The Church of the Savior on the Blood was closed to the public for most of its existence.
My mother was in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) born and raised,
And of its flamboyant grace all she had ever seen
Were scaffolds and beams
Like an armor of silvers and greys.

In that space of time Berlin was burned and built
anew.
Ditto Hiroshima and Tokyo – Resurrected.
London brushed off the Blitz and went back to the glitz.
But we, the Russians, are used to living in starts and fits.
We can build the most achingly beautiful city, move rivers, invent wonders
When the inspiration hits,
But we aren’t good at fixing buildings, systems and road pits.
Not good at slowly accruing wealth, rejoicing over a percentage increase in the single digits.
(granted, this was really only possible for three minutes –
Between Scylla and Charybdis).

But hear this: When in 1941 Leningrad was surrounded by a ring of fire,
They didn’t care who was gonna live or die there –
They didn’t give up a single stair, granite parapet or spire
(the same stairs and spires they would later take 50 years to fix).

We will never be heroes of domestic bliss –
Of the quiet and steady stewardship of that and this.
But like our grandfathers, and great-grandfathers we can be the heroes of survival and defiance.
We are better in times of war than times of peace.

Stalin’s Red Army – by God! There should be no words scarier in existence!
But it so happened that by the blood of these
youths spilled by the millions of gallons
Europe was delivered.
As a European Jew to this I can unflinchingly attest –
Without them my ancestors would have lain side by side with the rest,
And those who didn’t starve in Leningrad would have starved in Auschwitz.

Now in Germany they have heroes of the Central European Bank.
In America – heroes in every rank
from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to even a simple tank.
In Asia you name it and their heroes can make it run.
Europe finally has socialism that sounds like fun.
But in Russia the heroes – the great-grandfathers who fought and won
Are dead and gone.

How can we ever be equal to their memory
When a hundred kilometers from Moscow people still live without proper sanitation,
The Orthodox Church, still reeling from having been cancelled for seventy years, calls for
useless self-flagellation,
and half still have their wedding nights while their parents try to sleep in the next room?

So can you blame the devil, who himself is just a humble minister of public relations,
Whose job is to wear a most agreeable perfume and to see what he sees,
That he figured out how to buy the souls of these?
He gave them but a resurrected war – a gulp of glory their thirst to quell,
And now they march before him, the good with the wicked, and none can stop them on the road
to hell.