As my friends from Nizhny told me today, yesterday, 2/23 was a day of the Red Army, a Soviet holiday that had survived through the post-Soviet history till today under the name of Homeland Defernder's Day. Since I was never in the Soviet, or any other army, there is nothing holy for me in that day. Still, there are two comments to be made by me concerning the event.First, as with many Soviet holidays, the event leading to the commemoration of the date, has very little to do with reality. It seems to me that on Feb. 23, 1918, a few thousand draftees, and volunteers, under the name of Worker-Peasant Army, engaged Austrian and German troops, and, according to some sources, have folded under pressure. Soon after, a Brest-Litovsk Peace treaty was signed and it was very humiliating to Russia, definitely to German advantage. The whole purpose of the treaty signed by bolsheviks, was to preserve bolsheviks hold on power in Russia. Considering the fact that Lenin and bolsheviks were sponsored by German Wertmacht, and bolsheviks were really traitors subverters and seditioners at the time of war, I find nothing to celebrate here. Especially, if you consider the use of thesame army in gassing peasants in 1920-s, helping the state in the destruction of peasants as a class in 1930-s, and deportations of peoples with stagerring death rates within Soviet Union. Yes, there was a glorious period in its history, World War II, where the army marched from Moscow to Berlin, yet before the war was over, the army turned from liberation to occupying force within a few months. And now, as in Soviet time, the army is also a repressive apparatus, torturing abd breaking down young Russian man through its tradition of meningless brutality and torture within its ranks. Not a holy day for me by any means.Second, despite all said in previous paragraph, I find it interesting that a Ukranian and a Russian staged a heavyweight unification fight in Madison Square Garden yesterday, with a few other contenders of Soviet extraction waiting in the wings. Klitchko, Ibragimov, valuev, Chagaev, Maskaev, Povetkin... These are the names of modern best heavyweights. Nothing fake about that, brother.Yesterday was also a day of the smallest job ever done by Poetry Moving, a move of one small metal bedframe from Somerville to Cambridge for a very nice Bangladeshi customer by the name of Arafat, with whom we discussed his years at Yale, where he took a linguistics couse from a friend of mine, his concentration on Spain's history, Moors, Andalusia, Granade, and the cyclical nature of civilazations and cultures.Still posting on Craigslist under PoetryMoving.com, Piano Special, and a Mover and a Van. Planning to post more Poem Around a World today on the site. POKA.
Let this entry serve as an official commencement of Poetry Moving Blog, a site dedicated to issues of Moving, Poetry and other, more mundane subjects. This page is also open for comments, so that the customers can post their feedback to us, and others can see what we are in a transparent and open manner. I shall be back!
