A familiar face in Russia (03/14/07)

I'm figuring that it's genetic.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I'd stopped by the office to get something off my desk. While I was there, I did what I often do. I turned to my computer and checked The Associated Press wire.

That's when I saw a story from St. Petersburg, Russia, about street demonstrations against President Putin. Thousands of people were involved, hundreds were arrested, and police beat some of the demonstrators.

Ordinarily, that wouldn't have raised many eyebrows. Except that our youngest daughter, Sally, is now studying in St. Petersburg as an Indiana University student.

Still, I wasn't alarmed. There was no mention of any Americans being involved, and I knew from the name of the street that it wasn't in her neighborhood.

When I went home, I wasn't even sure I was going to mention it to my wife. Fortunately, she had made a trip to the grocery, so I didn't have to make that decision.

Then the phone rang. It was Sally. She's been in pretty regular contact thanks to an inexpensive phone card she purchased there.

"Were you anywhere near the demonstrations?" I asked.

"You know about that?" she responded. She wasn't sure how to bring it up and was relieved that I was already aware of what happened. "I'm okay," Sally said. "I was in the middle of it."

She quickly explained, after repeated assurances that she was all right, that she had been on her way to meet up with some friends studying in the same program. As she was walking down Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg's main drag, she saw thousands of people walking toward her, a group that stretched from one side of the street to the other.

So what did she do?

That's where I figure her genetic make-up took over.

She pulled out her camera and started taking pictures. And when the marching multitude reached her, she started marching along with them, taking still more pictures.

I was hardly in a position to scold her; she was just short of her third birthday when I was in the middle of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, doing much the same thing.

On Sunday, she called again, wanting to reassure her mother. By then, she had also posted some of her photos on a blog she's maintaining while in Russia. Even with the reassurances and hearing her voice, a couple of the photos were the sort of things that give parents gray hairs and stomach acid.

By Monday, we'd looked at the pictures several times and read Sally's account of the events; but I was still curious, so I started checking some Russian news sites on the Internet.

At a site maintained by the business newspaper Kommersant, I found a great 14-photo essay on the protests. I blew up one of the crowd scenes as large as I could and printed it out to take home and show Connie over lunch.

It was a mass of faces in black and white. The resolution was lousy because I'd blown up the image. But there were a few things that looked familiar.

Sitting there at the kitchen table, it hit me.

The building in the background looked familiar. So did a stop sign and another sign with an M on top.

I'd seen them before in Sally's photographs. Quickly adjusting for the angle, I figured out where she had to be standing.

And suddenly she was staring back at me. Her face was tiny, but it was unmistakable. Half a world away, standing in a crowd estimated at 3,000 to 6,000 people, witnessing history firsthand.

I'm figuring it's genetic.[[In-content Ad]]