Back from the Former U.S.S.R.

It’s that time of the century again: years of serfdom behind them, the Russians are cooking up another experiment in miserable failure. But the group of Orthodox monks that stumbled its way from Moscow to Cambridge recently didn’t seem to have any plans as logical as establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat up their embroidered sleeves—they were trying to reclaim the copper bells that a kindly Harvard alum saved from Stalin’s icy clutches seventy years ago before giving them a nice home on the Charles. Let’s review: if the bells weren’t annoying Harvard students every Sunday at one with their incessant ringing, they’d have been converted long ago into siding for some totalitarian warehouse after the commies melted them down. In response to this act of generosity and cultural conservation, we’ve got a band of disgruntled clerics on our case. Last time we do a favor for those guys!

Just last week, it hardly seemed worth repeating the myriad reasons that sending back the bells made less sense than climbing into a sauna with Boris Yeltsin and a fifth of bathtub vodka. Aside from the cost and inconvenience involved, returning the artifacts would deprive Harvard of one of its most distinctive charms. And did the Eastern patriarchs expect Lowell’s corps of dedicated, if a bit eccentric, klappermeisters to just pick up and find a new weirdly cultish pseudo-extracurricular? With all due respect, fathers, if you want some bells, I hear there’s a really great Salvation Army Santa Claus playing the Pit this week.

Writing on the monks’ journey, Pravda—the former organ of the banned Communist Party of the Soviet Union, now the organ of, um, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation—wrote that negotiations would happen in “Harvard State University, Boston, US.” Hey—if the monks want to spice up their social lives a little, harvard-parties.com-style, far be it from me to stand in their way. But please, I wondered, could they stop yammering about those silly bells?

Of course, that was before the monks kindly offered to foot the bill for returning the bells. With that obstacle removed, even the most possessive Harvard bell enthusiasts have had to consider the suddenly-serious option that St. Danil will get back his copper toys. And maybe they should. But frankly, all sacramental significance aside, one can’t help suspect that our bearded visitors would think twice about their mission if they actually got to hear them ring a few weekends in a row.

Maybe memory has sweetened the bells’ tones since Herbert Hoover was president and Ordzhonikidze was minister of industry, but Harvard students trying to get their z’s after a hard Saturday night know all too well how jarring that Eastern tuning can be. The monks have already shouted post-Soviet hosannas to the heavens upon playing the bells briefly—but before they waste too much energy on their vaguely Quixotic quest, the monks should see if it changes their minds to sit in the Lowell courtyard and let the bell-boys (and girls) do their thing for a few hours or twenty. After that, if they still want the things, let them spruce up Putin’s not-quite-police-state however they can.

—Simon W. Vozick-Levinson is an editorial editor.