Erika Holzer: Freedom Bridge

President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan arrived in Berlin on June 12, 1987. At 2:00 P.M. the President appeared at the Brandenburg Gate behind two panes of bulletproof glass.

Roughly 45,000 people were in attendance, among them Chancellor Helmut Kohl, West Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen, and West German president Richard von Weizsacker.

“We welcome change and openness,” Ronald Reagan declared, “for we believe that freedom and openness go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate.”

President of the United States of America, Ronald W. Reagan, then spoke six words that ushered in the coming of a new era…

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

When the iconic prime-mover of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, died, he left behind the political, economic, and cultural embodiment of soul-killing collectivism and the institutionalized statist force necessary to implement it.

Lenin’s philosophical and political heirs, especially Josef Stalin, would carry Marxist-Leninist principles and programs to their logical extremes, leaving in the wake of their almost 80 years of power destroyed nations, tens of millions of corpses, and the moribund but never fully discredited killer viruses of collectivism and statism.

It was during the Soviet Union’s collectivist-statist hell that, in 1917, eighteen-year-old Anna Petrovsky married fellow medical student, Yuri Glazov.

The next year, inspired by hatred of the Czar, grinding poverty suffered by the lower classes and the peasants, opposition to Russia’s war with Germany, and influenced by communist-socialist propaganda slogans such as “Peace, Land, and Bread,” Yuri Glazov decided to leave medical school and join the Revolution.

That night, as he told Anna of his decision, she took a step back and looked at him with luminous eyes. He stood before her with the pride of a gladiator poised for battle, she thought, with the dignity and flair of a centurion as he flashed a smile of perfect teeth… like the sun coming out.

“I’m glad you approve of my decision,” he said, the smile reaching his eyes as he pulled her into his arms.

But by 1918, Anna had learned that her husband had become a member of the Cheka, the dreaded secret political police—later to become the GPU, the NKVD, and by 1954, the KGB.

Yuri was a rising star, Anna thought bitterly as she recalled that moment of intimacy and candor soon after their son Aleksei had been born. Yuri had encouraged her to complete her medical studies. “Become a doctor for both of us,” he told her. “I’ve lost my taste for medicine.”

What he hadn’t told her was that he’d acquired a taste for blood.

From then on, she was determined to keep her husband away from their son, Aleksei, but long hours of study and an exhausting schedule punctuated with exams left her with little time at home. She watched helplessly as her son—under his father’s sometimes patient, sometimes boisterous tutelage—changed from a timid, introverted child into a self-centered bully.

Anna had vowed never to have another child. She’d lost that battle not once, but twice. Kiril, born in 1921, was conceived on a night when her usual deftness at putting her husband off with an excuse was met with unusual force fueled by vodka. Kolya, born the next year, was conceived under the same circumstances.

Though her pregnancies had been unwanted, Kiril and Kolya filled Anna’s life with optimism. It was impossible not to feel that way in the presence of two such wholesome beings with their boundless energy and playful inquisitiveness. They had also inherited some of her Petrovsky genes—miniature mirrors of her face and each other’s. Prominent cheek bones. Hair so thick and glossy she could never resist running her fingers through it, which caused them to erupt with giggles. Their eyes were the same dark brown as their hair, and she could tell that both boys would grow up to be tall and angular like her and her father before her.

Then one night in 1925, everyone’s life changed. Anna had been working late at the hospital. When she returned to the spacious GPU-provided apartment she shared with Yuri, she opened the front door, heard him mutter something from the bedroom, and then a thunderous crash. Her drunken husband had fallen out of bed—again. Dropping her medical bag, she rushed into the bedroom to attend to the besotted man, not realizing her bag had popped open.

Understandably, the two young boys had been drawn to some of the items that spilled from her medical bag, but it was four-year-old Kolya who grabbed hold of a pair of scissors.

Would she ever forget that scream? It had pierced her own heart even as Kolya punctured his chest with the scissors.

As soon as Anna had slowed the bleeding, she closed Kiril inside the boys’ bedroom, out of the reach of his father, and rushed Kolya to the hospital for x-rays. What they revealed was a mixed blessing.

The point of the scissors had lightly touched Kolya’s heart, but had not pierced it. The only way his heart could be examined for further damage was by sawing through his sternum, and if Kolya’s heart did need repair, Anna knew—as did her colleagues—that no one in the Soviet Union had the skills to perform such a difficult procedure. She would have to leave the country or Kolya would die.

When she returned home and confronted Yuri, he was hesitant—torn between GPU disapproval and remorse that his drunkenness had as good as pushed those scissors into his child’s heart. With steely resolve and a mercilessness she hadn’t known she possessed, Anna cut through her husband’s indecision by using his own interrogation techniques against him. She played on his guilt until he capitulated.

Yuri Glazov had called in every favor owed him by his secret police colleagues, swearing on his life that Anna and the child would return to the Soviet Union.

When the time came for her to leave, Anna’s “goodbye” was painfully brief. Aleksei was out somewhere with friends, so to see her off, there was only seven-year-old Kiril and Anna’s younger sister, Marissa, who promised to care for Kiril until Anna returned. As Anna bent down to embrace Kiril, her gold charm bracelet jangled. Dangling from it were a half-dozen miniature medical instruments. The child frantically tugged at one of them, not wanting his mother to leave, and it broke off and fell to the floor. Anna picked it up and pressed it into Kiril’s hand. “It’s called a scalpel , little one. Doctors use real ones,” she said softly. “Grandfather Petrovsky was a doctor too. He had all these tiny instruments put on my bracelet the year I entered medical school. Will you do me a favor, Kiril? Will you keep the scalpel with you always ? Until I get back?” she corrected herself as tears streamed down her face. “Take care of him until I return, Marissa,” she pleaded as Kiril began to cry. “Promise me you’ll protect him from his father.”

When the German doctors opened the four-year-old’s chest in April, they were shocked to see that although the scissors had not punctured Kolya’s heart, he suffered from a malfunction in his mitral valve which needed repair. As experienced as the German surgeons were, they were reluctant to attempt the operation. In 1923, Dr. Elliott Cutler of the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School had performed the world’s first successful heart valve surgery on a 12-year-old girl with rheumatic mitral stenosis, but they knew the procedure had a ninety percent mortality rate. As Kolya lay on the operating table with his chest open and his little heart beating, Anna told the surgeons to go ahead. It was when Kolya was recuperating from the successful operation that Anna first considered not returning to the Soviet Union.