—3— Mark your calendar Feb. 12, 6:00 p.m. RAPS Dinner (originally scheduled for Dec. 17) Multnomah Athletic Club, 1849 SW Salmon Feb. 19, 1:00 p.m. Remembering PSU’s History 338 Smith Memorial Student Union RAPS to the rescue: Volunteer lecturers sought for Tuesday series A Portland assisted living facility, Rose Schnitzer Manor, is seeking speakers for a Tuesday evening lecture program. According to Katherine Hansen, activity coordinator, lectures can be on almost any topic, including art, travel, history, politics, religion, accounting and finance, and health and fitness. The lectures are scheduled on Tuesdays from 6:45 to 7:45 p.m. Rose Schnitzer Manor, part of the Cedar Sinai Park nonprofit organization, is located near BeavertonHillsdale Highway and Scholls Ferry Road. The lecture venue, Zidell Hall, has a high-quality sound system, two handheld microphones, two headset microphones, a projector that can be linked to a laptop, and DVD/VCR/CD player. Contact Hansen by phone, 503-535-4041, or by e-mail, Katherine.hansen@cedarsinaipark.org. Other volunteer opportunities for RAPSters: Develop a plan for a new RAPS scholarship Contact: Bob Vogelsang, 503-292-5955 drvogie@yahoo.com Mentor writing skills for Japanese grad students Contact: Pat Wetzel, 503-725-5277 wetzelp@pdx.edu Send cards and/or visit RAPS members who are ill or grieving Contact: Vic Dahl, 503-636-5784 vbdahl@hevanet.com Estonia under the Soviets: ‘She had been lied to all her life’ Estonia, the country whose name is usually said in the same breath with its fellow Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania, was given its own platform by Tom Palm at RAPS’ Jan. 15 program in Smith Memorial Student Union. Nearly 40 RAPS members listened as Palm, a professor emeritus of economics and a native of Estonia, explained with words and pictures Estonia’s starcrossed history and its emergence in the early 1990s as a free, independent state. A country that had spent most of its long history under the domination of German, Danish, Swedish, and Russian invaders, Estonia, by the late 1980s, was marking more than four decades under Soviet occupation. As Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union, Estonians began their revolution, not with guns and bullets, but with song. As many as 300,000 Estonians gathered to defiantly sing songs that had been forbidden by the Soviets. These song festivals, which continued until independence, became known as “The Singing Revolution.” In 1989, while the Soviets still occupied the country, Palm received an invitation from the department of political economy—“which consisted of propagandists whose job it was to justify whatever the Communist Party had come up with,” he explained—to lecture on the Western perspective of the economics of Karl Marx. “I had the board covered with equations,” Palm recalled. “A wise-guy kid in the front row pointed out that equation so-and-so and equation so-and-so are inconsistent. “‘You can have one, but you can’t have both,’ he said. ‘They’re in direct contradiction.’ “So I asked, ‘Whose argument is it? It’s not mine— it’s Karl Marx’s.’ “In the back row, there’s a young woman with her head in her arms, her shoulders bouncing. I figured I made her cry—she had been lied to all her life.” In spring 1991, with the Soviet grip on Estonia slipping, Palm attended a conference that included the Estonian prime minister and economics minister. Over dinner, Palm made a lighthearted remark to the prime minister, suggesting that he should gather all his advisers together “butt naked” in a sauna and “nobody gets out until you figure out what you’re going to do.” In August, fully clothed, Palm and Estonia’s leaders met to institute a market economy. That same month, the Soviet Union fell apart, and Estonia declared its independence.
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