Many Cups of Tea: Getting to Know Our Russian Sisters

By: Mary Lee Plumb-Mentjes

January 19, 2012

Category: Waldorf Education, Travel

Report of a 2011 Trip by ISIS to Russia

Note on "sisters" in the title: At each gathering almost only women were present. Work in a Russian Waldorf school or curative center does not provide a living wage by itself; normally men must either be the real wage earner or the household like the groups we visited are carried by women in extended families.

Two years ago (2009), five of us from ISIS Cultural Outreach International, went on the first trip to Russia after Monica Gold had retired from its leadership. [An announcement of that trip is linked at the bottom of the page.] At that time we visited Irkutsk in Siberia and Vladivostok, in part because we believed that they might be the most interested in having us give an Anthroposophic workshop since they were so far from Europe.

My most precious memory from that ISIS trip to central and eastern Russia was the experience I had around the small kitchen table of my hostess in Irkutsk. Even with my minimal speaking ability in Russian, the warmth of that was something I longed to experience again on our second trip. This past summer when we went to Irkutsk, Yekaterinburg, and Kirov, I was impressed most by our times around the Waldorf kindergarten tables with the teachers, helpers and parents all tightly squeezed around, sharing tea and cookies, intent on discussion of challenges, singing and laughing.

I’ve been in Waldorf circles for many years and only in the early pioneer days of initiatives do I remember the same ability of a group to have a single focus shared together. Those we visited in Russia were not in what we would consider their “pioneer days;” they had been at it generally since 1989 and the days of glasnost and perestroika. Part of their warm, social strength comes from the challenges they face. They don’t receive support from the State; the Russian Orthodox church considers them as part of a cult; the public considers Waldorf education “useless” since the children don’t have computers or early intellectual development so the schools struggle along with the populace where the divide between the rich and the poor, i.e., everyone else, gets ever larger. So together, our friends are strong and survive together, as the Kirov Waldorf School (known as “Nasha Skola,” “Our School“) does with no salaries after renovating their previously trashed building. When times are hard, great warmth is possible in such situations.

At our Russian workshops I chose to speak on Steiner’s work on social and antisocial forces (special reference to “Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being,” December 12, 1918, Bern). I characterized how often our being social puts each other asleep, our heads bobbing in empty agreement. And I described the antisocial where each person feels impelled to emphasize his/her individual differences at every opportunity, unable to see beyond them.

From my prior visit I developed a personal aversion to doing lectures with listeners in rows, somehow it didn’t go with the theme. And, pausing after each sentence to be translated is trying for all parties, listeners and speakers, particularly in mid-afternoon.  
One of my colleagues had introduced the thought about Steiner’s emphasis in his autobiography on how he was formed by meetings with others. 
 
I invited the participants to form groups of four and work on Steiner’s karmic exercise on how certain experiences with others, which we had always considered negative in our lives, actually did have an aspect of a valuable gift. I gave the small groups a half hour to work on this question. Initially, I had suggested that each individual take a few moments alone to consider the question. Instead, the room immediately became like a beehive alive with intent conversation. I worried that the conversation might not be thoughtful enough, but the experiences shared later indicated that indeed they were. People had been moved and were likely to remember this exercise for future work. I hoped that together we had experienced that having genuine interest in the other as we listened took us past the head-bobbing social experience and the antisocial isolation of our individual opinions to a genuine social experience to be cultivated further. 

The group we lectured to in Vladivostok on our first trip let loose with fierce reactions at the close of our workshop. We had asked for comments after each session and had met with silence. We had asked at the start what their experience was, what their questions were and learned only their formal names and professions (20 women, almost all psychologists). At the end they let us know that they had wanted to hear of our personal experiences, not constant references to dead or unknown authorities like Steiner and Prokofiev. They stated that they had had more than enough of such in the Soviet times with ubiquitous references to Marx and Lenin. 

My other workshop theme this visit was from Steiner’s lecture, “Work of the Angels in Man’s Astral Body.” I had been wrestling with the second task he described, which combines religious freedom, meetings that would have the quality of a sacrament, the experience of the divine in each person, and how only true Christianity makes this possible. Quite a riddle how all can be experienced at once! We are also admonished to speak out of our own personal inner experience of Christ in such a way that a free religious life can develop in each person!

For this talk I started with having each person stand and strongly declare who she is: their name and their outer profession. It is interesting that Russian doesn’t have the verb “to be” in the present tense, so instead of “I am Mary; I am a teacher” it sounded as “I, Mary; I, teacher.” Later, when we reached the description of the second task, I shared a very different experience of the “I am”, when I feel most at a loss and deeply not knowing the answer to a challenge, where “I just plain am,” no longer confident and proud, pushing myself and my answers on others, but ironically finally free and open, able to be close to others, able to receive help, where I am just myself, that which is and will continue, and then comfort comes, that deep mystery of the “I am.” We went around the circle, and each said in turn the Russian “I am,” “Yah,” quietly and humbly. It was very moving, and I hope of some use in the future.

Not only is there the precious warmth of togetherness in adversity in the groups we met; there is also the pain of individuals carrying initiatives, ones that need others to join and help, but often experiencing isolation and the pain of different interpretations of how something should be done, sometimes paralyzing the small community. This riddle is one we all face of how to balance, how to tune being social and part of a group with being an individual with varying experiences of how something should be done without sapping the energy of one and all. This is a challenge, also in Russia, this very special place of the far future.

In Kirov they spoke of our visit as a “gulp of fresh air” because the various individual initiatives came together for our workshop and what for them was also so heartening, this time of warmth of shared food, soulful singing, and, yes, even dancing for a brief, precious interval. 

In the summer of 2013, we plan to return to see our friends again and to participate in an Anthroposophic conference in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, where Europe and Asia meet, as do the warmth ether from the east (extending to the Rocky Mountains) and the light ether of central Europe (see Virginia Sease’s article in the Spring 2007 Classics from the Journal for Anthroposophy: Revisioning Society and Culture, February 13, 1999 lecture, “Choosing America as a Place for Incarnation or Immigration in the 20th Century” and Wachsmuth’s work on the ethers, The Etheric Formative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man, especially Volume 2, Chapter 4). My hope is that there can also be “a road show” afterwards where we can bring colleagues from the West to share research done on Waldorf graduates that demonstrates that Waldorf education is indeed an education that prepares young people to meet the future effectively and meaningfully. I also hope we can share movies and talks on how those with special needs can have a meaningful life and deserve it as a human right. Parents of children with special needs now are told by their doctors to turn their child over to the State to be institutionalized and to “start over” with another child.

If you would like to support this effort or to join us in 2013, you may contact me by e-mail at maryplumbmentjes (at) yahoocom or Arie van Ameringen in Montreal at arieva.perceval (at) gmailcom. We are trying to raise $20,000 to help the initiatives of our Russian friends.