Meltha Magazine Online

1997, Volume 3, No1(7) pages 4-5

Prof Mikhaik Sado

OUR INTELLECTUALS

THE ASSYRIAN BULL

By: Nikolai Volzhin-Yastrebov

("New Russia", No.3-4, 1994)

What do we know about the Assyrians? What do we, Russians, know about the descendants of the great nation which has been scattered all over the world and a small portion of which has settled on the vast plains of great Russia?

Russian Assyrians used to live in Northern Iran, Turkey and the Trans Caucasus before the First World War, engaged in cattle raising, crop farming and handicrafts in towns and had, over the centuries, lost their original skill of making war. The Christian Assyrians had shared the sad lot of other nations Moslems were at odds with. And like some of those other nations, they sought refuge in Russia. Oh, the tragic absurdity of the time! Fleeing from hostile Moslems, Assyrians came to Russia in 1919, unsuspecting that the country they were entering was no longer Christian, but a land of godlessness where they would again, along with other nations, fall victim to anti-Christians.

In 1937-1938 the orgy of reprisals hit these people as well; no, hit is an understatement - it engulfed the entire community. The powers-that-be had issued every nation with a sin, but the sins, falsely blamed on the people, are quite beside the point. Every nation was given its cross to bear. Assyrians were forced to leave their native villages in the Caucasus and the Kuban area. But, what with the exceptional nature of the "Assyrian sin", the authorities had not stopped there. Nearly all Assyrian men were exterminated: long prison terms and firing squads had taken care of that. By the end of the 1930s, the Russian Assyrian community consisted solely of old men in their dotage, young children and women. And the women it was who, banished from the land where they had done the usual agricultural chores, were flung into towns and cities with their illusion of employmnet and some sort of existence at least. Flung there speaking no other language besides their own, unskilled in any profession suitable for the new way of life, with helpless children and old folk on their hands...

Mikhail Sado is a citizen of Russia and an ethnic Assyrian. He is the ideologue of the famous Russian Social Christian People's Liberation Union whose purpose was the overthrow of communism in the USSR, and the building of a Christian state in its stead. On this charge Sado served a 13-year prison term (1968-1980). At present he teaches Hebrew at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy.

His son is a temple priest in the St. Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Thus a single family epitomizes its nation's aspirations in the sphere of religion and statehood. The medley of recent years has yielded a lot of new faces and destinies. Mikhail Sad strikes one as being consistently there, in that gallery. A Christian and a believer in statehood, he is no different in every life. He has never been split between thought and word, between word and deed; he has gone the classical Russian way of prison and labor camps; and now he is teaching would-be Orthodox hierarchs the language of the Bible. He had chosen a beautiful bride, Gina (Zinaida Ivanovna), who remained his true love through thick and thin, reunited with her husband after thirteen years. How many non-Christian lives were shattered to pieces, confronted with far less trying and protracted ordeals?

Mikhail Sado is head of the Assyrian community of St. Petersburg. He enjoys popularity and respect among the Russian Assyrians. They are not too numerous, a mere 40,000 or so, counting both intellectual scientists and boot-blacks we know so well. A consistent advocate of Russian statehood, Sado defends Russian interests wherever he goes; and he is a welcome and honored guest with the Assyrian communities in Sweden, Germany, the United States and other countries.

Sado and I, we talked as citizens of a thousand-year-old state, which is Russia. But Mikhail Sado had the might of ancient Assyria behind him, a statehood of 3,000 years' standing.

Mr. Sado, you spent 13 years in prison "for Russia". Was it the kind of Russia we see today?

The communist system's inhumanity, the way it trampled underfoot the nationalist foundation of Russia on the whole of its multi-ethnic territory induced me to fight against it. Everything held sacred in this country had been defiled. The national elite was partly destroyed, partly reduced to collaboration with the system by harassment and persecution.

Marxist-Leninist ideology robbed the nations of their ethnic memory. It cultivated the allegedly "class" hatred in them - now that has taken the form of simple unadulterated hatred.

Republics fight against other republics. Within republics, it is clans and groupings that wage war on one another. Enmity and crude materialism have pushed to the fore a new social group that resembles nothing so much as a swarm of bluebottles, sleek and well upholstered, that feed without producing anything.

We fought for Russia humiliated. In 1967, while setting up our organization, we wanted to reconstruct the traditional Russian system of social group hierarchy. This is what holds a state together. Social groups imply the big-family subordination and harmony. Everything that was distorted after the October 1917 coup we hoped to restore. All state institutions, with their content appropriately updated. Would you say the communist system represented the Russians' interests? That system destroyed every political tie and preference Russia had had traditionally: it let Turkey wreck Greece, it quarreled with other Slav states. Lenin's admiration for Ataturk has spawned what we have to "swallow" in the Caucasus today. Friends became enemies, while enemies turned into friends, ostensibly. The results of similar transformations are well known in history.

The Western policy aimed at the destruction of Russia, of the Russian Empire is short-sighted. Russia was destroyed once, in 1917. The outcome is here for everyone to see. United under the red banner, the country restored itself geographically, and even grew bigger after the Second World War. It adopted the communist system and reduced the world of its current state. Any politician ought to realize: Russia is a country to be preserved. The Russian continent has to be preserved as one whole at all costs - in the name of their own interests, as a guarantor of world stability.

Russia's dominant is spirituality. In Europe this is the law, in the States, the "dollar", but in Russia the dominant is still the spirit and honor. In spite of the social system which was bent on destroying and doing away with precisely that. That is our way, and if we follow it, we shall be able to recover after the Bolshevist rule. And above all, our national way of life and national democracy must be resurrected....

when I worked in the prison camp stokehold, the warden used to come in and ask me:
"Tell me about your past, Sado" Well, I told him our cause and what we were after. As a rule, the warden listened attentively and then said: " They were wrong to lock you up." The ordinary people have never been particularly fond of Marxists.