It reminds me of a lecture about the beauty of nature of Siberia I heard from my grammar school history teacher at some after-school hours meeting. She passionately described what she saw there; the forests, the lakes, and the rivers, and how they change with the seasons, that it did not cross our minds to ask what she was doing there.

I asked after the meeting; she spent eight years there in a gulag.

After WWII, as a high schooler in Vilnius, she met in private apartments with a few other girls to sing Polish songs in the evenings. It was considered an anti-governmental activity; she was arrested and spent one year in solitary confinement. Gulag was the change for the better.

In 1957 she was allowed to relocate to Poland.

Please check my eight articles about Ukraine and Russia I posted on Medium this year, five of them before the war started. I am proud of my assessment of the situation far ahead of mainstream media pundits.