🇷🇺 TREE 615: JG – oppressive regime

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No jeans. Shirts must have collars. All music must be approved. Radios are banned. Lights out at 10. Wake up call at six. Guys and girls must never be alone with each other, except when prescribed by the ruling authority. Informing on one’s neighbour is encouraged. Be sure the things you say match the official position. Avoid joking around, but be sure to smile constantly so the outside world will know that you are superior and happy about it. Above all, conform. If you refuse, your likely fate will be exile.

That was Moscow, 1994. I was 20 and there by my own choice. The oppressive regime was not leftover Soviets. It was Bill’s cult.

There were about 200 of us, mostly in our late teens and early 20s, living on a boat locked in the frozen Moscow river. In the mornings we listened to teaching, and we did ‘research’ (finding evidence to confirm the conclusions about life we were given in advance).

In the afternoons we dressed up in our white shirts and blue suits and visited schools. We sang hymns and talked about having good character and God. We watched performances full of wonderful Russian folk music. We ate lovely food and drank strong tea. Sometimes we were grouped in pairs to home with a couple of the students for dinner.

We also went to church, and sometimes shopped. When we were tired of cold tongue neon brown sauce, we ate at McDonald’s or the American Bar and Grill. We read about Kurt Cobain’s death in The Moscow Times, and I heard a couple people say good riddance.

I learned that if it’s cold enough your nose hairs freeze when you breathe in and thaw when you breathe out.

I went home in love Moscow and her people, and so emotionally battered from four months under Bill’s deputies that it took me two years to feel normal most of the time. Despite the damage to my mental health, I would never go back in time and undo that winter and spring in Moscow. I made wonderful friends, one of whom is FFOREST contributor Teresa Roberts, in cold city full of warm-hearted citizens of a beautiful country that for a little while wasn’t in a fight with the West.

I wish Kurt didn’t have a gun.

If you could use some help integrating painful parts of your past into your life today and you are able to handle significant levels of woo, I highly recommend Ram Dass’ Grist for the Mill. It’s not a therapy book. It offers what I found to be some really helpful ways of reframing life experiences.

Grow slowly
Jeff