I spent Christmas in St. Petersburg, Russia when I was 26 years old. Yegor Malashachiva is a biology professor at St. Petersburg University and also happens to be a friend I met while we were both attending school in Germany. Since we would both be on holiday break over Christmas and New Year’s we decided to visit the prettiest city in all of Europe (seriously, even in winter St. Petersburg is beautiful).
I remember landing in Russia after midnight and spending the next 7 days touring the city and seeing sights I never imagined I would. I learned how to say ‘Happy New Year’ in Russian, visited the Kremlin, ate at McDonalds (seriously, it didn’t taste any different), took lots of photos and discovered that subway security guards don’t care whether you speak Russian but you better (somehow) quickly figure out what they want. One thing I didn’t expect to learn on my trip was the need every human being has for diversity and that sameness produces spiritual and emotional starvation. Ironically, I learned about this ‘starvation’ while Yegor was telling me about bread.
Yegor grew up under the communist regime of the old Soviet Union and remembers all the privations associated with it. Somehow we got on the conversation of groceries and grocery stores and how they compared to those I knew in America. He told me that until the Soviet Union fell in 1991 grocery stores carried only one brand of everything – milk, cheese, bread, eggs, etc. He then told me about the changes that occurred beginning in 1992. With wide eyes he said, “I remember how exciting it was to go with my mom to the store and, for the first time in my life, see 2 brands of bread!” I was stunned. It never occurred to me that all of the choices that I took for granted as an American were mere fantasy in Soviet Russia. I knew then that different was good.
Unfortunately, we as Americans seem to be forgetting that truth. In my profession, I now see cemeteries requiring monuments conform to capricious standards and the public has grown so accustomed to them that they forget that they can have something different! The public disregards the delight of diversity and settles for the sorrow of sameness. Or, as my friend Yegor might say, they forget that there is more than one brand of bread.
Bott Monument hasn’t forgotten! We love crafting unique and memorable tributes to individuals and aren’t in the business of producing cookie cutter-style monuments. Communism failed and we don’t see any reason to replicate any of its practices.
