An Interview with Michele Berdy
British trade across the Baltic Sea led to the construction of an Anglican church in Riga— now capital of independent Latvia—in the mid-19th century. St. Savior’s is located on Anglikāņu iela [Latvian: Anglican Street] in Riga’s Old Town, next to an embankment of the sweeping Daugava River. During late Soviet rule the church building became a student’s club used for concerts and dances, before an English-speaking congregation was reestablished once Latvia regained its independence in 1991. The two most recent chaplains have been women—currently Elīza Zikmane, a Latvian whose background is Lutheran.
Visiting Riga in August 2022, the editor of the East-West Church Report met a new member of the chaplaincy’s Council, Michele Berdy. Before leaving Russia in the wake of the 24 February invasion of Ukraine, Michele was an active member of the Anglican parish in Moscow. However, she is best known for her regular column in The Moscow Times, an independent Englishlanguage newspaper founded primarily for expatriates in 1992. In thesaurus fashion, installments of The Word’s Worth explore nuances in Russian-language expression of particular concepts. A recent example considered vocabulary concerning anger: www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/12/02/angrywelcome-to-the-zoo-a79566.
You have extensive knowledge of the Russian language—is your background Russian?
I’m second-generation American. My mother’s family came from the Russian Empire—her mother from what was then Vilna [now Vilnius, Lithuania], her father from Ukraine. My father’s parents were Lemkos, the tiny ethnic group [now numbering some 75,000 in the border region of Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine.] They immigrated to the United States. We don’t know much about my father’s father, but his mother and aunt took a boat in 1909. For reasons lost in family lore, my mother’s parents spoke Russian at home, and she spoke Russian. My father spoke Lemko with his mother. He was born on East 74th Street in New York, where many Lemkos lived. The Czechs lived on 75th Street, the Hungarians on another street, and so on. Everyone was part of that world. So they did a lot of “code-switching”: When they went to the Ukrainian neighbors they would all switch to probably not-very-good Ukrainian. Then they would switch to Polish, to Russian, to Czech, and sometimes to Hungarian.
Did that mean you grew up speaking Russian?
No, I had to learn it. I started a little bit in high school. I studied it in college—I really wanted to become a translator. In 1978 I went to study in Moscow for a semester and then found a job there. At that time there were three publishing houses that hired foreigners as English-language or foreignlanguage editors. My job was with one of them, Agentstvo Pechati “Novosti” [Novosti Press Agency], or APN. I stayed in Moscow from 1978 to 1982. After spending a couple of years in New York, I then started going back and forth as an interpreter once things started opening up due to glasnost’. For a while I had apartments in both New York and Moscow; I spent half the year in one place and half in the other. Then, in 1992, I packed up everything in New York, put it in a friend’s basement, and moved to Moscow. All told, I was there for 44 years, apart from some periods mostly in the States—so my entire adult life!
Did you have a Christian upbringing?
My brother and I were baptized in the Orthodox Church. We always had two Easters—American Easter and Russian Easter. But like many in that generation, my parents wanted to be “real Americans.” My father got a job with G.E. [the General Electric company] in Schenectady [New York State]. A couple of years after they moved there they joined a Presbyterian church. I remember once asking my mother why. She had grown up next to an Orthodox church in Stamford, Connecticut, where I think there were a lot of old-school priests. She said, “We always felt like we were sinners—but we didn’t feel as sinful as we were made to feel.”
So essentially my parents went from all the mystery of Orthodoxy to the most austere form of Protestantism! (Laughs.) My mother used to arrange the church flowers, and later on I realized, “Of course!” She was making icons out of flowers—she would make crosses out of lilies. Later on my parents also became interested in spiritualism—clearly, they did not quite get enough of the mystery part of faith in their Presbyterianism. Yet we remained a very Slavic household in a lot of ways. As I was growing up, we would go to Russian Orthodox churches. My parents also supported St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary [Yonkers, New York State], and we would sometimes go there during the summertime. But my confirmation was in the Presbyterian Church. For most of my adult life I wasn’t really much of a churchgoer. But I read a lot—it was a very private kind of faith. Then a couple of years ago I thought, “Hm, this private sort of faith is lacking.” I started going to the Anglican Church, which seemed to me like the perfect place for somebody who has both an Orthodox and Presbyterian background! I felt very much at home. What I also really liked about it—St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Moscow is a very international church. There are a lot of diplomats, and it is one of the only places in Moscow where you see Asian people, Black people—there are a great many Anglicans in African countries. It is a very friendly and inviting place.
St. Andrew’s has that typically Victorian church building not far from the Kremlin. Melodiya—the state recording company—used it as a studio during the late Soviet period, before Anglican worship resumed in 1991.
Even after that change had taken place, Melodiya didn’t leave. They loved the acoustics. There was a huge ritual where they would move all their equipment to one side, services would take place, and then all the equipment would be moved back again. That went on for years, until they finally moved out. Interestingly, [prominent Russian rock musician] Stas Namin, who used to record his group’s works there, became a real proponent of the church. His theater put on Jesus Christ Superstar, and they did benefit performances of it in the church, including for the restoration of the roof. That was just before the pandemic hit, when I had begun to get involved. Then Bible classes and so forth all moved to Zoom.
When I arrived here in Riga I thought that Malcolm [Rev. Canon Malcolm Rogers, St. Andrew’s’ current chaplain] must have called ahead of time. I was invited to the Anglican church here the very next Sunday. When I stood up to speak, I just blubbered! (Laughs.) I just could not speak at all.
You had left Moscow hastily following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February?
I left after 4 March, when they passed the “law on fakes.” You were not allowed to say the word “war.” You were not allowed to say “invasion.” At first we [at The Moscow Times] didn’t think it had to do with us [as foreign media]. Putin signed the law late in the evening, and for some reason I woke up at three o’clock the next morning. I went into the kitchen, where I had cable TV—CNN, BBC, France 24, and so on. I turned it on to find that CNN was gone. So I looked at my Twitter feed and saw that the BBC and CBS were leaving. I just panicked—I got onto the administrative part of The Moscow Times website and started scrubbing. When anything had the word “war,” “invasion,” or whatever, I would either take out the word or change it. If I could not think of something, I just removed the article altogether! I also wrote rather hysterical letters to colleagues saying we had to close down the websites and get out. By that time a number of people had already left Russia. We did close down the Russian website immediately, but we kept the English site going.
[Editor’s note: Under the 4 March legislation, public dissemination of “intentionally false” information about Russia’s armed forces and/or criticism of their activity abroad may be punished with a heavy fine or lengthy prison sentence. Among some 5,000 administrative prosecutions to date are several where commentary on the war came from a religious perspective, such as anti-war posters quoting the Bible and the 17th-century metaphysical poet John Donne, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because Iam involved in mankind.” (See Victoria Arnold, “RUSSIA: Administrative fines continue for Ukraine war protests,” Forum 18, 7 November 2022, https://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2788.) Two priest-monks from the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad—a branch that did not reunite with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007 and is headquartered in Odesa, Ukraine—are among some 150 criminal cases, which also include the 8.5-year prison sentence handed down to opposition politician Ilya Yashin on 9 December (see Victoria Arnold, “RUSSIA: First criminal conviction for opposing war in Ukraine on religious grounds,” Forum 18, 18 October 2022, https://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2783.)]
Did you decide to leave simply because other foreign journalists were leaving? How important was it to you morally that you could no longer speak the truth?
And we couldn’t report what was going on truthfully—with facts—without risking arrest. I mean, I called the last column I did while in Moscow, “The Russian Language of War.” The war had just begun, and I was trying to figure out what on earth to write. So I did not write anything—all I did was list a series of quotations showing the escalation towards war. I thought, “That’s now illegal, I could go to jail for 15 years for that. But I’m not going to not write that.” So it was a question of safety, but the question of safety arose because we knew that we were not going to follow these new laws and rules.
And so you left Russia.
I was pretty much the last staff member to leave—I was trying to figure out where I could travel with a dog. At that point you could no longer fly west—you could fly to places such as Bishkek or Istanbul, or cross over land borders. So I chose Latvia—the only Baltic State I had not yet visited. A friend told me that there was a minivan service to the border. You would walk through the border zone and then be picked up by another minivan on the other side.
I had a suitcase, a computer bag, a handbag, my dog Riley, a bag with Riley’s stuff… and of course some grandmother desperately wanted me to bring something for her grandson over here! What I had not counted on was it being 18 below zero [0 Fahrenheit]. The ground was covered in ice and the walk was over a mile—you had to haul your suitcases to one place, then to someplace else. We were kept waiting outside for about two hours. There were also two other dogs—one of them a very ill-tempered French bulldog called Frosya who kept lunging and trying to bite my dog. So it had a really nightmarish quality to it.
By the time we crossed the border, it was three o’clock in the morning. When I finally got my passport back, I said, “Okay, kuda? [Russian: “Where to?]” They said, “See those lights? That’s Estonia.” That was around 800 meters away— half a mile—hauling bags across this rough ice, switching hands. I think the Estonians are not allowed to help you, but by the time I got there, they just said, “Leave everything here. Don’t worry.”
So you crossed into Estonia first?
Yes. There is another crossing, but it is very busy. This crossing was quiet and also had a veterinary station.
Before you left Russia, was the atmosphere of increasing censorship similar to your experience of the Soviet era?
One of my Russian friends likens it to the late 1970s. He was arrested in 1979, essentially for dissidence. He had been passing around Solzhenitsyn texts and he also wrote a paper comparing the legal systems of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and the Soviet Union. That didn’t go over well! First he was arrested and put in a [penal] colony. Then they decided he was just ill, so he was put in a psychiatric prison hospital. That was actually worse because they gave him horrendous drugs and the place was filled with truly psychotic people.
By the mid-1980s things were already becoming halfhearted in a lot of ways. But now it is clear that that was only outwardly the case—the KGB remained the KGB and kept on going. Under Andropov [Soviet leader from November 1982 to February 1984] there were KGB officers in every big industrial plant. When we were getting all excited about change in the 1990s, they were just cementing their positions.
How about the general population—did you observe any similarities there?
Because I have a dog I used to walk in the park twice a day. Our park had a very friendly dog community— it was always the same people. When the war began, even very intelligent, well-educated people were saying things like, “Ukrainians are killing Russians, they’re murderers,” “They’re not a separate people, it was always Russian land,” or “Why won’t Biden let us live in peace?” I knew to shut up—I sort of went into Soviet mode. One group of dog walkers wouldn’t mention it at all—even though their country was at war. I thought maybe they were being polite because they thought Biden was responsible, or maybe they didn’t trust me.
One neighbor had gotten her college-age son out of the country on the night the war started. When she told me she was now figuring out how to follow with her daughter, she made a tapping gesture [used in the Soviet era to signal danger due to the possible presence of informants or stukachi, derived from Russian stuсhat’, to tap] and said she had not told anyone else that she was leaving. So when I realized I was leaving, I also didn’t tell anyone. The weird thing is—or maybe not, but these were neighbors I saw every day, spent holidays with, and so forth—that not a single soul has sent me a message. Again, is that because it is dangerous for them, or because they think I’m bad? I have absolutely no idea. Even that is just horrendous—how is it I can have no idea about people I spent so much time with? And they’re nice people.
How have you adjusted to life in Latvia?
This is a great place to be, an absolutely lovely country. Riga is a beautiful city, both grand and cozy. It has a huge Russian community—they say about 45 percent are Russian. Almost everybody over a certain age speaks Russian, as do people in the service professions. It makes for a transition that is very comfortable.
Have you found that people here were also surprised by the war?
Less than we were. Because they had experience—the Baltic States have been saying, “Guys, we have been telling you this, and you have been pooh-poohing it for all of these years.”
I’m living in Zolitūde, a suburb of big brutalist Soviet-style apartment buildings. It is actually very green, with charming market gardens and grapevines climbing up the walls. It is a largely Russian-speaking neighborhood, and they have been watching Russian TV for all these years. Now it is blocked, but people have VPNs [virtual private networks], so they are still watching a lot of it. This is such a limited experience that it is not statistically valuable, but what I find a lot here is that there are many conspiracy theories to the tune of, “Everybody’s bad.” I was recently talking to a Latvian cab driver, who insisted that the war was all about money; that everyone was in on it. As proof of this, he pointed to the fact that everybody hung out Ukrainian flags when the war began. He said, “They must have known ahead of time and printed them ready for this.”
How does St. Savior’s in Riga compare with the Anglican community in Moscow?
It is much smaller. At St. Andrew’s there would always be at least 50-100 people at services, and it was really packed on holidays—you had to get tickets for the Christmas service a month ahead of time in order to get in. Here I haven’t seen the diplomatic community—I don’t know if it is just really tiny or if they’re not churchgoers. As in Moscow, there are expats who came over for some reason, fell in love with the country, or got married. Then there are Latvians and Russians. Services are in English, but sometimes there is some Latvian—we’ve had a couple of christenings lately where the families were Latvian.
It is also a super-liberal church that welcomes absolutely everybody—I think it was all-inclusive from the moment it reopened. They told me there were demonstrations against it. [Editor’s note: In 2005 the church hosted a service for participants in Riga’s first Pride March, which was violently attacked by counter-demonstrators.]
How has the war affected the community here?
We don’t really discuss it. That said, there is always a prayer for Ukraine—“We pray that the aggression in Vladimir Vladimirovich’s heart will be…” I pray a little less kindly, Ihave to say! We are also trying to start a group to provide fellowship and support to Ukrainian refugees. I posted a letter on the “Ukrainians in Riga” and “Ukrainians in Latvia” websites and received around 30 or 40 responses of “Molodtsy!” [Russian: Bravo!], “This is wonderful!”, “Absolutely right, we need support—this is a very difficult time, we are sleeping badly.” Yet they don’t come—we haven’t quite figured out how to get them through the door, but we will keep trying. One of the things we wrote was, “We are not really planning anything until you tell us what you need.” It could be lectures or excursions to get a sense of Latvia. Since school will be starting again soon, I thought of inviting teachers who could tell them what it will be like, so the kids can navigate it—they are not going to be able to speak Latvian.
St. Savior’s also runs a soup kitchen. Yes. That is a very necessary thing because they constantly have around 100 or more people coming. During the pandemic it was difficult because they had to pack up the food for people—they couldn’t serve them directly. But it still went on throughout that entire period. We also rent out space in the church to a project organized by one of our very active church wardens. It provides free English lessons to Ukrainian refugees. The reason we are trying to provide assistance to Ukrainian refugees is—that is what you do. It doesn’t matter what their religion is—these are people in need, and you try to help them. This is an outreaching sort of church in general. Kind of low-key—not proselytizing or sign-you-up, but “We are followers of Christ and that means helping people” and “Do you need help? Okay, we’ll try and figure out how to do it.”
