"We will bury you."

On each trip I discovered something about a country or a city which I never would have suspected if I had not seen or heard it “in situ.” The most interesting thing I heard in all the places I visited happened on a cruise and on the wide rivers “from St. Petersburg to Moscow.” From the “picture window” of our cabin I expected to see industrial plants along the banks; instead, day after day our ship glided past “plants” of the green, living kind.

For hundreds of miles the shore was lined with tall trees, close-ranked like Russian soldiers, emerald green against a pure blue sky. Although beautiful, the monotony tempted me to dose off. I came 7,000 miles to sleep? No way! While my roommate read romance novels in the cabin, I climbed four flights of stairs to hear a young Russian historian lecture on Soviet history. He had been an exchange professor at Cambridge and spoke excellent, fluent English.

As he talked about Russian trade, I could see, through the windows of our minuscule “activity room,” along the shore-line trees taller than our ship. A few times we passed timber yards, the result of cutting down the forest behind those trees. Planks were stacked up tree-high, in groups like Southwestern mesas, extending for miles, waiting to be loaded onto barges. Surely, I thought, lumber must be Russia’s No. 1 export. Don’t always believe your eyes. I learned it is No. 4. The No. 1 is petroleum, which Russia sells to India.

Then our professor talked about Krueschev. I can’t find the proper spelling in my spell-checker, but you know whom I mean: the man who banged his shoe on the desk at the U.N. and said, “We will bury you!” You’ve heard that repeated time after time on radio and television as evidence that the Russians considered the U.S. an enemy which must be destroyed.

On that English cruise in Russia, I learned something extraordinary. “We will bury you” is not what Khruschev (I’ll try another spelling) said at all! At the United Nations the translator must make an instant translation as the speaker continues to speak. “Bury” was a hasty substitution that popped out of the translator’s mouth because she/he had no time to think of a different word. Our professor on the cruise explained that the word which the Russian premiere used HAS NO ENGLISH EQUIVALENT. The original Russian, conveyed by a short phrase, is complicated, meaning something like, “We disagree, but let’s sit down and talk about it.”
Quite different from “We will bury you.”

(I recently heard a Russian expert on Book TV give a similar explanation.)

We all see things and think we “get the picture.” We all hear things and think we understand the meaning. We all need to think about things – our relationships, our religion, our politics, all our ideas – and ask ourselves, “What don’t I know about this?” It is always easy to say, “There are two sides to every question.” That’s too simple. Life is complicated. We are all limited by our backgrounds and our experiences. Or lack thereof.