Contributors

Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of many books, including Out into the Beautiful World and Grief and Other Stories.

Matt DeLisi is coordinator of criminal-justice studies, professor in the Department of Sociology, and faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University.

Brian Patrick Eha is a writer in New York.

Nicole Gelinas is a City Journal contributing editor, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street—and Washington.

Judge Glock is the chief policy officer at the Cicero Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913–1939.

Connor Harris is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Kay S. Hymowitz is a City Journal contributing editor, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys.

Malcom Kyeyune is a writer based in Uppsala, Sweden, and sits on the steering committee of Oikos, a conservative think tank in Sweden.

Catesby Leigh writes about public art and architecture and lives in Washington, D.C.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

John O. McGinnis is a contributing editor of City Journal and the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University.

Lance Morrow, a contributing editor of City Journal and the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, was an essayist at Time for many years. His latest book is God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money.

Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and a professor at New York University.

Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor and a French public intellectual, is the author of many books, including Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twenty-First Century and The Genius of India.

John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal and coauthor of The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.

Stephen J. K. Walters is the author of Boom Towns: Restoring the Urban American Dream; a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise; and chief economist at the Maryland Public Policy Institute.

John Paul Wright is a professor at the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.

Soundings:

Seth Barron is managing editor of The American Mind and author of The Last Days of New York. Jim Fitzgerald is a retired special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who specialized in terrorism investigations, including infiltration of terrorist organizations. Stanley Goldfarb is a professor of medicine and former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and the author of the forthcoming book Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns. Thomas Hogan has served as a federal prosecutor, local prosecutor, and elected district attorney. He is currently in private practice. Theodore Kupfer is an associate editor of City Journal.

Artists:

Tayfun Coskun is an international photojournalist with the Anadolu Agency. Alberto Mena is a graphic artist living in New York. For cover artist Jessica Dalrymple, see page 2.

Columbia County, NY Diarist

Repetition, with Variations

Lance Morrow

The images out of Kiev and Lviv—especially of young Ukrainian mothers fleeing with their children or hiding in shelters underground—take me back a long way, to Matthews Hall in Harvard Yard in September 1959, when I arrived as a freshman and met my roommates. One was Ukrainian and the other was Hungarian, and both had come to America as refugees from Stalin or Stalin’s heirs.

My Ukrainian roommate, Danylo Struk, was a dashing young man with a certain Cossack swagger that would make him popular at Wellesley and Radcliffe mixers. Dan had two great loves: Ukraine and Ukrainian literature. We became best of friends and collaborated in translating Ukrainian fiction and poetry—Dan doing a rough draft of the translation and me polishing up the English.

Dan’s father had been murdered in one of Stalin’s purges. His mother must have been an extraordinary woman—forebear of the Ukrainian mothers we now see trying to shield their young from Putin’s bombs and rockets. With little Danylo in tow, she fled to the West, making her way across many borders, through the Russian armies and the German armies, until at last she made it to the safety of the American lines.

Dan and his mother were displaced persons. They wound up among the Ukrainians of the diaspora in northern New Jersey, around Metuchen, where Dan grew up. He earned a scholarship to Rutgers Prep and then another to Harvard.

After we graduated, many of us trooped down to New Jersey, to the large Ukrainian immigrant community there, for Dan’s marriage to Roma, a Ukrainian beauty from Alberta, Canada. The wedding, a tremendous affair with heroic drinking and dancing, went on for four days. Alas, the marriage did not last.

My other roommate, Derick, was in his teens when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956. His family escaped by night, often on foot, until they reached Austria. “We walked across the border around 1 am, not far from the bridge at Andau,” Derick remembered. “We were housed in a monastery in Styria, from where we got to Salzburg and eventually on a U.S. aircraft out of Munich. We arrived in the U.S. in a snowstorm around 10 pm on December 24, 1956. It is still the best Christmas present I ever had.”

Among the few things they brought out of Hungary was his father’s valuable stamp collection, which helped support the family after they settled in New York. Derick found his way to a New York private school, and then to Harvard. He attended Harvard Medical School and became a successful internist and hospital administrator.

Danylo would become a distinguished professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Toronto. The great project of his life, causa pietatis, was Ukraine. He founded and edited the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, a vastly ambitious project. After 30 years of labor, said one description, it became the “most comprehensive work in English on Ukraine: its history, people, geography, economy, and cultural heritage, both in Ukraine and in the diaspora.”

Dan died too soon, more than 20 years ago, of a heart attack while he was attending an academic conference. Derick and I remain in touch, and he promises to visit us on our farm in upstate New York in June. We’ll talk a lot about Danylo.

In old age, you see the patterns of repetition—with variations. These are history’s morphic resonances, as the biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls them: “In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.” So it is in Russia now. Putin— the tiger hunter, the bare-chested centaur, the man at the end of the long, silly table—recapitulates (with variations) Joseph Stalin—Koba the Dread. Or, across centuries, he conjures Peter the Great—Russia’s Enlightenment modernizer, a Dr. Jekyll with more than a touch of Mr. Hyde. Or Ivan the Terrible. Or even, deep in the nostalgia of the id, Genghis Khan, who united the nomadic tribes of northeast Asia in the twelfth century by summoning the ancient ferocities with which Putin seeks, in the twenty-first century, to reunite tribes of the old Soviet empire—his Planet Krypton.