar (1911–1985), although many doubts and unknowns remain. Martin Almagro Gorbea, a former professor of Prehistory and specialist in Iberian protohistory, sums it up this way: “Currently, we only debate whether a text says, ‘this is so-and-so’s stele’ or it should be translated instead as ‘here so-and-so is buried.’ And, to a large extent, we owe this [knowledge] to Gómez-Moreno, the great Spanish epigrapher.”

The Iberian Peninsula has always been a kind of reservoir of Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. As the continent’s Finisterre and, therefore, at a remove from the great western migratory flows, its languages remained archaic and didn’t change much. The Iberian Peninsula was divided into two large land masses, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But Hispania’s inhabitants were strongly connected for commercial reasons, meaning that many of them were likely bilingual. For example, in the winter, herds of Celtiberian transhumant (nomadic) shepherds from the north grazed in the southern Tartessos or Gadir, an eminently Mediterranean city.

The Celtiberian transhumant shepherds from the north reached the southern Tartessos, which forced them to be bilingual

In the third millennium BC, Indo-European peoples from Ukraine and southern Russia penetrated the Baltic, generating northern Europe’s Germanic languages, while those who moved westward gave rise to the Celtic languages. The fact that these people carried the R1b genetic group – which, for example, allowed them to assimilate milk proteins as adults and accumulate large reserves of ferritin, facilitating their survival and expansion – led researchers to follow their linguistic trail in Hispania and Europe. As a result, scholars have determined that Proto-Celts settled in a mosaic pattern throughout the Iberian Peninsula’s Atlantic area; the language that linguists call Lusitanian came with them. Two millennia later, when writing appeared, Lusitanian’s idiomatic imprint was visible from the north of the peninsula to the Sierra Morena in south-central Spain.

On the other hand, the Iberian language was spoken in the Iberian Peninsula’s Mediterranean areas. The language came from Anatolia (Turkey) and spread throughout the western Mediterranean in the fifth millennium. It predominated in the Spanish Levant, Jaén and Eastern Andalusia, where it coincided with the Argar and proto-Tartessian cultures, which had their own language, Tartessian (in the region of Huelva, in southwestern Spain, and southern Portugal). Through contact in the northern part of the peninsula, the Iberian language was also related to Proto-Basque, although the latter may also be interconnected with Proto-Sardinian.

In 1200 BC, people from a Celtic culture known as the urnfield culture – so named because of their custom of cremating their dead and burying them inside vessels in large necropolises – arrived through the eastern passes of the Pyrenees. They expanded into the area of the high Jalón (Zaragoza), the Iberian System, Soria and Guadalajara. These people are known as Celtiberians, a group that prevailed over the older Celts who had been settled in these areas of the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. Thus, their language, Celtiberian, is closely related to Europe’s Celtic languages; however, because of its geographical location, the language did not evolve as much as the related Gaulish Celtic and Gaelic Celtic did. Celtiberians, who were cattle breeders, then moved toward the west of the peninsula and linguistically absorbed the other Iberian peoples in those areas, such as the Vacceans and the Vetons, who were Celtiberianized. The Celtiberians extended as far as an imaginary line between present-day Astorga (in the north) and Mérida (in western Spain, in Extremadura).

To the west of that strip of land, the Lusitanians maintained their Indo-European language in present-day Galicia, Portugal and Extremadura. Like Spanish, this language had just five vowels. Only a hundred words from this language, which is halfway between Celtic and Italic, have been preserved, so translating it remains difficult. It is possible that the language split when Celtic and Italic had not yet differentiated during the first migrations. Unlike the rest of the Iberian peoples, the Lusitanians only began to write after the Roman legions conquered them. In fact, there are some inscriptions by Lusitanian priests with ritual instructions that have a prologue in Latin. Spanish epigrapher Antonio Tovar identified this language in the 1950s.

In contrast to the Lusitanians, Iberian elites did know how to write; they took writing from the Tartessians – with whom they maintained commercial relations – in the 6th century BC, who had adapted it from the Phoenicians around the 8th century BC. This alphabet developed a semi-syllabic system, which consists of writing vowels and liquid and nasal consonants with a single symbol, and it also uses a single symbol for occlusive syllables (a syllabic system). Iberian writing is divided into southern (Andalusia, Murcia and Alicante) and Levantine (from Valencia to Roussillon, France) variants.

For their part, the Celtiberians copied the Iberians’ writing; it is practically the same with only a few variations. The discovery of the Hand of Irulegi – which consists of 40 symbols – shows that the Proto-Basques adopted the Celtiberians’ writing, with some variations to reproduce characteristic Proto-Basque sounds. The Basque language was spoken to the south of the Pyrenees, between Jaca and Navarre, as far as Aquitaine (in southern France). The language was not spoken in the present-day Basque Country, where the inhabitants communicated with each other in Celtic, as the names of geographical features – for example, Deva and Nervion – demonstrate. The language now known as Euskadi only became linguistically Basque during the Middle Ages; for that reason, the territory has been referred to as the Vascongadas, the lands that became Basque.

But how is it possible to translate all these languages without a Rosetta stone? In the 18th century, the Marquis of Valdeflores, Luis Joseph Velázquez de Velasco y Cruzado, was the first to identify the Celtiberian language. He wrote a treatise on its symbols based on the coins he identified at the time. But the real breakthrough came from the studies of Manuel Gómez-Moreno. He compared the inscriptions of the Celtiberian coins with Roman ones from the same city, and the name of the town written on the two coins made it possible for him to compare the two scripts and understand the symbols. In any case, his great contribution was to discover the semi-syllabic system (an alphabet composed of letters and syllables). Tovar would unravel the Lusitanian alphabet years later.

Gómez-Moreno compared the inscriptions of Celtiberian coins with Roman ones to find similarities

In his Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum, German Jürgen Untermann (1918–2013) compiled a lexicon of all the words from the Iberian Peninsula that had been deciphered. We know one hundred Lusitanian words, a few dozen Tartessian words (because almost no inscriptions have been found in that language), and around a thousand words each of Iberian and Celtiberian.

But how many of these words do we understand? “We can comprehend 80% of the Celtiberian and 60% of the Iberian words. Experts are certain about very few Tartessian words because they disagree about whether it is an Indo-European language combined with ancient elements. We also understand 60% of the Lusitanian words. However, these figures do not mean that we know that percentage of the languages [as a whole], but rather the percentages we can understand of the texts that we have found,” explains Martín Almagro.

Experts are currently trying to further their knowledge through artificial intelligence. “First, the corpora [databases of identified words] are being compiled. Once we have them, they will be entered into computers. There are linguists working on it, but if you don’t have the data, you can’t make progress. Archaeology is behind in this [respect]. We are still looking for coins by looking at them in books. The logical thing [to do] would be to put them in a scanner and find parallels,” Almagro says.

For those who are interested in learning more, there’s a database (hesperia.ucm.es) that includes everything that linguists know about Tartessian, Celtiberian, Iberian and Proto-Basque. It is free to access, and through its maps, one can find and read everything that is known about the inscriptions that have been found. The database does not include translations, but it does provide descriptions of the objects (from coins to tombstones) with the words engraved on them and the archaeological context in which they were found.

El Pais in English – December 31, 2022

The Spanish researcher believes that the Asian country has made a mistake in going from a zero-Covid policy to a nearly unrestricted one, as its population has low vaccination coverage

Three years after the coronavirus pandemic began, the world has once again become concerned about China. The explosion of cases that the Asian giant has recorded after it abruptly ended the zero-Covid policy, in effect since 2020, has worried many governments. The question is how an uncontrolled increase in infections in a country with over 1.4 billion inhabitants will affect the rest of the world. Luis Enjuanes, the director of the coronavirus laboratory at Spain’s National Center for Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC), is a leading international expert on such situations.

Question: What is happening in China?

Answer. Well, there has been no middle ground. They have gone from isolating all the residents in a building because of a [single] positive case to virtually letting the virus run rampant in a population that is not well immunized.

Q. And that is not advisable.

A. No. The result is that, according to some sources. about 35 million people are infected a day. That’s a huge number, which can only be explained if we take two things into account. The first is that the restrictions [that China has] imposed over the past three years mean that very few people have spread the disease naturally. The second is that China’s vaccination coverage rates are lower than [they are] in Europe… and their vaccines are less effective as well. All of that means that the population is poorly protected against the virus. As a country, China should have done what the rest of the world did: gradually re-open as the population of vaccinated individuals increased and keep some restrictions [in place] for as long as necessary. [China] has gone from one extreme to another.

Q. Has applying the zero-Covid policy for so long essentially meant that China postponed the point at which the country had to confront Covid-19 in earnest?

A. Yes.

Q. But that wasn’t difficult to foresee. China is also a scientific powerhouse. Didn’t the country’s experts warn that this could happen?

A. China is also an authoritarian regime, a country that strictly disciplines a population used to obeying. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese government retaliated against doctors; that’s what happened in the famous case of an ophthalmologist who, with the best of intentions, simply warned that a new virus was spreading. That is how dictatorships are, and the lack of freedom always works against the population.

Q. How worrisome is all this for the rest of the world?

A. It is worrisome.

Q. As worrisome as three years ago?

A. We are much better prepared [now]. There are many contagions, which means that there will be many more mutations, and new variants will emerge. This will have a cascade effect on the rest of the world. More infections always lead to more serious cases and more deaths, and that implies additional risks. However, it is also true that the new variants tend to be more attenuated forms of the virus.

Q. Why is that the case?

A. If the virus kills you or makes you very sick, they bury you or isolate you and the virus can no longer spread. On the other hand, if you can continue to live a relatively normal life, you are going to spread [the virus] everywhere. It is a natural process; on a large scale, that means that ultimately the more attenuated forms [of the virus], which cause milder cases, always end up spreading more. The Omicron variant causes less severe cases than Alpha or Beta.

Q. Wasn’t Omicron milder because of the effect of the vaccines?

A. Yes. A population’s protection against a virus depends on many cumulative factors. In Europe, we have seen that [happen] with the Omicron variant. It was generally milder than Alpha or Beta, but it still caused many serious cases and deaths among the unvaccinated and immunosuppressed populations.

Q. But there are viruses that do not become milder over time, such as measles and smallpox.

A. Those viruses are DNA; [they’re] larger and more stable. They mutate much less and cause a different type of systemic infection. That’s why being vaccinated or having had the disease once means you are protected for life. I was vaccinated against smallpox over 60 years ago, and I am still protected against it. Coronaviruses and influenza viruses are RNA and mutate much more.

Q. You said that the tens of millions of infections in China are going to have a cascade effect on the rest of the world.

A. Yes, and again we have vaccines to thank [for protection]. The new [vaccines] have a double function. They protect us against the early forms of the virus, which is necessary because [the earlier strains] would re-emerge otherwise. The vaccines also [protect] against the recent [variants], such as the new forms of Omicron. This is necessary because we know that protection against serious disease from the first doses declines over time, especially among older people and those with weakened immune systems. That’s why these new booster doses are so important. It’s like a race.

Q. What do you mean by that?

A. The body develops antibodies and T-lymphocytes against the form of the virus that infects it or the vaccine it receives. These defenses are tremendously effective in the beginning, but over time and as new variants appear, they lose that efficacy. And then the time comes when the virus infects you again. And then you develop new antibodies… And so on and so forth.

Q. The virus is supposed to become milder, and it will end up being like a cold.

A. Not necessarily. It could be like the flu, which for many people is not mild, and every year they have to get vaccinated again. There are things we don’t know yet.

Q. Does it make sense to require negative Covid-19 (PCR) test results from travelers who come from China, as some countries are doing, even when the virus is still spreading around the world?

A. Yes, that’s a standard public health measure that’s done in uncertain situations. You don’t mandate a quarantine or prohibit people from crossing the border, but you do exert some control in a situation where you don’t know very much about what is happening in China or you are not sure that you’re being told everything.

Q. Beyond China, what is the biggest challenge that the virus currently poses?

A. Long Covid. Studies in the US say up to 20% of people suffer some kind of ailment that doesn’t go away after their infection. According to studies in other countries, the percentages are lower but still significant. That’s a huge challenge that countries will have to confront.

El Pais in English – December 28, 2022

Joseph Ratzinger became the first pontiff to voluntarily resign his position since the 13th century and was faced with one of the biggest scandals of the modern Catholic Church during his papacy

On December 31, shortly after 10.30 am CET, the Vatican announced passing of Joseph Ratzinger. The pope emeritus, who was 95 years old, had been in ill health for several years, as he stated in a public letter in 2016. As Benedict XVI, Ratzinger embarked on the greatest formal revolution of the Church in the modern era, and will always be remembered as the first pontiff in seven centuries to voluntarily step down from his role. He did so on February 11, 2013, becoming the first pope emeritus in history in retirement at the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, just a few hundred meters from where his successor, Pope Francis, carried out his work as head of the Catholic Church. In later years, Benedict was seen occasionally taking a stroll in the Vatican gardens but remained largely removed from public life.

Benedict’s decision, which marked the first time a pope had elected to leave his position since the resignation of Celestine V in 1294 (Gregory XII was forced from office in 1415), paved the way for the conclave that elected Pope Francis. A statement from Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni on Saturday morning said that: “With pain I inform that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died today at 9:34 in the Mater Ecclesia Monastery in the Vatican. Further information will be released as soon as possible.”

The Vatican said Benedict’s remains would be on public display in St. Peter’s Basilica starting Monday for the faithful to pay their final respects.

Benedict, the reluctant pope

The former Cardinal Ratzinger had never wanted to be pope, planning at age 78 to spend his final years writing in the “peace and quiet” of his native Bavaria.

Instead, he was forced to follow the footsteps of the beloved St. John Paul II and run the church through the fallout of the clerical sex abuse scandal and then a second scandal that erupted when his own butler stole his personal papers and gave them to a journalist.

Being elected pope, he once said, felt like a “guillotine” had come down on him. Nevertheless, he set about the job with a single-minded vision to rekindle the faith in a world that, he frequently lamented, seemed to think it could do without God.

“In vast areas of the world today, there is a strange forgetfulness of God,” he told one million young people gathered on a vast field for his first foreign trip as pope, to World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany, in 2005. “It seems as if everything would be just the same even without him.”

With some decisive, often controversial moves, he tried to remind Europe of its Christian heritage. And he set the Catholic Church on a conservative, tradition-minded path that often alienated progressives. He relaxed the restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass and launched a crackdown on American nuns, insisting that the church stay true to its doctrine and traditions in the face of a changing world. It was a path that in many ways was reversed by his successor, Francis, whose mercy-over-morals priorities alienated the traditionalists who had been so indulged by Benedict.

Benedict’s style couldn’t have been more different from that of John Paul or Francis. No globe-trotting media darling or populist, Benedict was a teacher, theologian and academic to the core: quiet and pensive with a fierce mind. He spoke in paragraphs, not soundbites. He had a weakness for orange Fanta as well as his beloved library; when he was elected pope, he had his entire study moved from his apartment just outside the Vatican walls into the Apostolic Palace. The books followed him to his retirement home.

It was Benedict’s devotion to history and tradition that endeared him to members of the traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church. For them, Benedict remained even in retirement a beacon of nostalgia for the orthodoxy and Latin Mass of their youth – and the pope they much preferred over Francis.

Like his predecessor John Paul, Benedict made reaching out to Jews a hallmark of his papacy. His first official act as pope was a letter to Rome’s Jewish community and he became the second pope in history, after John Paul, to enter a synagogue.

In his 2011 book, Jesus of Nazareth, Benedict made a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Christ, explaining biblically and theologically why there was no basis in Scripture for the argument that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for Jesus’ death. “It’s very clear Benedict is a true friend of the Jewish people,” said Rabbi David Rosen, who heads the interreligious relations office for the American Jewish Committee, at the time of Benedict’s retirement.

Yet Benedict also offended some Jews who were incensed at his constant defense of and promotion toward sainthood of Pope Pius XII, the World War II-era pope accused by some of having failed to sufficiently denounce the Holocaust. And they harshly criticized Benedict when he removed the excommunication of a traditionalist British bishop who had denied the Holocaust.

Benedict’s relations with the Muslim world were also a mixed bag. He riled Muslims with a speech in September 2006 – five years after the September 11 attacks in the United States – in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as “evil and inhuman,” particularly his command to spread the faith “by the sword.”

Catholic Church sex abuse scandal

But Benedict’s legacy was irreversibly colored by the global eruption in 2010 of the sex abuse scandal, even though as a cardinal he was responsible for turning the Vatican around on the issue. Documents revealed that the Vatican knew very well of the problem yet turned a blind eye for decades, at times rebuffing bishops who tried to do the right thing.

Benedict had firsthand knowledge of the scope of the problem, since his old office – the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which he had headed since 1982 – was responsible for dealing with abuse cases.

In fact, it was he who, before becoming pope, took the then-revolutionary decision in 2001 to assume responsibility for processing those cases after he realized bishops around the world weren’t punishing abusers but were just moving them from parish to parish where they could rape again.

And once he became pope, Benedict essentially reversed his beloved predecessor, John Paul, by taking action against the 20th century’s most notorious pedophile priest, the Rev. Marcial Maciel. Benedict took over Maciel’s Legionaries of Christ, a conservative religious order held up as a model of orthodoxy by John Paul, after it was revealed that Maciel sexually abused seminarians and fathered at least three children.

In retirement, Benedict was faulted by an independent report for his handling of four priests while he was bishop of Munich; he denied any personal wrongdoing but apologized for any “grievous faults.”

Benedict inherited the seemingly impossible task of following in the footsteps of John Paul when he was elected the 265th leader of the Church on April 19, 2005. He was the oldest pope elected in 275 years and the first German in nearly 1,000 years.

Born April 16, 1927, in Marktl Am Inn, in Bavaria, Benedict wrote in his memoirs of being enlisted in the Nazi youth movement against his will in 1941, when he was 14 and membership was compulsory. He deserted the German army in April 1945, the waning days of the war.

Benedict was ordained, along with his brother, Georg, in 1951. After spending several years teaching theology in Germany, he was appointed bishop of Munich in 1977 and elevated to cardinal three months later by Pope Paul VI.

His brother Georg was a frequent visitor to the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo until he died in 2020. His sister died years previously. His “papal family” consisted of Monsignor Georg Gaenswein, his longtime private secretary who was always by his side, another secretary and consecrated women who tended to the papal apartment.

El Pais in English – December 31, 2022

It is the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says he wants to remedy by waging war against Ukraine; it is the legacy of Moscow’s dominance that Ukrainians hope to free themselves of by defeating Moscow.

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It was supposed to be “a voluntary association of peoples with equal rights,” one that would guarantee the “peaceful coexistence and fraternal cooperation of peoples” while serving as “a faithful bulwark against world capitalism.”

It was to be called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

On Dec. 30, 1922, in a meeting at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater of Communist delegates from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Caucasus region, the Soviet Union was born.

The result was the largest country by landmass in modern history, spanning two continents, which emerged victorious in 1945 with the Western Allies in the most destructive war known to man. The Soviet Union killed millions in famine and the Gulag prison camps, deported millions of members of ethnic minority groups from their homes, and kept Europe divided and unfree for two generations. It put the first satellite into orbit and the first person into space, while engaging in an arms race that created nuclear arsenals big enough to extinguish human life on Earth.

And it lasted less than seven decades, ending with the strokes of politicians’ pens in December 1991.

But a full century after the founding of the U.S.S.R., the shadow it cast has grown only deeper; its imprint on history only more tragic. It is the disintegration of the Soviet Union that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in his convoluted logic, says he wants to remedy by waging war against Ukraine; it is the legacy of Moscow’s dominance that Ukrainians hope to free themselves of by defeating Russia.

A rose-colored view of a Soviet Union globally respected, thriving and content has become part of Mr. Putin’s ideology in the war, driving a nostalgia for empire that the Kremlin’s propaganda is fueling not just among older generations who remember the Soviet era, but also among young people who do not. In Ukraine, where Soviet symbols and street names are now outlawed, that history is increasingly seen through the prism of the deprivations that Ukrainians endured.

“Ukrainians went through genocide,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in November, referring to the Holodomor famine of 1932 and 1933 that killed millions. “And today we are doing everything possible and impossible to stop Russia’s new genocidal policies.”

With the layered realities of the Soviet past looming over the war in Ukraine, editors of The New York Times pored over thousands of archival photographs to create a look back at the Soviet Union and its people. Here is their selection.

The Russian Communist leader Vladimir Lenin giving a speech in Moscow in May 1920 to men of the Red Army leaving for the front during the Polish-Soviet War.

A couple with their starving children during a famine in the Soviet Union circa 1922.

Soviet officials displaying the Russian crown jewels in 1922. Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, had been killed along with his family four years earlier.

Farmers marching to the collective fields in a Russian town in 1931. Forced collectivization of agriculture under Joseph Stalin, Lenin’s successor as the Soviet leader, drove a wave of famine in the early 1930s. It was particularly deadly in Ukraine, where it killed millions and became known as the Holomodor, meaning “death by hunger.” Many historians say Stalin orchestrated the famine there.

Leon Trotsky at his home in Turkey in 1931. A key revolutionary leader, he was exiled from the Soviet Union in the late 1920s after losing a power struggle with Stalin, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico in 1940.

Members of a collective farm near Moscow, New Life, left their children in a nursery before going to work in 1931.

Stalin in his office in 1932. He would be the Soviet Union’s dictator for almost three decades, presiding over murderous repression and a ruthless drive to become a world industrial and military power.

Homeless peasants near Kyiv, Ukraine, in the 1930s..

Soldiers from the Soviet Union marching along the coast line of the Arctic Ocean in 1939.

Soviet soldiers distributing Moscow newspapers near Vilna, Poland, in 1939. Soviet troops entered the country from the east weeks after Nazi Germany invaded from the west, and shortly after the two powers signed a secret deal to divide the territory, alongside a public nonaggression treaty.

Russian prisoners of war taken during fighting in Ukraine on their way to a Nazi prison camp in September 1941. Hitler had begun his assault on the Soviet Union that June, casting aside his promises and, by forcing Stalin into an all-out conflict, transforming the prospects of the Allied side in World War II.

Women and men digging anti-tank trenches in Leningrad in 1941. The city, which after the Soviet era regained its original name, Saint Petersburg, endured more than two years of a siege that killed about a million civilians.

Soviet troops trench fighting during an attack in 1941.

Leaving a son to the partisans, Leningrad 1942.

The Battle of Stalingrad, 1942 or 1943. The monthslong struggle for the industrial city, now known as Volgograd, is ranked among the decisive confrontations of World War II, turning back the Nazi advance at an enormous human cost.

By the time Stalingrad was liberated, in 1943, its population had fallen from half a million to 35,000. In total, the Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people in the war with Nazi Germany, a conflict still known across the post-Soviet region as the Great Patriotic War.

Prisoners in the Vorkuta Gulag, a major Soviet labor camp, in 1945.

Red Army soldiers hoisted the Soviet flag from a balcony of the Hotel Adlon in front of Soviet units gathering at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 1945. The victory over fascism, and the collective struggle to achieve it, would become an enduring keynote of Soviet pride and propaganda, one that Mr. Putin has worked to revive and exploit.

Stalin met with his fellow Allied leaders, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the resort city of Yalta in Crimea in February 1945 to plan for the end of the war. The Yalta Conference laid out the contours of what would become the Cold War world, in which the Soviet Union came to dominate Eastern Europe, and has been a subject of controversy for decades.

Families of a collective farm gathered for a meal in Ukraine in 1947.

Stalin in his coffin in 1953.

An elementary school in Moscow in 1954.

In October 1956, a student protest in Budapest against Soviet domination of Hungary sparked an armed uprising that seemed briefly on the verge of achieving its aims, with a new prime minister promising liberalization. Instead, within days, Soviet tanks were sent to Budapest to crush the Hungarian revolution.

Practicing positions at the Bolshoi Ballet School in 1958.

Moscow in 1963.

During the height of Soviet-Cuban cooperation, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev welcomed the Cuban leader Fidel Castro at the Kremlin in 1961.

A U.S. patrol plane flying over a Soviet freighter during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. After the Soviet Union stationed nuclear-armed missiles on the island, the United States launched a blockade, in a standoff that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile crossing Red Square in 1965, during a military parade in Moscow marking the 20th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe.

A subway station in Moscow in 1967. Metro systems built on a grand scale became a symbol of Soviet might.

A parade of young Russian sportsmen during May Day celebrations in Red Square in 1969.

Soviet tanks rolled into another neighboring country in 1968 to crush the “Prague Spring” — a brief period of liberalization in Communist Czechoslovakia.

The crew of the Soyuz 9 spaceflight, Cmdr. Andriyan Nikolayev, right, and Vitaly Sevastyanov, a flight engineer, during training in a simulator at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in 1970.

Visitors celebrating Saint George near the Alaverdi monastery in Georgia in 1972. The Soviet Union sought to eradicate religion without officially banning it.

The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at a summit with President Ronald Reagan in Geneva in 1985. Mr. Gorbachev, who took power that year, tried to reform the Soviet Union but ended up presiding over its collapse.

A Soviet technician decontaminating clothes and equipment in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine in 1986. The explosion and fire at the plant had an initial death toll of more than 30 and spread radioactive contamination across Europe. It also shook the Soviet Union’s self-image as a scientific superpower.

Soviet soldiers crossing a bridge on the border between Afghanistan and then Soviet Uzbekistan in 1989. The withdrawal ended almost a decade of war that had become a costly humiliation for the Soviet Union.

East German border guards seen through a gap in the Berlin Wall after demonstrators pulled down a segment near Brandenburg Gate in 1989. This time, as a wave of peaceful revolutions swept Soviet-controlled Europe, the tanks largely did not arrive.

Outside a state-owned television shop in Moscow in 1991. Customers had to wait many years for the day when they could visit this store for a prized black-and-white set. For most Russians, liberalization did not bring prosperity.

A long line outside the first McDonald’s in the Soviet Union on its opening day in Moscow in 1990.

Soviet troops in Moscow in May 1990.

Soviet mothers who lost their sons in the Red Army holding photographs of their loved ones during a protest in Red Square in 1990.

A Lithuanian woman resting by a fire outside Parliament in Vilnius in 1991, after spending the night guarding the building with other pro-independence citizens. Here, after the Baltic nation declared its independence, civilians did face Soviet tanks.

A Moscow crowd celebrating in 1991 after reports that a coup against Mr. Gorbachev by hard-line Communist Party officials had failed.

Boris Yeltsin, seen here in Moscow in 1991 raising his fist to express solidarity with thousands gathered to pay their respects to the victims of the failed coup, became president of Soviet Russia in 1990 and became the face of opposition to the coup and of more radical liberalization. After Mr. Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mr. Yeltsin became the first president of the new Russian Federation.

Toppling the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police force that became known as the K.G.B., in Moscow in 1991.

Removing a portrait of Lenin in Baku in 1991. Azerbaijan was proclaimed a Soviet Socialist Republic in 1920.

Bus commuters in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk in 1991.

A Russian woman near a vandalized emblem of Communism, the Hammer and Sickle, in Moscow in 1990. The Yeltsin years would bring new freedoms but also economic shock therapy, chaos, corruption and hardship for many ordinary Russians. In 1999, he resigned in favor of Mr. Putin.

New York Times – December 30, 2022

Dec. 29, 2022

Like many millennials, I was educated, if that’s the right word for it, on the internet. The online music critics and antiwar bloggers of the mid-2000s who were my teachers did not introduce me to T.S. Eliot, but they made sure that I had reasonably detailed opinions about “Apocalypse Now Redux,” the 2001 update of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic war movie. This meant that I had heard Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” which the film features in a hammy (and on the whole rather effective) reading by Marlon Brando.

Not long after, I found a copy of the old Harcourt edition of Eliot’s “Collected Poems” in the library. “The Hollow Men” and a dozen other poems committed themselves effortlessly to my memory, where they have been lodged ever since. In those days, for reasons I could not understand (and would not wish to understand even now, lest the magic be dispelled), the poems seemed to have an incantatory power. I distinctly recall sitting at the back of the school bus and repeating, mantra-like, the following lines from “The Waste Land”: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?”

If you had asked me then, I would have imagined that the centenary of “The Waste Land” — published in book form 100 years ago this month — would be a big to-do. I don’t know exactly what I would have envisioned (parades? presidential decrees? a Sphinx-size statue of Eliot erected somewhere in the Great American Desert?). But it would have been more lavish than the quiet commemoration provided by the handful of recent publications from university and trade presses, of which the most enviable is a full-color facsimile of the original drafts of “The Waste Land” with Ezra Pound’s characteristically terse editorial notes (“Too loose”).

Modest as the festivities have been, I am certain that in 100 years there will be no poem whose centenary is the object of comparable celebration. This seems to me true for the simple reason that poetry is dead. Indeed, it is dead in part because Eliot helped to kill it.

Of course poetry isn’t literally dead. There have probably never been more practicing poets than there are today — graduates of M.F.A. programs working as professors in M.F.A. programs — and I wager that the gross domestic chapbook per capita rate is higher than ever. But the contemporary state of affairs is not exactly what one has in mind when one says that poetry is alive and well — as opposed to, say, on a luxe version of life support.

I’m hardly the first person to suggest that poetry is dead. But the autopsy reports have never been conclusive about the cause. From cultural conservatives we have heard that poetry died because, for political reasons, we stopped teaching the right kinds of poems, or teaching them the right way. (This was more or less the view of the critic Harold Bloom, who blamed what he called the “school of resentment” for the decline in aesthetic standards.)

Another argument is that the high modernist poets and their followers produced works of such formidable difficulty that the implicit compact between artist and audience was irrevocably broken. It is certainly difficult to imagine many of the suburban households that once contained popular anthologies such as “The Best Loved Poems of the American People” finding room on the shelf for Pound (“‘We call all foreigners frenchies’/and the egg broke in Cabranez’ pocket,/thus making history. Basil says”).

There is probably some truth to such arguments. But the problem seems to me more fundamental: We stopped writing good poetry because we are now incapable of doing so. The culprit is not bad pedagogy or formal experimentation but rather the very conditions of modern life, which have demystified and alienated us from the natural world.

Permit me, by way of argument, a medium-size quotation. Here are lines — not especially memorable or distinguished ones, but serviceable enough — taken at random from the second volume of Robert Southey’s “Minor Poems” (1823):

Aye Charles! I knew that this would fix thine eye,/This woodbine wreathing round the broken porch,/Its leaves just withering, yet one autumn flower/Still fresh and fragrant; and yon holly-hock/That thro’ the creeping weeds and nettles tall/Peers taller, and uplifts its column’d stem/Bright with the broad rose-blossoms.

Admit it: Your eyes, so far from being fixed, are already glazing over. How many Americans even know what woodbine is? By sheer guesswork one might infer that Southey meant some kind of ugly creeping plant. But what about all this holly-hock business, yon or near? Are the stems white? Habituated as most of us are to skimming text, we find ourselves wondering imperceptibly what Southey’s point was.

This is not to suggest that poetry is supposed to be a textual version of nature photography or the rhymed equivalent of audio descriptions for the blind. But the relationship between nature and poetry is basic and elemental. (“Nature,” the critic Northrop Frye wrote, “is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.”) When Milton described the fallen bodies of rebel angels — “Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks/In Vallombrosa” — he was borrowing an image from Dante, Virgil and Homer, all of whom employed the shedding of leaves as a simile for the fall of bodies. Even after the loss of his sight, Milton’s world, like that of his predecessors, was one full of such images. It was a natural world alive with intimations of the transcendent that could be evoked, personified and filtered through one’s subjective experience.

But modern life, disenchanted by science and mediated by technology, has made that kind of relationship with the natural world impossible, even if we are keen botanists or hikers. Absent the ability to see nature this way — as the dwelling place of unseen forces, teeming with images to be summoned and transformed, as opposed to an undifferentiated mass of resources to be either exploited or preserved — it is unlikely that we will look for those images in the work of Homer or Virgil, and even less likely that we will create those images ourselves.

But surely, you object, we can write poems about things other than flowers and bees and wild goats’ milk, poems that depart not only from the established idioms of the Greek and Latin classics but also from the basic imagistic procedures common to all poetry written before the last century. We can write verse, if not about the perceived transcendent order in the universe, then about the feelings of unease within ourselves; we can even draw our images from the detritus of consumer civilization — an empty plastic bottle, an iPhone with a cracked screen.

Of course we have been doing this, for more than a century now, thanks in large part to Eliot. His poetic revolution began in 1915 with the well-known opening of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table

To an Eliot detractor like C.S. Lewis, this grotesque simile — comparing the evening sky to an anesthetized human body — was a moment of rupture, a discarding of the entire established tradition of poetic diction and imagery, and the implicit reverence that undergirded both.

But that, of course, was the point. In breaking with his predecessors (notice how the nine-syllable lines with which “The Waste Land” opens hint at iambic pentameter, teasingly reminding the reader of the vanished inheritance that the author is mourning) and then submitting the entire corpus of European — and not only European — literature to a kind of mash-up remix, Eliot was conveying the fragmentation of human experience, an experience that contemporaries such as Lewis lamented without ever being able to capture.

With his almost cinematic montages, Eliot created a body of work that is unique in English poetry for its simultaneous ability to lay bare both the personal anxieties of its author and the sense of mechanized horror that had overtaken an entire civilization. In juxtaposing automobiles, typewriters, gramophones, popular lyrics and modern slang with allusions to Jacobean dramatists and half-parodic forays into more recognizably “poetic” language, Eliot created an idiom that captured the disappearance of the pre-modern worldview.

Eliot was successful — so successful that he remade all of English poetry, or what has passed for it since, in his image. The clipped syntax, jagged lines, the fixation on ordinary, even banal objects and actions, the wry, world-weary narratorial voice: This is the default register of most poetry written in the past half century, including that written by poets who may not have read a single line of Eliot.

The problem is not that Eliot put poetry on the wrong track. It’s that he went as far down that track as anyone could, exhausting its possibilities and leaving little or no work for those who came after him. It is precisely this mystique of belatedness that is the source of Eliot’s considerable power. What he seems to be suggesting is that he is the final poet, the last in a long unbroken line of seers to whom the very last visions are being bequeathed, and that he has come to share them with his dying breaths.

I’m convinced. Eliot finished poetry off.

Can it be revived? The philosopher Slavoj Zizek has said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism. For my part, I have an easier time conceiving of a world socialist utopia than I do a revival of poetry in English. For poetry to reappear, the muses would have to return from wherever they fled after we banished them. Among the conditions for their return would be, I suspect, the end of the internet and many other things that most of us value far more than we do poetry.

This leaves us in the somber position of Eliot’s speaker in “Ash-Wednesday,” whose “lost heart stiffens and rejoices/In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices,” mourning the absence of something he cannot name.

New York Times – December 29, 2022 – Matthew Walther