Many years ago, I was writing about Yevgeny Mravinsky, the great Russian conductor. For 50 years, he was capo of the Leningrad Philharmonic. I regarded him as a little unlucky. He was born in 1903. So he was 14 when the revolution came. He lived all the way until 1988 — just short of the collapse of the USSR. He enjoyed very little time before the revolution and none after.
And this great musician performed in the West almost not at all.
Shostakovich was born in 1906. So he was eleven. And he died in 1975. What hell he endured.
Some people’s timing is better. In my “Baltic Journal” today, I talk to Latvia’s state secretary for foreign affairs, Andrejs Pildegovics. He is a very bright and experienced man, and he tells me some things that I find moving.
He was born in 1971, in Vladivostok, which is way over in the Soviet Far East. (Do you remember the Brezhnev-Ford summit?) His father had been sent there to work. Later, the family lived back in Latvia. Andrejs could not go to the West, but he had a great curiosity about the world. (Hence his career.) He decided that China and Chinese were his ticket. His ticket to the broader world. So, in St. Petersburg, he studied the language and history. He also had a stint at an institute in Beijing.
From 2007 to 2012, he served as Latvian ambassador to the United States. At the end of our interview, he showed me two pictures: one with President George W. Bush in it and the other with President and Mrs. Obama in it. The latter picture also included a choir — a Latvian children’s choir. This was in the East Room of the White House.
Pildegovics then made this statement to me:
“I grew up 200 kilometers from Sweden, and I never dreamed of going there. Much less to the United States. To just show up at JFK — that is mind-blowing. My three kids think it’s nothing. They think you can just go to the United States whenever you want. I could barely even dream of going to Sweden. The Soviet Union collapsed when I was 20. It was the greatest dream in the history of dreams.”