ROTARY IN RUSSIA
By Frank Deaver
Rotary Club of Tuscaloosa, Alabama USA
 

     A new district in the Rotary world!  After the RI Convention in Denmark, a delegation of Rotary leaders went to Russia to formally create District 2220.  From the first Rotary Club in Russia (Moscow, 1990) there are now 48 clubs in the new Western Russia district, with more than 1000 Rotarians.  The clubs were formerly affiliated with districts in Finland and Sweden.

     But flash back to 1975.  An American Rotarian visiting St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) chanced to meet Nina Sergeevna Raziborskaja, a retired teacher of English and a poet.  She was charming, but shy; proud but modest.  She told about “the great war,” and how she, then a young lady, had said good-bye to the man she intended to marry, as he went off to submarine service in the Baltic Sea.

     He never returned.  She never married.

With gentle encouragement, Nina Sergeevna agreed to read a poem she had written to her lost sailor’s memory. Apologizing that in English translation it lost its rhyme and meter, she read aloud, her eyes growing increasingly moist:

               Permit me, my love, to come to the beach,
               Where the cold, gray Baltic breakers
               Will bring your silent love to me,
               From somber depths of the Gulf of Finland.

     Then Nina Sergeevna poured tea for her guest, and in the process she stared at the Rotary Wheel on his lapel.  “That pin that you wear; what is it, and what is its meaning?”  The reply was a hasty attempt at a simple and understandable concept.  “Rotary is an international organization dedicated to helping people from different countries come to know each other in a personal and friendly way.”

     “That sounds like such a good purpose,” she said, nodding her head as a teacher approving a student’s recitation.  “And do we have local clubs of that organization here in Russia?”  Unfortunately, at that time, the answer could only be negative.  “That’s a pity,” she said.  “With such goals as you describe, we should have Rotary Clubs here, too.”  She shook a school teacher’s finger at her guest and demanded, “Don’t you think so?”  Of course he agreed.

     Fast forward from 1975 to 1994.  In a post-Peristroika visit, that same Rotarian visited Russia’s first Rotary Club, in Moscow.  But inquiring in St. Petersburg about Nina Sergeevna, he learned she had died.  It had to be, for nearly two decades earlier she was already growing old and feeble.

     If it is possible for a person to look back from the next life, perhaps Nina Sergeevna remembers that in 1975 she wished for Rotary in Russia.  Perhaps she looked with satisfaction on that first club in Moscow in 1990.  And perhaps even now she is applauding the expansion of Rotary into a fully organized district in Western Russia – further extending the principle of international understanding and good will.  After all, she called it “such a good purpose.”