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Estimates of the number of deaths attributable to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin vary widely. Some scholars assert that record-keeping of the executions of political prisoners and ethnic minorities are neither reliable nor complete while others contend that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991 such as statements from. In this report, we explore the journey from survive to thrive through the lens of five of our 2020 Global Human Capital Trends: Designing work for well-being: The end of work/life balance The Trend: Organizations are taking well-being beyond work/life balance by starting to design well-being into work—and life—itself.
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1. Want to make friends with Russians? Speak from your heart!
Almost every foreigner notes that Russians look grim on the streets, but in fact, they are very nice and hospitable people, who care about friends. Megan Hanrahan from Australia was surprised when she once heard from her Russian friend: “I like you now, but I didn’t like you when we first met, you seemed really mean!” But then she realized that people here always speak to you “from the heart”. “In truth, Russians do not smile much in public, but the initial reservation towards strangers, once passed, reveals wonderfully funny, open-minded and curious people,” she said.
American Victoria Hendersen lives in St. Petersburg and says she was “overwhelmed” by the speed with which Russians accepted her as a friend. “At a housewarming party, I had four separate people, none of whom I had invited, offer to help me find a job after I’d expressed discontent with the one I had then. Friends have dropped everything they’re doing, at the drop of a pin, to come look at an apartment with me and make sure I didn’t get scammed in the process.”
2. Don’t be afraid of distances
For Russians, especially for those who live in Siberia or the Far East, distances mean nothing. “Traveling in Russia changed my life,” says Aurélia Crémoux, who recently studied at the Moscow Architectural Institute. “I discovered some landscapes I had never expected to see in my life, especially around Lake Baikal!”
“My Russian friends sometimes invite me to join them on a weekend trip that according to them is just outside Moscow, and when I ask how far away they say “Oh, it’s not very far, about 500 km,” said Italian Axel Grieco. “The total length of my country is around 1,185 km, so for me, even after all this time, it’s still very strange to hear!”
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If you are not a fan of long routes, visit nearby districts. “Take any suburban train (elektrichka) to the last stop and explore the countryside,” a user nicknamed Benedict recommends on an expat forum. He also advises avoiding tourist traps and “their crappy matryoshkas and other rip-offs”.
3. Remember that life doesn’t stop in winter
“Siberia was a place of discovery for me,” admitted Manuel Gomez from Spain, who spent 2 years in Krasnoyarsk. “At -40 degree Celsius we went for walks in the Stolby Nature Reserve: We climbed to the top of the rocks where my friends opened a thermos flask, took out a gas stove and heated stewed meat in tin cans. And that was happiness. And what a view!” he said.
“Russians eat ice cream everywhere, at all times, even when it's -15°C,” said Aurélia. “Some people will even tell you that it's very healthy.”
“Russians taught me that no matter how cold it is on the street it is always warm enough for a friendly smile (and a cup of tea),” says Axel Grieco, who now lives in Moscow.
4. Do it like a Russian
Briton Andrew Byron who lives in Moscow admits he sort of becomes another person when he speaks Russian. “If I arrive at my Russian friends’ house and they see me wandering in my socks, they will tell me to put some slippers on. Or if I whistle they can tell me to shut my mouth!” he says. “And when I speak Russian I started doing this as well!”
The same thing happened to Chiaki Hirai from Japan, who spent her internship in Moscow. Once, she noticed that she accepted the Russian tradition to keep a place in a queue. “One day, I found myself asking people, ‘I’m gonna buy an envelope, but will be back soon, so please, keep my place.’ I still find it hard to believe I’m saying things like this. But in Russia, this is an ordinary thing,” she said.
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MOSCOW (AP) — The 75 years since Yevgeny Kovalev was a teenage prisoner in Auschwitz have been marked by tormented memories and a wonder that he’s still alive.
“Remembering all that is always like torture for me, can you imagine that? I’m even wondering myself how I could survive those times,” the 92-year-old retired Russian factory worker told The Associated Press ahead of the 75th anniversary Monday of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army.
“We lived for minutes. We didn’t hope that we would survive,” he said.
Kovalev’s journey into the depths of the Nazi death-camp system began when he was arrested in 1943 at age 15 for helping partisans fight German forces occupying the Smolensk area in western Russia. He aided in sabotage attacks that blew up Nazi Germany’s trains and equipment.
“They put me on a bench, tied up my feet and body and scourged me with whipping sticks. My shirt was wet through with blood,” he said.
He was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the vast expanse of crude barracks and crematoria built by the Nazis in occupied Poland that was created to supplement the original Auschwitz camp, where the first victims to be fatally gassed and incinerated by the Nazis were Soviet war prisoners.
Auschwitz was the most notorious in a system of death and concentration camps that Nazi Germany operated on territory it occupied across Europe. In all, 1.1 million people were killed there, most of them Jews from across the continent.
At Birkenau, trains pulling boxcars crammed with prisoners pulled into the camp and the occupants were unloaded onto the platform.
“Those people were civilians. None of them knew they would be burned,” he recalled. “They went to decontamination, went into the wash house, were locked inside and Zyklon the gas came. In five to seven minutes, everyone was dead.”
Many of the arrivals were told they were being taken to showers for decontamination.
So many prisoners were killed that the crematoria on the edge of the camp couldn’t incinerate all the bodies. Auschwitz’s Sonderkommando prisoner work units threw many bodies into open pits and burned them there.
The crematoria worked around the clock. “Smoke came day and night and the smell was terrible,” he said.
Prisoners who were ill or feeble were culled from the new arrivals and executed quickly. Younger, healthier prisoners were kept alive in order to perform work, but even teenagers feared they could be chosen for elimination.
The infamous doctor Joseph Mengele came to the camp and conducted selections of “who should go to the crematorium and who should stay. I went through this procedure three times. It was horrible. We knew perfectly well that we could be burned,” Kovalev said.
At some point, teenagers such as Kovalev were sent to a subcamp that had previously been used for Roma prisoners.
“We opened one of the barracks and it was full of clothes, including children’s clothes, shoes, so many of them. That was terrible. They exterminated people, burned them and left the clothes,” he said.
He said another barracks had packs of human hair that the Nazis planned to use somewhere.
In late 1944, he and many other young Auschwitz prisoners were sent to northern Czechoslovakia as forced labor in a radio factory. Auschwitz was liberated on Jan. 27, 1945, but Kovalev still had to work as a forced laborer at the factory until April of that year.
After the war’s end, he joined the Soviet military, then got work in a plant manufacturing automobile parts, from which he retired in 1990.
He remains stunned by the twists of fate he endured as a youngster.
“It was just a coincidence” that he survived, Kovalev said. “We never hoped that we would survive, absolutely, no one had any hope. ”