Volodymyr Goes Full Byzantine

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 67-70:

VOLODYMYR TOOK THE throne in 980. He spent the first decade of his rule on warfare, ensuring that the realm created by his predecessor stayed together. Following in Sviatoslav’s footsteps, he again defeated the Khazars and the Volga Bulgars, reasserted his power over the Viatichians in the Oka basin, and pushed westward to the Carpathians, taking a number of fortresses from the Poles, including the town of Premyshl (Przemyśl) on today’s Polish-Ukrainian border. His main concern, however, was the southern frontier, where the Rus’ settlements were under continual attack by the Pechenegs and other nomadic tribes. Volodymyr strengthened border defenses by building fortifications along the local rivers, including the Sula and the Trubizh. He settled those areas with prisoners of war and subjects from other parts of the realm. Rus’, born of conquest, now sought stability by defending its borders instead of attacking the frontiers of other states.

Under Volodymyr’s rule, Kyiv’s relations with Byzantium were also changing. Whereas his predecessor on the Kyivan throne, Helgi, allegedly had sent troops against Byzantium to obtain trade preferences, and Sviatoslav did the same to acquire new territory in the Balkans, Volodymyr invaded the Crimea in the spring of 989 in pursuit of marriage, if not love. He besieged the Byzantine town of Chersonesus, demanding the hand of the sister of Emperor Basil II. A few years earlier, the emperor had asked Volodymyr for military assistance, promising the hand of his sister Anna in return. Volodymyr sent his troops to help up the emperor. But Basil was in no hurry to fulfill his promise. After receiving this slap in the face, Volodymyr refused to turn the other cheek and instead attacked the empire. His tactic worked. Alarmed by news of the fall of Chersonesus, Basil dispatched his sister Anna to the Crimea. She arrived with a retinue that included numerous Christian clerics.

Volodymyr’s request for marriage was granted in return for an assurance that the barbarian chieftain (as the ruler of Kyiv was regarded in Constantinople) would accept Christianity. Volodymyr went along. His baptism would start the process of the Christianization of Kyivan Rus’ and open a new chapter in the region’s history. Once the wedding party had moved back to Kyiv, Volodymyr removed the pantheon of pagan gods, including the most powerful of them—Perun, the god of thunder—from a hill above the Dnieper and put the Christian clergymen to work baptizing the population of Kyiv. The Christianization of Rus’ had begun—a long and difficult process that would take centuries to complete.

Our main source on the baptism of Rus’, the Kyivan chronicler, writes that Muslim Bulgars, Jewish Khazars, Christian Germans representing the pope, and a Greek scholar who spoke on behalf of Byzantine Christianity, the religion that Volodymyr chose, had all importuned Volodymyr. The story of the choice of faith as told in the Primary Chronicle is of course naïve in many ways. But it reflects certain real alternatives facing the Kyivan ruler, for he indeed did the picking and choosing. Volodymyr chose the religion of the strongest country in the region, in which the emperor was no less important an ecclesiastical figure—more important, in fact—than the patriarch. By choosing Christianity, he gained the prestige of marrying into an imperial family, which promptly elevated the status of his house and realm. Volodymyr’s choice of Christian name sheds additional light on his reasons for accepting Christianity. He took the same name as the emperor, Basil, indicating that in Byzantium he had found a political and religious model to emulate at home. A generation later, Kyivan intellectuals such as Metropolitan Ilarion would compare him and his baptism of Rus’ to Emperor Constantine and his role in establishing Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.

To be sure, the Byzantine political and ecclesiastical elite helped Volodymyr make the “right choice.” They were unhappy with the marriage but not with the conversion. The Byzantines had begun sending missionaries to the region soon after the Rus’ Vikings attacked Constantinople in 860. Back then, Patriarch Photius of Constantinople, the same clergyman who left us the description of the Viking attack, had sent one of his best students, Cyril of Thessalonica, to the Crimea and then to the Khazar kaganate. Along with his brother Methodius, Cyril devised the Glagolitic alphabet to transcribe Christian texts into the Slavic languages. The two men subsequently became known as the apostles to the Slavs and gained sainthood. Attempts to convert Kyivan rulers were undertaken long before Volodymyr’s conversion, as attested by the story of his grandmother, Olha, who became the first known Christian ruler and the first Christian woman in Kyiv named Helen. Apart from propagating Christianity, the Byzantine elites began to gain influence over the “barbaric” rulers and peoples, who had no fancy genealogies and little in the way of sophisticated culture but a great deal of destructive power.

After Volodymyr’s conversion, the patriarch of Constantinople created the Metropolitanate of Rus’, one of few ecclesiastical provinces named after its population and not the city where the bishop or metropolitan would reside. The patriarch reserved for himself the right to appoint metropolitans to head the Rus’ church—most of them would be Greeks. The metropolitan in turn controlled the appointment of bishops, most of whom would come from the ranks of the local elite. The first monasteries were established, using a Byzantine statute. Church Slavonic, the first literary language of Kyivan Rus’, initially functioned predominantly as a translation tool, making Greek texts understandable to local elites. Volodymyr issued regulations defining the rights and privileges of the clergy and gave one-tenth of his income to the church. Christianity in Kyivan Rus’ began at the top and moved slowly down the social ladder, spreading from center to periphery along rivers and trade routes. In some remote areas, especially northeastern Rus’, pagan priests resisted the new religion for centuries, and Kyivan missionaries who ventured there would end up dead as late as the twelfth century.

Volodymyr’s choice would have a profound impact on his realm and on the history of eastern Europe as a whole. Instead of continuing warfare with Byzantium, the new Rus’ polity was entering into an alliance with the only surviving part and continuator of the Roman Empire and thereby opening itself to the political and cultural influences of the Mediterranean world. It would prove fateful that Volodymyr not only brought Rus’ into the Christian world but also made it part of Eastern Christianity. Many of the consequences are as important today as they were at the turn of the second millennium.

Kyiv as Byzantium North

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 65-66:

FROM THE VERY first reports about the Rus’ princes on the Dnieper River, we hear of their attraction to the Byzantine Empire. The same thing that had attracted the Huns and Goths to Rome drew the Viking merchant warriors to the Byzantine capital, Constantinople: earthly riches, along with power and prestige. The Vikings never set out to topple Byzantium, but they tried to get as close to the empire and its capital as possible, launching a number of expeditions to capture Constantinople.

Sviatoslav’s death in 972 closed an important period in the history of Rus’ and its relations with its powerful southern neighbor. To the next two generations of Kyivan rulers, association with Constantinople was no less desirable than it had been for Sviatoslav. But Sviatoslav’s successors were concerned not only with money and commerce but also with the power, prestige, and high culture emanating from Byzantium. Instead of conquering Constantinople on the Bosphorus, as their predecessors had attempted to do, they decided to reproduce it on the Dnieper. This turn in Rus’ relations with the Byzantine Greeks and the new expectations of the Kyivan princes came to the fore during the rule of Sviatoslav’s son Volodymyr and the latter’s son Yaroslav. The two ran the Kyivan realm for more than half a century and are often credited with turning it into a true medieval state—one with a more or less clearly defined territory, system of government, and, last but not least, ideology. Much of the latter came from Byzantium.

As a prince of Kyiv, Sviatoslav’s son, Volodymyr, was less bellicose and ambitious than his father but turned out to be more successful in achieving his goals. Fifteen years old when his father died near the Dnieper rapids, Volodymyr had brothers who wanted the throne for themselves, and a new wave of Scandinavian arrivals eased his path to power. Before wresting the Kyivan throne from one of his brothers, Volodymyr spent more than five years as a refugee in Scandinavia, the ancestral homeland of his clan. He returned to Rus’ with a new Viking army. The Kyivan chronicler tells us that after Volodymyr took Kyiv, his soldiers asked for payment. Volodymyr promised to give them tribute from the local tribes but was unable to deliver. Instead, he recruited the Viking commanders as his local administrators in forts that he built on the steppe frontier, allowing the rest of the army to engage in an expedition against Byzantium. He also ordered his people not to let that army into their towns and to prevent them from returning.

Slavs Meet Byzantium

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 43-45:

THE SLAVS FIRST came to general attention in the early sixth century AD, when they showed up en masse on the borders of the Byzantine Empire, which had been weakened by the Goths and Huns, and moved into the Balkans. Jordanes, a sixth-century Byzantine author of Gothic descent, distinguished two major groups among the Slavs of his day. “Though their names are now dispersed amid various clans and places,” he wrote, “yet they are chiefly called Sclaveni and Antes.” He placed the Sclaveni between the Danube and the Dniester, reserving for the Antes the lands between the Dniester and the Dnieper, “in the curve of the sea of Pontus.” Linguistic data suggests that the ancestral homeland of the Slavs lay in the forests and forest-steppe zone between the Dnieper and the Vistula, mainly in Volhynia and the Prypiat marshes of today’s Ukraine. By the time Jordanes wrote, the Slavs must have moved from their forest recesses into the steppes, creating a serious problem for Emperor Justinian the Great.

Justinian ruled the Byzantine Empire between 527 and 567 and was ambitious enough to attempt a restoration of the Roman Empire in its entirety, both east and west. On the Danube frontier, where the empire faced unceasing attacks from local tribes, Justinian decided to take the offensive. Procopius, a sixth-century Byzantine author who left a detailed account of Justinian’s wars, writes that in the early 530s Chilbudius, a commander personally close to the emperor, was sent to wage war north of the Danube. He scored a number of victories over the Antes, which allowed Justinian to add “Anticus” (conqueror of the Antes) to his imperial title. But the success was short-lived. Three years later Chilbudius was killed in battle, and Justinian returned to the old policy of defending the border along the Danube instead of trying to extend it.

Justinian brought back the old Roman tactic of “divide and rule.” By the end of the 530s, not without Byzantine encouragement and incentives, the Antes were already fighting the Sclaveni, while Byzantine generals recruited both groups into the imperial army. Even so, the Slavic raids continued. While at war with the Sclaveni, the Antes managed to invade the Byzantine province of Thrace in the eastern Balkans. They pillaged the land and took numerous slaves, whom they brought back to the left bank of the Danube. Having manifested their destructive potential, the Antes offered their services to the empire. Justinian took them under his wing and designated the abandoned Greek city of Turris, north of the Danube, as their headquarters.

Like many other enemies of the empire, the Antes became its defenders in exchange for regular payments from the imperial treasury. They tried to enhance their status by claiming to have captured the emperor’s best general, Chilbudius, whom they wanted to recognize as their leader. Since Justinian had granted Chilbudius the title of magister militum, or commander of all the imperial troops in the region, such recognition would have made them legitimate citizens of the empire, not merely its gatekeepers. The plot did not succeed. The true Chilbudius was, of course, long dead, his impostor was captured and sent to Justinian, and the Antes had to accept the status of foederati—allies rather than citizens of the great empire.

Classical Pontic Steppe Divisions

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Ovid’s contemporary Strabo, author of the acclaimed Geographies, knew more about the Pontic steppe than did the famous Roman exile. From Strabo we learn the names of the Sarmatian tribes and the areas under their control. According to him, the Iazyges and Roxolani were “wagon dwellers,” or nomads, but the famous geographer gives us literally nothing about the sedentary population of the forest-steppe areas around the Dnieper, not to mention the wooded areas farther to the north. Unlike Ovid, however, he did not live among the peoples of the region; nor were his sources as good as those of Herodotus. They knew nothing about the “northerners,” and Strabo complained about the ignorance that prevailed “in regard to the rest of the peoples that come next in order in the north; for I know neither the Bastarnae, nor the Sauromatae, nor, in a word, any of the peoples who dwell above the Pontus, nor how far distant they are from the Atlantic Sea, nor whether their countries border upon it.”

Strabo’s informants came from one of the colonies, but if Herodotus made numerous references to the Dnieper, Strabo seemed more familiar with the Don. His sources likely came from Tanais, a Greek colony at the mouth of the Don that belonged to the Bosporan Kingdom, the most powerful union of Greek colonies revived with the arrival of the Romans. For Strabo, the Don had a special meaning. It served as the easternmost boundary of Europe, the term used in the Aegean homeland to describe the expanse of the Greek presence in the outer world. Europe lay to the west of the Don, while Asia began to the east of it.

Thus, at the beginning of the first millennium AD, when the Romans came to the Pontic colonies, the Ukrainian territories found themselves once again at the very edge of what would become Western civilization. The northern frontier of the Hellenic world had now become the eastern boundary of Europe. There it would remain for almost two thousand years, until the rise of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century redrew the map of Europe, moving its eastern boundary all the way to the Urals.

The division of the Pontic steppes into European and Asian parts did not mean much in the time of the Romans. Strabo wrote about the Sarmatians on both the left and right banks of the Don, and Ptolemy, one of his successors, wrote in the second century AD about two Sarmatias, one European, the other Asian—a division that would remain constant in the works of European geographers for another millennium and a half. More important than the imagined eastern boundary of Europe was the real civilizational frontier between the Mediterranean colonies on the northern shore of the Black Sea and the nomads of the Pontic steppes. Unlike the Greek colonies with their surrounding fortifications, that frontier was never set in stone, creating instead a broad zone of interaction between colonists and locals in which languages, religions, and cultures intermixed, producing new cultural and social realities.

The all-important boundary between the steppe nomads and the agriculturalists of the forest-steppe areas that was known to Herodotus became invisible for Strabo. Whether it disappeared altogether or Mediterranean writers simply did not know about it is hard to say. Geography and ecology stayed the same, while the population probably did not. It certainly refused to stay put in the middle of the first millennium AD, when we next encounter references to the region in the writings of learned Greeks.

Defining Ukraine and Ukrainian

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 24-27:

Nation is an important—although not dominant—category of analysis and element of the story that, along with the ever changing idea of Europe, defines the nature of this narrative. This book tells the history of Ukraine within the borders defined by the ethnographers and mapmakers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which often (but not always) coincided with the borders of the present-day Ukrainian state. It follows the development of the ideas and identities linking those lands together from the times of the medieval Kyivan state, known in historiography as Kyivan Rus’, to the rise of modern nationalism and explains the origins of the modern Ukrainian state and political nation. In doing so, the book focuses on Ukrainians as the largest demographic group and, in time, the main force behind the creation of the modern nation and state. It pays attention to Ukraine’s minorities, especially Poles, Jews, and Russians, and treats the modern multiethnic and multicultural Ukrainian nation as a work in progress. Ukrainian culture always existed in a space shared with other cultures and early on involved navigating among the “others.” The ability of Ukrainian society to cross inner and outer frontiers and negotiate identities created by them constitutes the main characteristic of the history of Ukraine as presented in this book.

Politics, international and domestic, provide a convenient storyline, but in writing this book, I found geography, ecology, and culture most lasting and thus most influential in the long run. Contemporary Ukraine, as seen from the perspective of longue durée cultural trends, is a product of the interaction of two moving frontiers, one demarcated by the line between the Eurasian steppes and the eastern European parklands, the other defined by the border between Eastern and Western Christianity. The first frontier was also the one between sedentary and nomadic populations and, eventually, between Christianity and Islam. The second goes back to the division of the Roman Empire between Rome and Constantinople and marks differences in political culture between Europe’s east and west that still exist today. The movement of these frontiers over the centuries gave rise to a unique set of cultural features that formed the foundations of present-day Ukrainian identity.

One cannot tell the history of Ukraine without telling the story of its regions. The cultural and social space created by the movement of frontiers has not been homogenous. As state and imperial borders moved across the territory defined by Ukrainian ethnic boundaries, they created distinct cultural spaces that served as foundations of Ukraine’s regions—the former Hungarian-ruled Transcarpathia, historically Austrian Galicia, Polish-held Podolia and Volhynia, the Cossack Left Bank of the Dnieper with the lower reaches of that river, Sloboda Ukraine, and finally the Black Sea coast and the Donets basin, colonized in imperial Russian times. Unlike most of my predecessors, I try to avoid treating the history of various regions (such as the Russian- and Austrian-ruled parts of Ukraine) in separate sections of the book but rather look at them together, providing a comparative perspective on their development within a given period.

In conclusion, a few words about terminology. The ancestors of modern Ukrainians lived in dozens of premodern and modern principalities, kingdoms, and empires, and in the course of time they took on various names and identities. The two key terms that they used to define their land were “Rus’” and “Ukraine.” (In the Cyrillic alphabet, Rus’ is spelled Pycь: the last character is a soft sign indicating palatalized pronunciation of the preceding consonant.) The term “Rus’,” brought to the region by the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries, was adopted by the inhabitants of Kyivan Rus’, who took the Viking princes and warriors into their fold and Slavicized them. The ancestors of today’s Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians adopted the name “Rus’” in forms that varied from the Scandinavian/Slavic “Rus’” to the Hellenized “Rossiia.” In the eighteenth century, Muscovy adopted the latter form as the official name of its state and empire.

The Ukrainians had different appellations depending on the period and region in which they lived: Rusyns in Poland, Ruthenians in the Habsburg Empire, and Little Russians in the Russian Empire. In the course of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian nation builders decided to end the confusion by renouncing the name “Rus’” and clearly distinguishing themselves from the rest of the East Slavic world, especially from the Russians, by adopting “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” to define their land and ethnic group, both in the Russian Empire and in Austria-Hungary. The name “Ukraine” had medieval origins and in the early modern era denoted the Cossack state in Dnieper Ukraine. In the collective mind of the nineteenth-century activists, the Cossacks, most of whom were of local origin, were the quintessential Ukrainians. To link the Rus’ past and the Ukrainian future, Mykhailo Hrushevsky called his ten-volume magnum opus History of Ukraine-Rus’. Indeed, anyone writing about the Ukrainian past today must use two or even more terms to define the ancestors of modern Ukrainians.

In this book, I use “Rus’” predominantly but not exclusively with reference to the medieval period. “Ruthenians” to denote Ukrainians of the early modern era, and “Ukrainians” when I write about modern times. Since the independent Ukrainian state’s creation in 1991, its citizens have all come to be known as “Ukrainians,” whatever their ethnic background. This usage reflects the current conventions of academic historiography, and although it makes for some complexity, I hope that it does not lead to confusion.

PCV Exit Interviews in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 239-241:

The COS [Close-of-Service] conference convened on a spring weekend at a campground that wealthy Russians used as vacation property. The Peace Corps staff had reserved us several cabins that overlooked the river separating Moldova and Ukraine. For the first time in two years, the entire group of remaining volunteers was in the same place at the same time. Our original class had dwindled from thirty-seven to twenty-two. The meetings were brief and confusing. Our boss, the Country Director, described how we should avoid areas like shopping malls and rock concerts when we returned to America; large groups of people would probably unnerve us. He read updates from the previous volunteers who had quit or been evacuated; Callie was teaching English in Turkey and Paul was completing his first year of law school in Cincinnati. They were happy. We listened less to their advice for readjustment, and more to where these people lived. America was a big place. Jesse would live in Minnesota, Colin in Virginia, Will in North Carolina. And Sadie would be in New Jersey. I wouldn’t be anywhere near those places. The medical officer asked that those of us who’d contracted ailments continue our medications when we returned home. Jesse—in direct relation to his refusal to ever seek medical treatment—was awarded recognition as the group’s healthiest volunteer over the two-year period. The safety officer asked that we not celebrate our final days in country with binge drinking; our final benefit package would be delayed if we were arrested and deported from the country at the last minute.

The lecture portion of the conference now concluded, the necessary advice for readjustment into American life dispensed, the Country Director congratulated us and excused us to our exit language interviews.

* * *

The Country Director’s secretary was the only one in the office who spoke Russian well enough to test Jesse and me. I waited outside as Jesse spoke with her for ten minutes. He came outside smiling and said, “Piece of cake.” The secretary had given him an advanced mark.

Inside the cabin, I found the secretary sitting on the bed, her feet not touching the floor. She pointed to a chair in the corner and asked me to sit. She asked me to spell my name and then we began. We talked about transportation using verbs of motion, of food preparation, of my likes and dislikes and specific events in the past and future. It took five minutes to finish her checklist of language proficiency.

“So,” said the secretary. “We have some time to kill. What shall we talk about?”

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “It’s all the same to me.” The secretary giggled.

“Your accent is good. Your body language is good, also. Very Russian, it seems to me.”

I nodded, brushing aside the compliment.

“You live with Russians, I must guess. Is this true?” 

I nodded. 

“Tell me about them.”

“Not much to tell. Very good people. They treat me well.”

“Do you respect them?”

“Of course.”

“What do you mean by, ‘Of course?’”

We sat in silence for a moment as the secretary allowed me to compose my thoughts. My mind returned to my imagining Dima working across the border in Romania, taking orders in a language he hated. And in Bulgaria the women drank coffee on the street corners, I thought. Dima would never be happy anywhere else.

“I spend most of my time in family with the father, Dima. He’s a baker and enjoys working, perhaps not the amount that he must, but the work itself.”

I paused to see if the secretary understood me. She nodded encouragement and waved her hand in a rolling circle to keep me going.

“Like this there is happiness, which I respect. In Riscani, where we live, the streets are clean and pleasant; there is always someone to stop and chat with along the way on these roads. The purpose of life is open and understood, I think. Every day, life has a simple and direct purpose. Walk to work, don’t hurt anyone along the way, and get back home at night for a drink and a sleep.” The secretary nodded and then dismissed me from the cabin. She scored me advanced as well.

Our Quick Visit to Moldova

The Far Outliers have just returned from a short visit to Moldova, flying from Warsaw to Chișinău for Poland's Corpus Christi school holidays. We had multiple reasons for the visit.

We had earlier considered doing another year abroad under the English Language Fellow program after our year in Poland. In fact, we had originally hoped to go to Romania, but there were no current openings. Moldova has an opening for next year, but my scary health problems during our deep winter in Poland made me fear I might not make it through a Moldovan winter, despite my advantage of arriving in Moldova still fairly fluent in Romanian. Public signage all over Chișinău was indeed almost fully in Romanian (not in Moldovan Cyrillic or Russian), and I enjoyed being able to converse much more readily in Romanian than I have been able to in Polish. (My ability to navigate written Polish is far ahead of my conversational ability.)

Our other reason for visiting Moldova was to make a pilgrimage to the village where Ms. Outlier's Bessarabian German grandfather was born, and from which his family emigrated via Odessa to Canada and the Dakotas in the 1890s. Their rural village was named Neudorf, like dozens of German villages around the world. (There is a Neudorf village in Saskatchewan, and a poorly documented Neudorf cemetery in Eureka, South Dakota, originally settled by Germans from Russia). All the remaining Germans were expelled from Bessarabia in the 1940s, and Neudorf was renamed Carmanova (in Russian, Карманово).

Carmanova now lies in Transnistria, so near to the Ukrainian border that T-Mobile sent us "Welcome to Ukraine!" text messages when our phones came within range of their Ukraine cell towers. To get us there (and back), Moldova Tours was able to arrange for a private driver fluent in Russian, Romanian, and English, who had prior experience driving groups into the Transnistrian capital, Tiraspol, on their Soviet-era culture tours. But he had never been to very rural Carmanova and was curious about it. We ended up getting turned back twice at Russian Army checkpoints that could not handle international passports, and we had to wait in a long, slow line at the Grigoriopol checkpoint that could process our passports. They gave us a temporary insert but did not stamp our passports.

The rolling green hills of the Transnistrian countryside are quite lovely in June, with vast acres of foot-high sunflower sprouts. Several forks in the road had signposts directing us to the German settlements, and the road into the village featured a roughly made tall welcome sign with the year 1809 (when Neudorf was founded), its name in Cyrillic, Нойдорф, the year 1944, and its new name Карманово (from Карман 'pocket'?). There was also a rock monument in the village inscribed to mark the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1809.

The village itself was very small and quiet. We were given a tour of the House of Culture by its cordial manager. It contained a curtained stage and auditorium, a disco hall, a barre-lined ballet studio, and several rooms for workshops of various kinds. We also visited the cemetery for Soviet soldiers who died there, billboards with the names and faces of local citizens who died between 1941 and 1945. We saw no sign of a former church. The little country store where we bought a bottle of Ukrainian water took only Transnistrian rubles, so our driver/translator handled the payment.

I've added a Moldova album to my Flickr site, Joel Abroad.

Student Evaluation Day in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 26-27:

Our language instructor gave us directions to a landmark in the center of town, and we soon realized the directions had been intentionally complicated so that we’d have to ask questions of locals. Away from headquarters, we passed a yellow, onion-top church and were then sucked into the central bazaar, an outdoor black hole of discount merchandise. Anyone dealing any type of transaction came at us with booming Slavic accents, as if their words need only enter our physical space to stun us and take control of our wallets. I considered buying cheese, batteries, soap packets, tin cups for drinking, but managed to pass through without losing money.

Vendors conversed with their friends in shouts from stall to stall. Flip-flops, light machinery, dried fish, bulk tea, clothing, duplicates of keys, endless buckets of salted cheese, olives, rice, cucumbers, tomatoes, liters of wine in reused soda bottles. These vendors were the types who’d ridden with me on the bus in the morning—old babushkas selling whatever they had too much of at home. Grandchildren ran wild in the corridors of the bazaar, dashing in between, behind, and under the vendor stalls with their rubber toy guns.

It seemed everyone in the capital spoke only Russian. Romanian might have been spoken at home among family members, but Russian was the language of money, spoken openly at shops and on the streets. And though I understood the majority of volunteers sent to Moldova would learn Romanian in order to serve the poorest communities, I didn’t envy them. Unlike other colleagues, Jesse and I would never complain about policemen and bazaar women refusing (or unable) to speak Romanian, checks from all restaurants presented in the Cyrillic alphabet, and host families only speaking an angry-sounding foreign language to them at home, expecting them to respond to the sharp sounds as though they were dogs.

The din of commerce activity decreased once we left the maze of the bazaar. We hadn’t yet asked directions, still waiting for someone who appeared within our age range to approach. A girl walked fast and picked up speed as we addressed her, perhaps to shorten our opportunity to harass her. But she stopped shortly after passing us, having responded to the softness and insecurity in our accents. She pointed toward a busy intersection a block away and seemed disappointed that we ended our conversation by wishing her health and happiness. I think she wanted to tell us her name. At the intersection a woman selling popcorn perked up when she heard our accents and pointed across the street to a sidewalk art sale. At the art bazaar a man selling Russian stacking dolls said we were on the right track and asked where we were from, and recommended dolls to match any personality. He thought our accents sounded Polish. A block farther we stopped another girl and she pointed across the street to our destination.

McDonald’s.

Entering the Lena River Delta, 1881

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 316-318:

THE LENA RIVER originates nearly three thousand miles to the south of the Arctic Ocean, in a mountain range near Lake Baikal in the deep interior of Russia, not far from the border with Mongolia. As the river flows through the forested solitudes of Yakutia, it picks up tributary after tributary—the Kirenga, the Vitim, the Olekma, the Aldan, the Vilyui. The Lena is the world’s eleventh-longest river, draining the world’s ninth-largest watershed, a boggy, mosquitoey swath of tundra and taiga that measures more than 960,000 square miles. The amount of sediment carried by the Lena is extraordinary—and the river’s enormous power discharges a plume of silt and debris more than fifty miles out into the Arctic Ocean.

The Lena, like only a few of the world’s largest river systems, flows northward, toward a mostly frozen sea. In the fall, it begins to freeze first at its mouth, not at its source, which means that it develops a natural barrier against the force of its own massive current. As winter approaches in the Arctic, the river continues to flow with unchecked power, until it meets the ever-thickening plug of ice at its lower reaches.

The water’s only response is to spread out, frantically seeking other paths to the sea. In other words, the ice distorts and magnifies the tendency all rivers have of fanning out at their mouths. The pressures that build behind the Lena’s ice dam become so tremendous that the river splays over more than eleven thousand square miles. This riot of swollen currents creates one of the largest and most complicated deltas in the world.

From the air, the Lena delta looks rather like the cross section of an enormous tumor that bulges far out into the Laptev Sea from the Siberian mainland. Inside this protruding mass, 125 miles in width, is a confusing mesh of branched streams twisting and threading across sandy flats pocked by thousands of ponds and lakes and oxbow swamps. The delta has more than fifteen hundred islands—though that number changes all the time. The river, as it pushes through this morass of alluvium, divides into seven main branches, which, in turn, subdivide into scores and scores of lesser ones, an array of channels that redirect themselves from season to season as they course like capillaries toward the Arctic Ocean. The river’s assiduous probing continues until early winter, when the weather finally turns so cold that this titanic natural plumbing project backs up entirely—freezing solid all three thousand miles upstream, creating a superhighway of ice.

A report that would come out in 1882 would note, “No chart had been laid down of this desolate region, and indeed it would seem impossible to make any which would not be falsified by the changes which every fresh season brought.” Petermann’s map was the only one that had been published with any level of detail, but it was largely hypothetical and riddled with major errors. His map showed eight mouths to the delta, when in fact there were more than two hundred—and the few place-names, landmarks, and villages specified on his map were either grossly misplaced or didn’t exist at all.

This was the utterly bewildering landscape that De Long and his men approached on the afternoon of September 16, 1881. They were three miles out from the delta, yet they were already stuck, grounded on the river’s massive deposits of silt.

When De Long stood up to assess the problem, only one solution came to mind. He had everyone crawl out of the boat to lighten her load, so that she would ride a few inches higher in the water. The men, wading in the riffling currents, gathered around the cutter and began to guide her, sometimes shove her, toward land. Only Snoozer [the last dog] and a few disabled men remained in the boat.

Through the clear, shallow water, the wading men could see that the congealed beds of silt on which they oozed along had been brushed into ornate patterns by the play of the currents. Small fish darted this way and that. The water varied between one and a half and four feet in depth but generally became shallower the closer they drew toward land. The mud sucked at their boots, sometimes pulling them clear off their feet. In frustration, some of the men hurled their mukluks into the cutter and waded barefoot.

Often the boat ran aground, forcing the crew to heel her over and angle the bow toward a more promising channel. It was backbreaking labor, made more unpleasant by the cold of the river, which soon turned their feet and legs numb. While most of the men grunted and strained around the gunwales of the boat, others waded ahead, wielding oars to smash the young ice and scouting the best path toward land.

Throughout the day, they made only halting progress, advancing perhaps a mile. They could move only when the tide was in—at low tide the boat sat stuck in the slough. By late afternoon, said Nindemann, “everyone was pretty well played out.” They crawled back into the boat with Snoozer and shared a drab dinner of beef tongue. Afterward, Ambler asked everyone to take off their boots so he could examine their feet. What the doctor saw greatly alarmed him. A day of wading in the frigid water had come at a tremendous cost. The men’s feet were badly swollen and had developed a sickening bluish pallor. Ambler feared that frostbite was rampant among the crew. Boyd, Erichsen, Collins, Ah Sam, and Captain De Long were in the worst shape, but everyone’s extremities had suffered.

Trekking Over Arctic Ice, 1881

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 245-247:

In high spirits, De Long and his men began their long march across the frozen ocean, inching toward the familiar world, or at least a place where other human beings might conceivably be found. Stretched out for miles across the ice, they resembled, said Melville, a straggle of “vagabond insects.” It was numbing, staggering work, and yet they were strangely happy—happy to be free of the confines of the ship, relieved to be moving again, eager to accept the bonds of their common struggle. They aimed for the middle of Russia and the Siberian Arctic coast, but in their minds they were heading home, to wives and mothers and girlfriends, to plump chickens and fresh garden vegetables, to soft beds and warm fires, to gossip and invention, and if not to glory, exactly, then to the cheers of an appreciative homeland.

De Long and Dunbar, equipped with field glasses and pocket prismatic compasses, clambered ahead of everyone else in the foggy distances to mark the way with black flags stuck in the ice. They called their path a “road,” but the route they staked was little more than a suggestion of lesser treachery, a devious course across ever-shifting mazes of fissures, hummocks, pressure ridges, and pools of shimmering meltwater. Which is to say, the captain and his ice pilot—whose earlier problem with snow blindness had cleared up—were merely going on their best hunches.

Keep to the road! they cried. Stay on the road! The men could only laugh at the absurdity of the word. As Danenhower put it, there was only “knee-deep snow” and “lumps of ice that would have taken a whole corps of engineers to level.” Yet they trudged on, sunburned and chapped-lipped, dressed in sour-smelling pelts, wearing slitted ice goggles, singing galley songs as they slogged over the impossible expanses of crust and rubble and sludge.

The June sun, whenever it burned through the fog, had a strange quality of penetrating intensity, as though it were training X-rays on the snow. The light revealed a dirty ice pack at times strewn with signs of life—crab claws, bear scat, mussel shells, bleached bones, goose quills, plant seeds, driftwood, ocean sponges. The gyre of the ocean and the churn of the ice had mixed everything up, old and new, animal and vegetable, into a kind of Arctic gumbo.

Dr. Ambler cared for the sick; Alexey and Aneguin tended to the dogs. But the others spent their days as draft animals, straining against their hemp ropes and canvas harnesses. They pulled more than eight tons of provisions and gear, on improvised sleds whose crosspieces had been fashioned from whiskey barrel staves and whose heavy oak runners were shod with smooth whalebone. In addition to the three battered boats, they hauled, among other things, medicine chests, ammunition, stew pots, cooking stoves, tent poles, oars, rifles, ship logs and diaries, canvas for sails, scientific instruments, the wooden dinghy, and two hundred gallons of stove alcohol.

As for food, they had inventoried, at the outset, 3,960 pounds of pemmican, 1,500 pounds of hardtack, thirty-two pounds of beef tongue, 150 pounds of Liebig’s beef extract, twelve and a half pounds of pigs’ feet, and substantial quantities of veal, ham, whiskey, brandy, chocolate, and tobacco. Every pound, every ounce, had been carefully weighed at the start, then just as carefully apportioned to the different sleds and crews so that everyone, aside from the sick, would pull an equal amount of weight.

There was far too much to haul in one trip, so they had to double back—and sometimes triple back—to bring up everything from the rear. This meant that for many of the haulers, each mile of forward progress actually represented a distance of five miles traversed. A full day of this Sisyphean business could mean twenty-five miles or more of ceaseless struggle. It would have constituted slave labor even on hard, dry ground, but this slob ice, with all its gaping holes and intervening sea-lanes, was the most trying terrain imaginable—as a landscape, said De Long, it was “terribly confused.”

The men often had to launch the boats, cross a narrow lead of water, and then hop right back out again to re-stow the boats on the sleds. Other times, they would use a large cake of floating ice as a ferry, employing grappling hooks and networks of ropes to tow it, and all their belongings, across the water to the icy shore beyond. The “road-building crew” would wield pickaxes to clear a smooth groove through encrusted ice, shave off the top of a high hummock, or fashion what De Long called a “causeway” or a “flying bridge” across emerald pools of meltwater.

Arctic Rivalry in the 1800s

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 21-22:

To be sure, nationalism also drove the obsession. Americans, slowly emerging from the devastation of the Civil War, yearned to prove themselves on the international stage. Polar exploration, some suggested, could help unify the divided country—it was an endeavor that everyone, North and South, could agree on. An ambitious expedition of discovery provided a way for the still-mending republic to flex her power in a quasi-military, but ultimately peaceful, way.

It was a British naval officer, William [Edward] Parry, who in 1827 led what is widely regarded as the first serious expedition specifically aiming to reach the North Pole. Ever since then, the British Admiralty had led most of the cutting-edge polar explorations. This was largely due to the nearly evangelical zeal of Second Secretary of the Admiralty John Barrow for all things Arctic, and to the fact that after the defeat of Napoleon, the Royal Navy had had few major wars to fight throughout much of the 1800s. The great ships of the world’s mightiest navy were rotting away largely unused, and many officers had been relegated to half wages with little to do, yet with ambitions still burning in their breasts. The British primarily focused their efforts on finding a navigable sea route across the top of Canada—and on searching for previous English expeditions that had disappeared while looking for this elusive Northwest Passage.

But now, in the 1870s, attention was shifting away from finding the Northwest Passage and more toward the goal of reaching the North Pole itself, as an object of pure, abstract exploration. Not only England but France, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had mounted, or were now proposing, expeditions to reach the pole first. The United States considered herself a viable contender in this grand chase, and many Americans fervently wished to see the Stars and Stripes planted at the top of the world.

America’s desire to push north could be considered, in some ways, an extension of Manifest Destiny, the country’s pioneering surge toward the west. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the western frontier was closing—or at least its conquest was reaching a different phase, one that consisted less of adventurous exploration and more of the messy backfill work of occupation and settlement. But in 1867, the United States had purchased Alaska from the czar for the paltry sum of $7.2 million, and this enormous new frontier lay untapped and largely unknown. Thus the national movement west, having reached California, had taken a right turn and become a movement north.

In 1873, the country was still digesting this acquisition, was still trying to learn about the immensity of what America owned in her Far North and why she owned it. The money spent on Russian America remained controversial—Alaska was still widely referred to as “Seward’s Icebox” and “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Polar Bear Garden,” in derision of former secretary of state William Seward, who had championed and then negotiated the purchase. Yet the American people also wanted to know what might lie beyond the country’s new northern borders—and they were hungry for a hero to personify the country’s northern tilt.

Nabbed at Heathrow, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 365-366:

“Passport please,” a young immigration officer named Kenneth Human said when Sneyd approached the window.

Sneyd fished his wallet out of a coat pocket. From an inside fold, he retrieved a dark blue Canadian passport, which the officer opened and studied. Officer Human glanced at Sneyd, and then back at the passport photo. Nothing seemed untoward: the same man, the same glasses, everything matched.

Then Human saw another passport, peeking from Sneyd’s billfold. “May I see that other one?” he asked.

Sneyd handed the officer the second passport, which was clearly stamped “Canceled.”

“Why are the names different?” Human asked, noting that one said “Sneyd” and the other said “Sneya.”

Sneyd explained that his original passport, issued in Ottawa, had contained the misspelling—simply a clerical error—but that he’d had it corrected as soon as possible while in Portugal.

Officer Human appeared to be buying Sneyd’s explanation. But at this point, a Scotland Yard detective materialized—a slender, fastidious man with blue eyes and a trim mustache named Philip Birch. While Sneyd and the customs officer continued talking about the passport, Birch studied the Canadian’s face and movements. He had an “absent-minded professorial air” about him, Birch thought, but something about the traveler looked familiar. He seemed to recall seeing the man’s photograph in the pages of the Police Gazette.

Birch ran his finger down a list of names typed on an official Scotland Yard document that was labeled “Watch For and Detain.” Under the heading “All Ports Warning,” the Canadian’s name jumped off the page: Ramon George Sneyd.

Detective Birch tapped Sneyd on the shoulder. “I say, old fellow,” he later recalled telling the subject. “Would you mind stepping over here for a moment? I’d like to have a word with you.”

Seemingly more annoyed than alarmed, Sneyd glanced at his watch. “But my plane’s leaving soon.”

“Oh, this will only take a moment,” Birch assured him in a chipper tone. “May I see those passports, please?”

Two policemen joined Birch, and the three men escorted Sneyd across the busy terminal toward a police administrative office. Sneyd believed this was all just a routine passport mix-up, and so he remained grudgingly cooperative. Should things turn dicey, there was always the loaded revolver in his pocket. As far as he could see, this friendly trio of officers did not carry weapons.

When they arrived at the office, Birch turned and faced Sneyd. “Would you mind if I searched you?” he asked. Sneyd raised his arms and offered no protest.

Carefully patting him down, Birch quickly discovered the revolver: a Japanese-made .38-caliber Liberty Chief—its checkered walnut stock wrapped with black electrical tape. Birch spun the revolver and found five rounds of ammunition.

“Why are you carrying this gun?” Birch asked in an even tone.

“Well,” Sneyd replied. “I’m going to Africa. I thought I might need it. You know how things are there.” For the first time, a note of alarm had edged into his voice.

Birch handed the revolver to one of the other policemen and continued frisking the suspect. In Sneyd’s pockets, Birch found a little booklet on rifle silencers and a blank key, of the sort that a locksmith might carry. Sneyd had a small amount of money—less than sixty pounds—on his person.

“I have reason to believe you have committed an arrestable offense,” Birch said, and told Sneyd he was being detained. Now he would be missing his flight. Sneyd slumped in his chair.

The officer got on the phone and tried to have Sneyd’s bag pulled from the plane—but it was too late, the jet was already easing back from the gate. Then Birch called Scotland Yard headquarters and informed his superiors that just two days after being placed on the “All Ports Warning,” Ramon George Sneyd was now in police custody.

Robbing a Bank in London, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 356-357:

SNEYD HAD MOVED from the Heathfield House to the New Earls Court Hotel only a few days before. Though the little hotel was just around the corner, on Penywern Road, the weekly rent was cheaper and the accommodations a little nicer. Besides, Sneyd thought it prudent not to linger too long in any one place—especially after his aborted jewelry store stickup in Paddington.

The hotel was a four-story walk-up, with Doric columns and a blue awning covering a cramped vestibule; it was near the Earls Court tube stop and Earls Court Stadium, where Billy Graham had recently conducted a series of wildly successful crusades. For another week, Sneyd remained faithful to his usual nocturnal schedule, keeping to his brown-wallpapered room all day, receiving no calls, and taking no visitors. “He was nervous, pathetically shy, and unsure of himself,” the young hotel receptionist, Janet Nassau, later said. Feeling sorry for him, Nassau tried to make conversation and help him out with a few currency questions. “But he was so incoherent,” she said, “that nobody seemed able to help him. I thought he was a bit thick. I tried to talk to him, but then I stopped myself, I was afraid he might think I was too forward—trying to chat him up.”

For Sneyd, a far bigger worry than the peculiarities of British money was the fact that he scarcely had any money at all; his funds had dwindled to about ten pounds. But on June 4, the same day he called the Daily Telegraph journalist Ian Colvin, Sneyd worked up his courage and resolved to finally dig himself out of his financial straits.

That afternoon he put on a blue suit and pair of sunglasses. Then, at 2:13 p.m., he walked into the Trustee Savings Bank in Fulham and stood in the queue until, a few minutes later, he approached the till of a clerk named Edward Viney. Through the slot, Sneyd slid a paper bag toward the teller. At first, Viney didn’t know what to do with the rumpled pink bag. Then, on closer inspection, he saw writing scrawled across it.

“Put all £5 notes in this bag,” the message demanded. Viney caught a faint glimpse of the man’s eyes through his shades and realized he was serious. Glancing down, he saw the glinting nose of a revolver, pointed at him.

Viney quickly emptied his till of all small denominations—in total, only ninety-five pounds. Sneyd was displeased with his slim pickings, and he leaned over the counter and craned his neck toward the adjacent till. “Give me all your small notes!” he yelled, shoving his pistol toward the teller, Llewellyn Heath. In panic, Heath backpedaled and kicked a large tin box, which produced a concussive sound similar to a gunshot. The noise startled everyone, including Sneyd, who leaped away from the counter and sprinted down the street. Two tellers took off after him, but he lost them, ducking into a tailor’s shop, where for five minutes he feigned interest in buying a pair of slacks.

At Trustee Savings Bank, Edward Viney surveyed the premises and realized that the robber had left his note behind, scrawled on the pink paper bag. When the bobbies arrived, Viney handed them the bag—upon which, it was soon discovered in the crime lab of New Scotland Yard, the robber had left a high-quality latent thumbprint.

Finding Eric Galt's Real Name

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 319-323:

THE FBI REMAINED confident that the warrant they’d issued the previous day was correct, that Eric S. Galt was indeed their man. What they weren’t sure about was whether Eric Galt was really Eric Galt. The suspect clearly had a penchant for using multiple aliases, and Galt could very well be just another one. As Cartha DeLoach well knew, isolating a suspect was one thing; positively identifying him was something else again.

To that end, the fingerprint expert George Bonebrake and his men at the crime lab had been methodically poring over the fingerprints found on various objects in the bundle, in the Mustang, and in the Atlanta rooming house and comparing them with select batches of prints on file at FBI headquarters. Bonebrake had considerably narrowed the search by concentrating on men under fifty and over twenty-one, but that still left some three million sets of prints to examine—an aneurysm-inducing chore that could take many months and still turn up nothing.

Hoover and DeLoach realized they had to figure out some other way to narrow the search. DeLoach hunkered down with other high-ranking officials and sifted through all the evidence gathered thus far. As they did, a clear pattern began to emerge: Galt, even before the assassination, seemed to be acting like a man on the run. “All the signs were there,” DeLoach said. “The aliases, the movement from one place to another, the reluctance to make friends, the caution, the restraint. Galt was behaving like an escaped convict trying to avoid detection.”

Thus an idea was born. DeLoach picked up the phone and called Bonebrake’s boss, Les Trotter, director of the FBI’s Identification Division for fingerprints. DeLoach later recalled the conversation in his memoirs. “Les, we have pretty good evidence that Galt is an escapee,” DeLoach said. “How many ‘Wanted’ notices do we currently have in our files?”

“About 53,000,” Trotter said.

DeLoach grimaced. “Well,” he said, “at least that’s better than three million.”

The task before them was clear: DeLoach wanted Bonebrake’s men to compare the “Galt” prints with the prints of all fifty-three thousand wanted fugitives. “You’ve got to put all your people on this,” DeLoach said.

“When do you want us to begin?” Trotter asked.

“How about today?”

The examiners began working in the late afternoon of April 18, exactly two weeks after the assassination. Additional experts from Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Richmond hastened to Washington to assist in the round-the-clock effort. DeLoach said he didn’t need to remind them that “we’re under tremendous pressure, and that our cities are powder kegs.”

Bonebrake zeroed in on Galt’s left thumbprint found on both the rifle and the binoculars. It was their highest-quality print, the one that manifested a clear loop pattern with twelve ridge counts. To his pleasant surprise, Bonebrake learned that the FBI files of known fugitives held only nineteen hundred thumbprints with loops of between ten and fourteen ridge counts. This was encouraging: suddenly the monumentality of Bonebrake’s project had shrunk by several orders of magnitude. The teams of experts ranged around a table, facing a blowup poster of Galt’s thumbprint. They got out their magnifying glasses and went to work.

At 9:15 the next morning, April 19, Les Trotter called DeLoach. “We’re getting there,” Trotter said, noting that Bonebrake and his team hadn’t slept a wink and that they’d already plowed through more than five hundred sets of cards. “Give us just a little more time.”

“OK,” DeLoach said, and then ducked into a weekly meeting of FBI muckety-mucks led by Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s right-hand man. DeLoach was reluctant to tell Tolson the truth—that although countless specialists were hard at work and making progress, the investigation seemed to be momentarily stymied.

Several hours later, as the meeting was adjourning and DeLoach was gathering up his papers, the phone rang. It was Les Trotter on the line. “Deke,” he said, and already DeLoach thought he could detect a “note of triumph” in Trotter’s voice. There was a long pause, and then Trotter gloatingly said: “Tell the Director. We’ve got your man!”

“Are you sure?”

“No doubt about it. Bonebrake’s experts found an exact match just a few minutes ago, on the 702nd card.”

“I take it he’s not really Eric Galt. Or Lowmeyer. Or Willard.”

“Nope,” Trotter said. “His card number is 405,942G. The guy’s a habitual offender. Escaped last year from the state pen at Jeff City, Missouri. His name is James Earl Ray.”

Getting a Canadian Passport, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 281-282, 293-294, 308-309:

Then Galt did something truly brazen, something that illustrated the extent of his desperation: he called Bridgman and Sneyd on the telephone, probably from the same phone booth Mrs. Szpakowski saw him talking on. One night, Paul Bridgman, who worked as the director of the Toronto Board of Education’s Language Study Centre, picked up his home telephone, shortly after finishing his supper.

“Yes, hello,” Bridgman later recalled hearing the caller say. “I’m a registrar with the Passport Office in Ottawa. We’re checking on some irregularities in our files here and we need to know if you’ve recently applied for a passport.”

Bridgman was naturally a little suspicious. He didn’t understand why some bureaucrat in Ottawa would call on official business during the evening. “Are you sure you have the right person?”

“Bridgman,” Galt assured him, spelling out the surname. “Paul Edward Bridgman. Born 10 November, 1932. Mother’s maiden name—Evelyn Godden.”

“Well yes, that’s correct,” Bridgman replied, deciding the caller must be on the level after all. Soon Bridgman freely told Galt the information he needed to know: Yes, he once had a passport, about ten years ago, but it had expired, and he had not bothered renewing it. “Thank you very much,” Galt said, and hung up.

Galt was concerned that Bridgman might pose a problem—his old passport might still be on file in Ottawa and might set off alarm bells if Galt applied for a new one. So he got back on the phone and reached Ramon Sneyd. Going through the same routine, Galt was relieved to learn from Sneyd that the man had never applied for a passport in his life.

That settled it in Galt’s mind: while he might develop the Bridgman alias for sideline purposes, he would become Ramon George Sneyd.

...

IN TORONTO THAT same morning, Eric Galt was walking down Yonge Street, intent on an errand of disguise. He turned in to Brown’s Theatrical Supply Company and bought a makeup kit. Playing with the cosmetics later that day, he applied a little foundation and powder and eyebrow liner. He parted his hair in a different way and was a bit more conservative with his hair cream. Then he donned a dark suit, a narrow tie with a discreet waffle weave, and his best white dress shirt. As a final touch, he put on a recently purchased pair of dark horn-rimmed glasses, which, sitting on his surgery-sharpened nose, gave him a vaguely professorial cast.

Looking in a mirror, Galt was happy with the transformation: Ramon Sneyd was now ready for his close-up.

Sometime in the afternoon of April 11, he walked into the Arcade Photo Studio, also on Yonge Street, and met the manager, Mrs. Mabel Agnew. He told her he needed some passport photos.

Mrs. Agnew was happy to oblige. She led him to the rear of the studio, which was decorated with a vanity mirror and travel poster of Holland, and sat him on a revolving piano stool before a gray-white screen. Galt doubtless hated the whole ritual, as always, but this time he peered just off camera and kept his eyes wide open, throwing everything he had into playacting his new role. Mrs. Agnew couldn’t get her subject to smile, but she finally managed to snap off a decent shot. He left while the pictures developed and returned a few hours later. For two dollars, he retrieved three passport-sized prints.

The image turned out well. His countenance bore a discerning quality, a certain cosmopolitan panache. He could pass for a lawyer, or an engineer, or an international businessman. He almost looked handsome.

...

Sneyd first inquired about tickets to Johannesburg, South Africa, but recoiled at the price—$820 Canadian round-trip. Instead, he asked Spencer to look into the cheapest available fares to London. She soon found a flight on British Overseas Airways that departed Toronto on May 6. It was a twenty-one-day economy excursion, the cheapest flight available, and came with a fare of only $345 Canadian. Sneyd liked the sound of it and asked her to go ahead and make a reservation.

Do you have your passport with you? she asked.

He didn’t have one yet, he said, but he was working on it. Here Spencer must have sensed his hesitation, his awkward uncertainty over how to proceed. Sneyd was under the mistaken impression that to secure a passport, he would have to provide a “guarantor”—a Canadian citizen in good standing who could vouchsafe that he’d known the applicant for more than two years. Meeting this requirement was the main reason he’d been developing two identities and two addresses; according to his rather convoluted and risky plan, the bespectacled Sneyd would be the traveler, and Bridgman (wearing an altogether different getup and possibly a toupee) would be the guarantor.

Sneyd wasn’t going to explain any of this to her, of course, but Spencer graciously intervened before he had to conjure up a story. “I can get you a passport,” she said. “Do you have a birth certificate?”

“Well, no,” he said. She told him that was okay, he didn’t need a birth certificate.

What about the guarantor? he asked. “I don’t know anyone who could serve as my guarantor.”

“Not necessary, either,” Spencer replied. There was a loophole in the passport rules, she said. From her files, she fished out a government form called “Statutory Declaration in Lieu of Guarantor.” Sneyd was simply required to sign the form in the presence of a notary. “As it happens,” she said sunnily, “we have a notary right here in the office.”

Sneyd couldn’t believe his good fortune. He’d had no idea how easy it was in wholesome, trusting Canada to acquire travel papers and inhabit another person’s identity: no birth certificate required, no proof of residence, no character witnesses. He’d wasted his time fabricating a web of interlocking aliases, disguises, and residences, when all he had to do was swear before a notary that he was who he said he was. Welcome to Canada, the expression went, we believe you.

Finding the Assassin's Car, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 294-296:

AT EXACTLY THE same hour that Galt’s passport photos were ripening in a darkroom vat [in Canada], FBI agents in Atlanta were about to enjoy the week’s greatest breakthrough. At four minutes past four o’clock that afternoon, a convoy of bureau sedans converged on the Capitol Homes project. In a ruckus of slamming doors and squawking radios, a dozen FBI agents crawled from the cars and swarmed around the abandoned vehicle.

It was no mistake—this was without a doubt Eric S. Galt’s car: a white two-door V-8 1966 Mustang hardtop with whitewall tires and a red interior, VIN 6TO7C190647, bearing Alabama license plate number 1-38993.

While some agents inspected the vehicle, taking measurements, notes, and photographs, others soon fanned out and began interviewing Capitol Homes tenants. Did you see the individual who parked this car? Can you give a physical description? Had you ever seen the man before? Kids teetered on bicycles, spellbound by all the commotion, but it was more excitement than most of the tenants had bargained for. “There must have been a billion of ’em out here,” one lady said. Complained another: “I had to go to bed. It made me sick, so many of them asking me the same thing over and over and over.”

Soon a tow truck appeared in the parking lot. Guarded by a police escort, the wrecker hauled the Mustang off to a federal building at the corner of Peachtree and Baker streets. There, deep inside a large locked garage, a detail of agents in latex gloves worked the car over, systematically emptying all its contents and dusting its surfaces for fingerprints.

Every inch of the impounded car was examined. Agents took soil samples from the tire wells, fluid samples from the engine, sweepings from the carpets, seats, and trunk. Fibers, hairs, and several high-quality latent palm prints were teased from the Mustang’s recesses and contours. From the glove compartment, inspectors found a pair of sunglasses and a case. From the trunk, they retrieved, among other objects, a pair of men’s shorts, a pillow, a fitted sheet, various tools, a container for a Polaroid camera, and a small contraption that appeared to be an air-release cable for a camera shutter. On the right window, a prominent sticker said, “Dirección General de Registro Federal de Automóviles, 1967 Octubre Turista, Aduana de Nuevo Laredo, Tam.”

All these contents and samplings were inventoried, wrapped in plastic, and boxed up to be personally sent by air courier to the crime lab in Washington. But one item found on the Mustang urgently spoke for itself and required not a second of lab analysis. Affixed to the inside of its left door, a small sticker showed that Eric Galt had had the oil changed in his Mustang at 34,289 miles. The sticker said, “Cort Fox Ford, 4531 Hollywood Boulevard.”

WITHIN AN HOUR of the Mustang’s discovery in Atlanta, Special Agent Theodore A’Hearn of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office arrived at the service desk of the Cort Fox Ford dealership in Hollywood, California, and met a man named Budd Cook Jr. One of the garage’s service specialists, Cook dug into his records and soon found the work order, which he himself had taken down only a month and a half earlier. The paperwork was made out to Eric S. Galt and dated February 22, 1968.

He brought the car in at 8:00 that morning, Cook noted. It was a 1966 Mustang.

Do you remember what Galt looked like? A’Hearn asked.

Cook searched his memory and came up short. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of customers had passed through this garage over the previous months. Regrettably, he could not furnish a description of any sort.

“But,” Cook said, “Galt’s address is right here on the work order.”

THE NEXT MORNING, April 12, Agent Thomas Mansfield made his way to the large and slightly down-at-the-heels St. Francis Hotel at 5533 Hollywood Boulevard. He asked to speak with the proprietor, and presently a man named Allan Thompson appeared at the front desk. As the resident manager, Thompson had lived at the St. Francis for nearly two years and knew the history of the place, all its various denizens and comings and goings.

Yes, Thompson said. He recalled a man named Eric Galt. Thompson found a registration card that showed Galt had lived at the St. Francis for about two months, checking out on March 17. He resided in room 403 and paid eighty-five dollars a month in rent. “He had dark hair, combed back,” Thompson remembered. “Slender to medium build. Quiet, wore conservative business suits. Kept irregular hours. Far as I could tell, he was not employed.” Thompson said another tenant now occupied 403, and that Galt had not left any belongings in the room.

“Did he give any indication where he was going next?” Agent Mansfield asked.

“Well, yes,” Thompson said, producing a change-of-address card that said, “General Delivery, Main Post Office, Atlanta, Georgia.” The card was dated March 17, 1968, and signed “Eric S. Galt.”

Assassin's Lair, Memphis, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 145-147:

JUST ONE BLOCK west of the Lorraine, on South Main Street, stood a tumbledown rooming house run by a middle-aged woman named Bessie Brewer. The sign in front of the soot-darkened brick building at 422½ Main blandly announced APARTMENTS/ROOMS beneath an advertisement for Canada Dry’s Wink soda—THE SASSY ONE.

A resident of Bessie Brewer’s rooming house would later describe the place as “a half-step up from homelessness.” Its long corridors were narrow and dark, with blistered walls and cracked linoleum floors that smelled of Pine-Sol. Mrs. Brewer’s establishment was a haven for invalids, derelicts, mysterious transients, riverboat workers, and small-time crooks—rheumy-eyed souls who favored wife-beater T-shirts and off-brand hooch. Mostly white middle-aged men, they blew in on wisps of despair from Central Station a few blocks to the south and from the nearby Trailways and Greyhound terminals.

The guest rooms were upstairs on the second floor, above a grease-smeared joint with striped awnings called Jim’s Grill that sold Budweiser and homemade biscuits and pulled-pork BBQ. Rich smells from Jim’s kitchen curled upstairs, coating the flophouse tenants in a perfume of charred carbon and year-old frying oil. The tiny rooms, furnished with scuffed Salvation Army furniture, sweltered through the heat of the afternoon, even though many of the windows were crammed with ventilation fans that vigorously thunked away. For eight bucks a week, Mrs. Brewer’s tenants were satisfied with what they got and rarely complained. Among the long-term guests in her establishment were a deaf-mute, a tuberculosis patient, a schizophrenic, and an unemployed drunk who had a deformed hand. A homemade sign on the wall near Mrs. Brewer’s office admonished, “No Curseing or Foul Talk.”

AT AROUND THREE o’clock that afternoon, Eric Galt spotted Mrs. Brewer’s shingle on South Main and pulled the Mustang up to the curb alongside Jim’s Grill. A few minutes later, Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, looked through the grimy plate-glass windows and saw the Mustang parked out front.

Galt had apparently been casing the neighborhood for the past half hour or so and noticed something: some of the rooms at the back of Mrs. Brewer’s rooming house enjoyed a direct view of the Lorraine Motel. He observed that while a few of the rear windows were boarded up, several remained in use; their panes, though dingy and paint smudged, were intact.

Galt stepped out of the car, opened the door at 422½ Main, and climbed the narrow stairs toward Bessie Brewer’s office. At the top of the stairs, he opened the rusty screen door.

Galt rapped on the office door and Mrs. Brewer, her hair done in curlers, opened it as far as the chain would allow.

“Got any vacancies?” he asked.

A plump woman of forty-four, Mrs. Brewer wore a man’s checked shirt and blue jeans. She had been the rental agent at the rooming house for only a month. The previous manager had been forced to leave after a sordid incident that was covered in the local papers: apparently, he’d gotten into a quarrel with his wife and ended up stabbing her.

Mrs. Brewer appraised the prospective tenant. Slim, neat, clean shaven, he sported a crisp dark suit and a tie and looked to her like a businessman. She wondered why such a well-dressed person would show up at her place—and what he was doing in such a raw part of town. “We got six rooms available,” she said. “You stayin’ just the night?”

No, Galt replied, for the week.

Mrs. Brewer promptly led him back to room 8, a kitchenette apartment with a refrigerator and a small stove. “Our nicest one,” she said. “It’s $10.50 a week. You can cook in there.” Galt glanced at the room without venturing inside and shook his head: this room wouldn’t do. The window was on the west side of the building, facing Main and the Mississippi River. “No, see, I won’t be doing any cooking,” he mumbled. “You got a smaller one? I only want a room for sleeping.”

Mrs. Brewer studied Galt. He had a strange and silly smile that she found unsettling. She described it as a “smirk” and a “sneer,” as though he were “trying to smile for no reason.” She padded down the hall to 5B and turned the doorknob, actually a jury-rigged piece of coat-hanger wire. “This one’s $8.50 for the week,” she said, throwing open the door.

Galt stuck his head inside. The room had little to recommend it—a musty red couch, a bare bulb with a dangling string, a borax dresser with a shared bathroom down the hall. A little sign over the door said, “No Smoking in Bed Allowed.” The ceiling’s wooden laths peeked through a large patch of missing plaster. Yet one attribute immediately caught Galt’s eye: the window wasn’t boarded up. A rickety piece of furniture partially blocked the view, but with just a glance he could see the Lorraine Motel through the smudged windowpanes.

“Yeah,” Galt abruptly said, “this’ll do just fine.”

Mrs. Brewer did not bother to mention that her last long-term tenant in 5B, a man known as Commodore Stewart, had died several weeks earlier and the room had not been rented since. She was happy to fill it again, but being naturally suspicious, she was a little surprised by how quickly her new guest had made up his mind.

Beale Street Blues, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 103-105:

THE MARCH BEGAN. King, Abernathy, Lee, and Lawson locked arms in the front, and began walking, as police helicopters whirred overhead. They left Clayborn Temple and slogged along Hernando Street for a few blocks, jerking and halting, trying to find the right pace. Then they turned left onto Beale, the avenue of the blues, and marched west, in the direction of the Mississippi River.

In the rear, no one bothered to form orderly lines. The kids were jostling and shoving, sending forward wave after wave of people stumbling and stepping on heels. “Make the crowds stop pushing!” King yelled. “We’re going to be trampled!”

Soon they passed W. C. Handy Park, named for the prosperous bandleader and composer who first wrote down the blues and shaped the form into an internationally recognized genre. As it happened, this very day was the tenth anniversary of W. C. Handy’s death, and someone had laid a wreath beside the bronze statue of the beaming bluesman standing with his trumpet at the ready.

But this Beale was a faded version of the street that the Father of the Blues had known; had he been alive to see it now, he would have despaired at its mirthless state. In Handy’s heyday, it was the Main Street of Negro America, a place of deep soul and world-class foolishness, of zoot suits and chitlin joints, of hoodoos and fortune-tellers, with jug bands playing on every corner. The street smelled of tamales and pulled pork and pot liquor and lard. Day and night, Beale throbbed with so much authentic and sometimes violent vitality that, as Handy put it in one of his famous songs, “business never closes ’til somebody gets killed.”

For more than a century, blacks from across the Mississippi Delta came to Beale to experience their first taste of city life. Workers came from the levee-building camps, from the lumber and turpentine camps, from the cotton fields and the steamboat lines. The only confirmed studio photograph of Robert Johnson was taken on Beale—a ghostly image of the long-fingered bluesman posing in a fedora and pin-striped suit with his well-worn guitar. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King came here to play some of their first city gigs. The South’s first black millionaire, Robert Church, made his real estate fortune on Beale. Black doctors, black photographers, black dentists, black insurance companies, black mortuaries, black newspapers, hotels and restaurants “for coloreds only,” African-American parades as a counterpart to the all-white Cotton Carnival—Beale was a place where the concept of “separate but equal” had one of its more spirited and convincing runs.

“If you were black for one Saturday night on Beale, you’d never want to be white again,” the Stax Records legend Rufus Thomas once quipped.

By the spring of 1968, however, most of the great clubs and theaters—the Daisy, the Palace, the Monarch, P. Wee’s Saloon, Club Handy—were boarded up or gone altogether. Though there were still reputable businesses closer to Main, much of Beale had become a drab drag of busted concrete and liquor stores and pawnshops, populated by winos and petty thieves. As King tramped west on Beale, past Handy’s statue, separate was most assuredly not equal. The blues was on its sickbed, it was said—a moribund music, an era dead and gone. Now a column of proud but anxious men carried signs in the direction of city hall, headed for an uncertain future.

Galt Emigrating to Rhodesia?

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 62-63:

TO THE CORE of his angry soul, Eric Galt identified with Wallace’s rants against big government, his championing of the workingman, his jeremiads on the spread of Communism. He even identified with the governor’s Alabama roots—Galt had lived for a brief time in Birmingham in 1967, and his Mustang still bore Alabama plates, which sported the state nickname, HEART OF DIXIE.

What Galt found most appealing about Wallace, though, was the governor’s stance as an unapologetic segregationist. Wallace’s rhetoric powerfully articulated Galt’s own smoldering prejudices. Although Galt was not politically sophisticated, he was a newspaper reader and something of a radio and television news junkie. His politics were composed of many inchoate gripes and grievances. On most topics he might best be described as a reactionary—he was, for example, drawn to the positions of the John Birch Society, to which he wrote letters, though never formally joined.

By late 1967, Galt had begun to gravitate toward stark positions on racial politics. He became intrigued by Ian Smith’s white supremacist regime in Rhodesia. In Puerto Vallarta he had bought a copy of U.S. News & World Report in which he found an advertisement soliciting immigrants for Rhodesia. The idea appealed to him so much that on December 28, 1967, he wrote to the American–Southern Africa Council in Washington, D.C., to inquire about relocating to Salisbury.

“My reason for writing is that I am considering immigrating to Rhodesia,” Galt said in his letter, noting that representatives from the John Birch Society had referred him to the council. “I would appreciate any information you could give me.” Not only did Galt hope to gain citizenship in Rhodesia; he was such an ardent believer in the cause of white rule and racial apartheid that he planned, as he later put it, to “serve two or three years in one of them mercenary armies” in southern Africa. While living in Los Angeles, he wrote to the president of the California chapter of the Friends of Rhodesia—an organization dedicated to improving relations with the United States—raising still more questions about immigration and inquiring about how he might subscribe to a pro–Ian Smith journal titled Rhodesian Commentary.

Eric Galt at a Clinical Psychologist

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 52-53:

FOR SOME TIME since his arrival in Los Angeles, Eric Galt had been paying visits to a clinical psychologist named Dr. Mark O. Freeman. Their first appointment was on the late afternoon of Monday, November 27, 1967, and Galt, sharply dressed as usual, walked into Freeman’s Beverly Hills office at around five o’clock. Dr. Freeman wrote in his daybook that his new patient hoped to “overcome his shyness, gain social confidence, and learn self-hypnosis so he could relax, sleep and remember things better.”

They began to talk, and Dr. Freeman got a sense of the man. Galt naïvely seemed to believe that hypnosis was a form of communication expressed directly eye to eye, through some mysterious medium of thought rays. “He had the old power idea of hypnotism,” Freeman said. “He actually thought you could go around looking people in the eye and hypnotize them and make them do whatever you wanted them to do.”

Galt placed great value on the touted health benefits of hypnosis—and especially hoped to learn how to put himself under. All told, he met with Dr. Freeman on six occasions, throughout the months of November and December 1967. Dr. Freeman later said that Galt “made a favorable impression” on him. The sessions were productive, he thought, and the two men got along well.

“He was a good pupil,” Freeman said. “This fellow really wanted to improve his mind. He had a bent for reading. He didn’t fight hypnosis. I’d show him how to go under, and pretty soon he’d be lying on the couch on his back and start talking. I taught him eye fixation, bodily relaxation, how to open himself to suggestion. I gave him a lot of positive feelings of competence.” While Freeman said that Galt confessed to no “deep dark secrets,” he did note that in at least one of their sessions together, Galt disclosed a “deep antipathy to negroes.”

Then, for reasons not known, Galt severed his relationship with Freeman, saying only that the psychologist “didn’t know nothing about hypnosis.” He canceled his last appointment with Freeman, telling him that his brother had found a job for him as a merchant seaman in New Orleans. Freeman never heard from Eric S. Galt again.