Read Online A Song in the Night by Bob Massie - Free Book Online

project of writing a biography of Peter the Great. My mother wrote a series of essays and translations of Russian poetry, printed in both Russian and English. It was published in 1972 as
The Living Mirror: Five Young Poets from Leningrad
. During her many trips to Russia my mother had also fallen in with a circle of painters, dancers, and other artists. She began to collect their stories and, in modest amounts, their works, smuggling them out among her clothes.
    We heard at first hand about Soviet brutality against those the state considered intellectually or politically dangerous. When the Soviet secret police suspected that one of our friends and one of Russia’s great character dancers, Sasha Mintz, wanted to leave Russia, they sent thugs who beat him and broke his collarbone. We were horrified, for we knew that such an attack could easily have ended his career. My parents also fought for years on behalf of the ballet couple Valery and Galina Panov. Though Valery was one of the greatest dancers in all Russia, he was largely unknown in the West, because he had been allowed to perform only a single time in New York. When he applied to emigrate to Israel, he was fired and exiled to a distant rural town; his wife, Galina, also a dancer, was pressured to divorce him; and he lived with the daily fear of violence and assassination. After many years he was released, but only after my parents and hundreds of other supporters inthe West held protests and pressured the Soviet Union to stop its destruction of this exceptional artist.
    That single success did little to alter our disgust with Soviet human rights violations and hypocrisy. I learned through these experiences that the crime of brutalizing citizens required no particular political label. It did not matter whether the government was identified as left-wing or right-wing; dictators were dictators. They needed to be opposed no matter what the political excuses for their behavior. Stories of persecution and brutality arrived almost daily in the mail or over the ancient black telephone that sat on the oval table near the window overlooking the courtyard with its peaceful trees.

    One day when I was fifteen, our friend Phyllis Glaeser asked if we would like to come that evening to see the rough cut of a documentary by a friend of hers. In the small screening room we met a quiet and intense black director named Nelson (“Nana”) Mahomo. The film, called
Last Grave at Dimbaza
, depicted the brutal system of racial segregation that governed a country I had never heard of—South Africa. The focus of the film was the policy of resettlement, under which black citizens, particularly women and children, who had moved to towns and squatter camps near South Africa’s major cities were forcibly relocated to distant spots in their “homelands”—in fact, little more than bleak, waterless dumping grounds. The South African minister of justice argued that the breakup of families was justified because “black workers must not be burdened with superfluous appendages like women and children.” Theresulting misery, poverty, malnutrition, and disease decimated the population, so much so that in some parts of the country only half the babies lived past the age of five.
    Apartheid was a system specially designed for the twentieth century and aggressively defended as a positive good. It was administered by an intelligent, mechanized modern government controlled by an all-white political group known as the National Party. In addition, this government frequently proclaimed itself a democratic ally of the United States, something that American presidents seemed to tolerate. And judging from the numerous shots of American corporate facilities that popped up throughout the film, the United States apparently had extensive and unapologetic commercial arrangements with the white rulers of this regional power on the tip of the great continent.
    The message of the film struck me powerfully. What