Humor and Brutality in Moscow's Red Square

Masha Gessen, Russian investigative journalist who visited us March 8th, is back in Moscow (against the advice of her friends, family and readers).

Here's a recent post from the "Latitudes" blog of the New York Times / International Herald Tribune.

MOSCOW — We spent most of April Fool’s Day laughing. My friends and I started right around midnight on Saturday when, sitting around my kitchen table, we began talking about the protest scheduled for the next day, April 1: Strolling in Red Square while wearing white ribbons....

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Russia: What Happens Now?

"[T]here is the habit that revolutions have of turning on their own. I have first-hand experience of this. Our revolution has not yet won, and fellow organizers have already on occasion asked me to keep my lesbian, Jewish, and American-passported self off the front pages."

"I realize that in throwing myself headfirst into organizing protests, as I have done in the last couple of months, I have given up the rarefied environment of a certain subset of Moscow intelligentsia, with its cultivated air of tolerance. In the worst-case scenario, the new Russia will be a xenophobic society that will have no place for someone like me. In the best-case scenario, I and others like me will have to come out of our shells and use a newly created public space to educate people about our differences." More.

So writes Masha Gessen today in her blog for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. The Russian journalist visits Albany on Thursday 3/8.

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The Invasion of New York

Willard Sterne Randall, who visits today, writes of Alexander Hamilton's efforts to defend Manhattan against the British navy in the January 2003 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

"On August 8, Hamilton tore open orders from Washington: his company was to be on round-the-clock alert against an imminent invasion of Manhattan. “The movements of the enemy and intelligence by deserters give the utmost reason to believe that the great struggle in which we are contending for everything dear to us and our posterity, is near at hand,” Washington wrote.

"But early on the morning of August 27, 1776, Hamilton watched, helpless, as the British ferried 22,000 troops from Staten Island, not to Manhattan at all, but to the village of Brooklyn, on Long Island. Marching quickly inland from a British beachhead that stretched from Flatbush to Gravesend, they met little resistance. Of the 10,000 American troops on Long Island, only 2,750 were in Brooklyn, in four makeshift forts spread over four miles. At Flatbush, on the American east flank, Lord Charles Cornwallis quickly captured a mounted patrol of five young militia officers, including Hamilton’s college roommate, Robert Troup, enabling 10,000 redcoats to march stealthily behind the Americans. Cut off by an 80-yard-wide swamp, 312 Americans died in the ensuing rout; another 1,100 were wounded or captured. By rowboat, barge, sloop, skiff and canoe in a howling northeaster, a regiment of New England fishermen transported the survivors across the East River to Manhattan. More.

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