Once a thriving community of aristocrats who had fled the Bolsheviks and workers who had come to build a railroad, the Russians of Harbin, China were gradually made unwelcome in their adopted homeland and forced over a period of decades to return to a Russian motherland many of them had never seen. For some the transition was disastrous, while others found salvation. Giles Roberts met with many of Moscow's Harbin community to record their stories of hope and horror.
It was August of 1954, Alexander Pavlovich recalls, when he boarded the train in Harbin, China, that would take him back to the motherland he had never seen. Packed into cattle cars with his fellow Russians, Pavlovich crossed the Chinese-Soviet border and caught his first glimpse of stone-faced Soviet border guards. People in one wagon started to shout "Hurrah," and the cry was taken up along the length of the train, Pavlovich recalls.
Nearly two decades earlier, Pavlovich, now a 65-year-old Moscow resident, had been part of a 100,000-strong Russian community in Harbin and Manchuria comprised mostly of those who had arrived beginning in 1898 to build the KVJD railway cutting through Manchuria to connect Siberia and Vladivostok. Eventually these workers and their descendants were joined by families of White Russians who fled the victorious Bolsheviks after 1917.
But by the mid-1960s, the once-thriving Russian community had all but disappeared as its residents were forced out over the decades, first by the Japanese who occupied Manchuria in 1932 and took control of the railroad, later by the Red Army that drove out the Japanese in 1945 and took many Harbin Russians against their will back to the Soviet Union, and finally after 1949 by the Chinese communists, whose regime became increasingly unfriendly to the resident Russians.
Harbin Russians ?€” or Harbintsy, as they call themselves ?€” spread across the globe from France to Australia, America to Argentina, exiled from their exile. The majority, however, were to return to Russia, whether they were motivated by financial difficulties or sheer patriotism. The course of their lives to follow depended largely on when they returned.
Of the community of Harbintsy in Moscow ?€” approximately 400 in number ?€” the largest group left Manchuria in the 1950s, putting their faith in the new spirit of forgiveness that Nikita Khrushchev had started at the 20th party congress.
Georgy Melikov, a Moscow historian born in Harbin in 1930, is among this group. The son of a Russian KVJD railway worker, Melikov came to the Soviet Union in 1955.
Like many Harbintsy of his generation, Melikov adapted well to life in the Soviet Union. But that does not mean he is willing to forget his past. As the director of a society for Russians returning from China, he meets with his fellow Harbintsy three or four times a year. And three years ago, on the 100th anniversary of the founding of Harbin, he helped organize a celebration at Moscow's Belgrade Hotel, luring over 250 people from all over the world.
According to Melikov, his Moscow-based society, created in 1988, is one of many such groups throughout Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
"The largest is in Novosibirsk," Melikov said. "We all publish occasional newsletters. People advertise to find lost friends or relatives. Most Harbintsy find each other through [such] contacts or word of mouth. It has a life of its own."
During one recent Harbintsy reunion, Larissa Pavlovich, Alexander Pavlovich's mother, talked about her own return. She too was among those who boarded the cattle cars in Harbin in 1954 to come back to the country where she had been born.
Now 86, Larissa Pavlovich was born in Novosibirsk, where her father served as mayor before the communists seized control of the town. She and her family fled to Manchuria in 1922 when the communist victory in the civil war seemed inevitable.
"When my father came to Harbin he had spent all his money on getting us out of Russia. Since he had no skills that were of much use there, he had to scrape a living operating the tap supplying water for steam trains. He also earned a little by hunting and selling furs," Larissa Pavlovich said last month in the Lyubertsy home she shares with her son, Alexander, and daughter-in-law Tatyana.
However, life gradually got easier for Larissa's family. She went to study on a scholarship, and, during the Japanese occupation, when life became difficult for many Harbin Russians, Larissa's husband worked in a liquor factory. "It was good work for the time," she said.
But by 1954 ?€” after the communists had taken control of China ?€” "we felt very unwanted," Pavlovich said. She and her family starting applying to emigrate ?€” first to Australia, then to Brazil. The Soviet Union was only a third choice, but even after options one and two fell through, they were not disappointed about their decision.
"We didn't fear coming to the Soviet Union. We were naive and optimistic. Certainly we'd heard rumors about Soviet atrocities, but we thought them exaggerated," said Larissa. "It wasn't until much later that we learned about the fates of those whom the Soviets had arrested in Harbin in 1945 and 1946. It's almost impossible to believe now how little we knew about what was happening in the Soviet Union."
Having arrived in the Soviet Union, Larissa's family was given a little money and the choice of four or five places in which to resettle.
"My husband was advised to go to the Kuzbass region because of the coal industry there," Larissa recalled. "We had many negative impressions. Even compared to China there seemed to be a lot of poverty. People were often drunk in the streets ?€” something you rarely saw in Harbin. At first we had to do low-level jobs. My husband ?€” a qualified engineer, mind you ?€” greased machines while I worked in a valenki [felt boot] factory. But all of us Harbintsy knew how to pull ourselves up from nothing. We'd all done it before. My husband got better work, and I started to teach. Housing was free, medicine was free, education was free. Really, I can't complain about my life in the Soviet Union."
For Larissa's son, Alexander, a former scientist who is now the vice director of a plant in Lyubertsy that manufactures coal-mining equipment, emigrating to the Soviet Union was also a generally positive experience.
"The Harbintsy had to get out of China," Alexander said. "Up until the 1960s the communists didn't interfere with us much, but it was clear that our time in China was coming to an end ?€” that it was no longer a wise place to live. I remember back in 1953 the Chinese communists were undergoing a party purge. We lived not far from the Harbin sports stadium, where during the day I would see them preparing for mass executions. There were crowds, flag-waving, and a lot of pomp. We could hear the shots from our house. Then they buried the dead in shallow graves nearby."
Although he had never seen his parents' original homeland, Alexander was keen on coming to the Soviet Union. "I was 18 and full of enthusiasm. It was wonderful to be surrounded by my mother tongue ?€” even if it wasn't my mother country. I was allowed to continue my engineering studies. In fact, the authorities told us that if we encountered prejudice as Harbintsy we should ask the local party headquarters for help."
In spite of this comparatively warm welcome, the family was nonetheless watched.
"We were people who had relatives and friends abroad [Harbintsy who had emigrated to France and the United States]. Everybody in that position, not just Harbintsy, fell under some kind of suspicion," Alexander said. "By the time Brezhnev came to power our phone here in Moscow was tapped. In the 1980s we had a 'false friend' who always came around to our house and tried to get us to talk about our contacts abroad. But this was funny more than anything else. This 'false friend' was a very low-level operative and he kept on giving himself away through sheer stupidity ?€” revealing things he knew about us that he shouldn't have known. I found him rather useful. In fact, he helped with repairs around the house and did some really good work on my car. I had a private mechanic paid for by the government."
But while Alexander Pavlovich can laugh at the comical attempts of the government to keep tabs on his family, those Harbintsy who came to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s have a much darker tale to tell.
Take, for example, the Harbintsy who fell into the clutches of Soviet security personnel who accompanied the Red Army into Manchuria in 1945. Among the victims of this wave of persecution was Larissa's stepfather, Vasily Ushakov.
"My stepfather had fought as a partisan with the Whites in the civil war. He was a good and conscientious man," said Larissa. "In 1945 he told my mother that he'd had a dream in which the Virgin Mary appeared before him and told him to make amends for killing his fellow countrymen. He went to the tobacco factory in Harbin where he worked, took his earnings and gave them to my mother. Then he handed himself over to the Soviets and told them what he'd done in the civil war. Years later we heard that he'd been seen in a prison camp in the Urals, very ill and weak. I suppose he died there. My mother couldn't accept his going like that. She lost her mind and died soon afterward."
Alexander Dzygar was also among the victims. Now 85, at the end of World War II Dzygar was a concert violinist in Harbin. In 1945 he attended a banquet given by the Harbintsy in honor of the Red Army, after which he was among those invited back to the Soviet Consulate for tea. There, he and his fellow Harbintsy were arrested in their dinner jackets. He spent the next several years in Soviet prison camps where his fingers ?€” and his musical career ?€” were irreparably injured during torture sessions.
The first wave of immigrants from Harbin ?€” those who left China after the Japanese moved into Manchuria in the 1930s ?€” were equally unfortunate. At that time, when Russian railroad workers were fired from their posts by the Japanese authorities, nearly 30,000 Harbintsy boarded trains for Russia, where few were to escape execution or imprisonment in Stalin's purges of 1937 and 1938. Most were arrested under an order of the NKVD ?€” the predecessor of the KGB ?€” directed against Harbintsy on baseless charges of being spies for the Japanese. The majority of the men were shot, the women imprisoned and the children placed in children's orphanages or, for the lucky ones, in the care of relatives who had avoided arrest.
Tatyana Kovalevskaya was just 2 years old in 1932 when her parents, both workers on the KVJD, moved the family back to the Soviet Union. By 1937 they were living in Voronezh, where her father had found a job as a physical education teacher. Her uncle was studying in Moscow and her aunt was a schoolteacher. But by 1938, her father and uncle had been shot after being charged with spying for the Japanese, and her aunt and grandmother were in prison. Somehow, she and her mother managed to slip through the cracks and avoid arrest.
"My mother had a friend who was in the NKVD," said Kovalevskaya. "He showed her an order for her exile with me and advised her to run. We changed our home and changed our names and, in the confusion of those times, we slipped through the NKVD's net."
In spite of her father's tragic fate ?€” the truth of which she only learned in 1988 ?€” Kovalevskaya joined the Communist Party in 1961.
"I believed in the ideal. Even when I knew that my father had been executed I still believed in the ideal, not in Stalin. When the truth did come out I thought that those surrounding Stalin were to blame ?€” that the system itself wasn't at fault," said Kovalevskaya. "Much later when I met with other Harbintsy and learned what had happened to their families ?€” horrible things for so many people ?€” the ideal was wrecked for me. Now I can understand why some old people, particularly those who worked in the party organization, kill themselves when they realize that their entire life's work was for nothing ?€” or for worse than nothing: for evil."
In 1988 Kovalevskaya became involved with Memorial, the human rights organization founded by former political prisoners and dissidents, where she has compiled an impressive archive on the Harbintsy who were executed or imprisoned.
"When I first joined Memorial it wasn't specifically with the Harbin connection in mind, but when looking through the archives, I realized that there were many like me," said Kovalevskaya, who set about organizing a society for those who had come back from China in the 1930s or who had been arrested by SMERSH [an acronym for the Soviet "death to spies" organization] in Manchuria in 1945.
"Whenever Memorial organized an event I was there with a notice saying who I was and where I could be contacted. I met people with histories similar to mine and received about 200 letters from throughout the CIS," said Kovalevskaya.
Through her efforts, Kovalevskaya reunited two elderly female cousins, former Harbin residents both living in Moscow, who each thought the other had died. "I read the documents about their fathers' executions and noticed a similarity in the surnames," said Kovalevskaya. "In those days the security organs split families up, and those who had been imprisoned had to sign papers promising that they wouldn't speak about their experiences; the children who had lived through such experiences were generally too scared to look for relatives when they became adults."
The legacy of fear has not only kept the earlier Harbin victims from seeking out their friends and relatives, it has also prevented them from comfortably mixing with the Harbintsy of the generation that returned under the Khrushchev thaw.
Part of this is explained by reasons of class. Those who returned in the 1930s and 1940s were, for the most part, from working-class families who lost their jobs on the KVJD railroad, while those who returned later were more closely associated with the Russian aristocrats who had fled the Bolsheviks.
"In Harbin, the classes didn't socialize with each other. They were the aristocrats, whereas our parents were ordinary workers on the railroad," explained Kovalevskaya. "Most of our parents were enthusiastic communists, so of course there wasn't much friendship between them."
But the distinct barrier separating the two different Harbin groups is maintained by more than class lines. The Harbintsy of the Khrushchev generation and those who returned under Stalin are separated by very different histories, and it is difficult for them to find a common language.
"The Harbintsy who came under Khrushchev finished their studies and got decent jobs. Everything was easier for them and they didn't suffer as we did," said Kovalevskaya, adding that even today there is little understanding between the two groups. "Sometimes I get the impression their [group] is just a drinking club."
And while the Khrushchev-era Harbintsy have been able to stay in touch since they set foot on Soviet soil, many Harbin Russians who came back in the 1930s and 1940s have only recently established contact with each other.
"Only after 1988, thanks to Memorial, did we start to meet, and our topics of conversation really differ [from those of the Khrushchev era Harbintsy]," said Kovalevskaya. "Our memories are very bitter and we still have to cope with fear. Many are still afraid to talk openly about what happened to them. And maybe they're right. It's not clear what the future holds for this country."
It was August of 1954, Alexander Pavlovich recalls, when he boarded the train in Harbin, China, that would take him back to the motherland he had never seen. Packed into cattle cars with his fellow Russians, Pavlovich crossed the Chinese-Soviet border and caught his first glimpse of stone-faced Soviet border guards. People in one wagon started to shout "Hurrah," and the cry was taken up along the length of the train, Pavlovich recalls.
Nearly two decades earlier, Pavlovich, now a 65-year-old Moscow resident, had been part of a 100,000-strong Russian community in Harbin and Manchuria comprised mostly of those who had arrived beginning in 1898 to build the KVJD railway cutting through Manchuria to connect Siberia and Vladivostok. Eventually these workers and their descendants were joined by families of White Russians who fled the victorious Bolsheviks after 1917.
But by the mid-1960s, the once-thriving Russian community had all but disappeared as its residents were forced out over the decades, first by the Japanese who occupied Manchuria in 1932 and took control of the railroad, later by the Red Army that drove out the Japanese in 1945 and took many Harbin Russians against their will back to the Soviet Union, and finally after 1949 by the Chinese communists, whose regime became increasingly unfriendly to the resident Russians.
Harbin Russians ?€” or Harbintsy, as they call themselves ?€” spread across the globe from France to Australia, America to Argentina, exiled from their exile. The majority, however, were to return to Russia, whether they were motivated by financial difficulties or sheer patriotism. The course of their lives to follow depended largely on when they returned.
Of the community of Harbintsy in Moscow ?€” approximately 400 in number ?€” the largest group left Manchuria in the 1950s, putting their faith in the new spirit of forgiveness that Nikita Khrushchev had started at the 20th party congress.
Georgy Melikov, a Moscow historian born in Harbin in 1930, is among this group. The son of a Russian KVJD railway worker, Melikov came to the Soviet Union in 1955.
Like many Harbintsy of his generation, Melikov adapted well to life in the Soviet Union. But that does not mean he is willing to forget his past. As the director of a society for Russians returning from China, he meets with his fellow Harbintsy three or four times a year. And three years ago, on the 100th anniversary of the founding of Harbin, he helped organize a celebration at Moscow's Belgrade Hotel, luring over 250 people from all over the world.
According to Melikov, his Moscow-based society, created in 1988, is one of many such groups throughout Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
"The largest is in Novosibirsk," Melikov said. "We all publish occasional newsletters. People advertise to find lost friends or relatives. Most Harbintsy find each other through [such] contacts or word of mouth. It has a life of its own."
During one recent Harbintsy reunion, Larissa Pavlovich, Alexander Pavlovich's mother, talked about her own return. She too was among those who boarded the cattle cars in Harbin in 1954 to come back to the country where she had been born.
Now 86, Larissa Pavlovich was born in Novosibirsk, where her father served as mayor before the communists seized control of the town. She and her family fled to Manchuria in 1922 when the communist victory in the civil war seemed inevitable.
"When my father came to Harbin he had spent all his money on getting us out of Russia. Since he had no skills that were of much use there, he had to scrape a living operating the tap supplying water for steam trains. He also earned a little by hunting and selling furs," Larissa Pavlovich said last month in the Lyubertsy home she shares with her son, Alexander, and daughter-in-law Tatyana.
However, life gradually got easier for Larissa's family. She went to study on a scholarship, and, during the Japanese occupation, when life became difficult for many Harbin Russians, Larissa's husband worked in a liquor factory. "It was good work for the time," she said.
But by 1954 ?€” after the communists had taken control of China ?€” "we felt very unwanted," Pavlovich said. She and her family starting applying to emigrate ?€” first to Australia, then to Brazil. The Soviet Union was only a third choice, but even after options one and two fell through, they were not disappointed about their decision.
"We didn't fear coming to the Soviet Union. We were naive and optimistic. Certainly we'd heard rumors about Soviet atrocities, but we thought them exaggerated," said Larissa. "It wasn't until much later that we learned about the fates of those whom the Soviets had arrested in Harbin in 1945 and 1946. It's almost impossible to believe now how little we knew about what was happening in the Soviet Union."
Having arrived in the Soviet Union, Larissa's family was given a little money and the choice of four or five places in which to resettle.
"My husband was advised to go to the Kuzbass region because of the coal industry there," Larissa recalled. "We had many negative impressions. Even compared to China there seemed to be a lot of poverty. People were often drunk in the streets ?€” something you rarely saw in Harbin. At first we had to do low-level jobs. My husband ?€” a qualified engineer, mind you ?€” greased machines while I worked in a valenki [felt boot] factory. But all of us Harbintsy knew how to pull ourselves up from nothing. We'd all done it before. My husband got better work, and I started to teach. Housing was free, medicine was free, education was free. Really, I can't complain about my life in the Soviet Union."
For Larissa's son, Alexander, a former scientist who is now the vice director of a plant in Lyubertsy that manufactures coal-mining equipment, emigrating to the Soviet Union was also a generally positive experience.
"The Harbintsy had to get out of China," Alexander said. "Up until the 1960s the communists didn't interfere with us much, but it was clear that our time in China was coming to an end ?€” that it was no longer a wise place to live. I remember back in 1953 the Chinese communists were undergoing a party purge. We lived not far from the Harbin sports stadium, where during the day I would see them preparing for mass executions. There were crowds, flag-waving, and a lot of pomp. We could hear the shots from our house. Then they buried the dead in shallow graves nearby."
Although he had never seen his parents' original homeland, Alexander was keen on coming to the Soviet Union. "I was 18 and full of enthusiasm. It was wonderful to be surrounded by my mother tongue ?€” even if it wasn't my mother country. I was allowed to continue my engineering studies. In fact, the authorities told us that if we encountered prejudice as Harbintsy we should ask the local party headquarters for help."
In spite of this comparatively warm welcome, the family was nonetheless watched.
"We were people who had relatives and friends abroad [Harbintsy who had emigrated to France and the United States]. Everybody in that position, not just Harbintsy, fell under some kind of suspicion," Alexander said. "By the time Brezhnev came to power our phone here in Moscow was tapped. In the 1980s we had a 'false friend' who always came around to our house and tried to get us to talk about our contacts abroad. But this was funny more than anything else. This 'false friend' was a very low-level operative and he kept on giving himself away through sheer stupidity ?€” revealing things he knew about us that he shouldn't have known. I found him rather useful. In fact, he helped with repairs around the house and did some really good work on my car. I had a private mechanic paid for by the government."
But while Alexander Pavlovich can laugh at the comical attempts of the government to keep tabs on his family, those Harbintsy who came to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s have a much darker tale to tell.
Take, for example, the Harbintsy who fell into the clutches of Soviet security personnel who accompanied the Red Army into Manchuria in 1945. Among the victims of this wave of persecution was Larissa's stepfather, Vasily Ushakov.
"My stepfather had fought as a partisan with the Whites in the civil war. He was a good and conscientious man," said Larissa. "In 1945 he told my mother that he'd had a dream in which the Virgin Mary appeared before him and told him to make amends for killing his fellow countrymen. He went to the tobacco factory in Harbin where he worked, took his earnings and gave them to my mother. Then he handed himself over to the Soviets and told them what he'd done in the civil war. Years later we heard that he'd been seen in a prison camp in the Urals, very ill and weak. I suppose he died there. My mother couldn't accept his going like that. She lost her mind and died soon afterward."
Alexander Dzygar was also among the victims. Now 85, at the end of World War II Dzygar was a concert violinist in Harbin. In 1945 he attended a banquet given by the Harbintsy in honor of the Red Army, after which he was among those invited back to the Soviet Consulate for tea. There, he and his fellow Harbintsy were arrested in their dinner jackets. He spent the next several years in Soviet prison camps where his fingers ?€” and his musical career ?€” were irreparably injured during torture sessions.
The first wave of immigrants from Harbin ?€” those who left China after the Japanese moved into Manchuria in the 1930s ?€” were equally unfortunate. At that time, when Russian railroad workers were fired from their posts by the Japanese authorities, nearly 30,000 Harbintsy boarded trains for Russia, where few were to escape execution or imprisonment in Stalin's purges of 1937 and 1938. Most were arrested under an order of the NKVD ?€” the predecessor of the KGB ?€” directed against Harbintsy on baseless charges of being spies for the Japanese. The majority of the men were shot, the women imprisoned and the children placed in children's orphanages or, for the lucky ones, in the care of relatives who had avoided arrest.
Tatyana Kovalevskaya was just 2 years old in 1932 when her parents, both workers on the KVJD, moved the family back to the Soviet Union. By 1937 they were living in Voronezh, where her father had found a job as a physical education teacher. Her uncle was studying in Moscow and her aunt was a schoolteacher. But by 1938, her father and uncle had been shot after being charged with spying for the Japanese, and her aunt and grandmother were in prison. Somehow, she and her mother managed to slip through the cracks and avoid arrest.
"My mother had a friend who was in the NKVD," said Kovalevskaya. "He showed her an order for her exile with me and advised her to run. We changed our home and changed our names and, in the confusion of those times, we slipped through the NKVD's net."
In spite of her father's tragic fate ?€” the truth of which she only learned in 1988 ?€” Kovalevskaya joined the Communist Party in 1961.
"I believed in the ideal. Even when I knew that my father had been executed I still believed in the ideal, not in Stalin. When the truth did come out I thought that those surrounding Stalin were to blame ?€” that the system itself wasn't at fault," said Kovalevskaya. "Much later when I met with other Harbintsy and learned what had happened to their families ?€” horrible things for so many people ?€” the ideal was wrecked for me. Now I can understand why some old people, particularly those who worked in the party organization, kill themselves when they realize that their entire life's work was for nothing ?€” or for worse than nothing: for evil."
In 1988 Kovalevskaya became involved with Memorial, the human rights organization founded by former political prisoners and dissidents, where she has compiled an impressive archive on the Harbintsy who were executed or imprisoned.
"When I first joined Memorial it wasn't specifically with the Harbin connection in mind, but when looking through the archives, I realized that there were many like me," said Kovalevskaya, who set about organizing a society for those who had come back from China in the 1930s or who had been arrested by SMERSH [an acronym for the Soviet "death to spies" organization] in Manchuria in 1945.
"Whenever Memorial organized an event I was there with a notice saying who I was and where I could be contacted. I met people with histories similar to mine and received about 200 letters from throughout the CIS," said Kovalevskaya.
Through her efforts, Kovalevskaya reunited two elderly female cousins, former Harbin residents both living in Moscow, who each thought the other had died. "I read the documents about their fathers' executions and noticed a similarity in the surnames," said Kovalevskaya. "In those days the security organs split families up, and those who had been imprisoned had to sign papers promising that they wouldn't speak about their experiences; the children who had lived through such experiences were generally too scared to look for relatives when they became adults."
The legacy of fear has not only kept the earlier Harbin victims from seeking out their friends and relatives, it has also prevented them from comfortably mixing with the Harbintsy of the generation that returned under the Khrushchev thaw.
Part of this is explained by reasons of class. Those who returned in the 1930s and 1940s were, for the most part, from working-class families who lost their jobs on the KVJD railroad, while those who returned later were more closely associated with the Russian aristocrats who had fled the Bolsheviks.
"In Harbin, the classes didn't socialize with each other. They were the aristocrats, whereas our parents were ordinary workers on the railroad," explained Kovalevskaya. "Most of our parents were enthusiastic communists, so of course there wasn't much friendship between them."
But the distinct barrier separating the two different Harbin groups is maintained by more than class lines. The Harbintsy of the Khrushchev generation and those who returned under Stalin are separated by very different histories, and it is difficult for them to find a common language.
"The Harbintsy who came under Khrushchev finished their studies and got decent jobs. Everything was easier for them and they didn't suffer as we did," said Kovalevskaya, adding that even today there is little understanding between the two groups. "Sometimes I get the impression their [group] is just a drinking club."
And while the Khrushchev-era Harbintsy have been able to stay in touch since they set foot on Soviet soil, many Harbin Russians who came back in the 1930s and 1940s have only recently established contact with each other.
"Only after 1988, thanks to Memorial, did we start to meet, and our topics of conversation really differ [from those of the Khrushchev era Harbintsy]," said Kovalevskaya. "Our memories are very bitter and we still have to cope with fear. Many are still afraid to talk openly about what happened to them. And maybe they're right. It's not clear what the future holds for this country."