A Russian European’s Story

Herman Achminow, as pictured on the cover of his last book published in 1983, two years before his death.

Born in Murmansk in twenty-one

in a Russia reeling from revolution

-yet once more-

one that would prove victorious.

Grew up in the thirties on the streets of Leningrad,

his parents warned him of a reality so sad

that it is hard to evoke:

children were disappearing on the way from school.

By the end of the thirties,

a decade of unspeakable cruelties,

Herman had become the leader of the local young communists -

whilst his (card-carrying) parents

were dispatched to the gulag -

he never saw them again.

In 1940, Herman was sent to the Baltic Front

where this commissioned soldier would have to confront

the choice between remaining loyal to Stalin

or surrendering to his German nemesis.

Herman became a member of the Vlasov Army:

Soviet soldiers who went over to the enemy,

plotting to destroy Stalin by leveraging Hitler,

calculating that the West would dispense with the German dictator

(a leap in the dark by desperate men that proved half-right or half-wrong, depending on your politics).

The war over, Herman was placed

on a truck returning him to Soviet space.

He jumped off in a Bavarian field

knowing that to continue the journey would mean certain death.

Herman got a scholarship to the UK

where at Oxford he wrote his first full-length essay

in which he described the split in the Soviet Communist party

that four decades later would bring the system down.

I first met Herman

in 1968 when returning from the then

Czechoslovakia, where I had had a front-row seat

on the Prague Spring - and was thirsty for answers.

In Munich, Herman would be my thesis director

but much more for he placed me on a vector

that would make questions of war and peace

key preoccupations for the rest of my life.

Herman was convinced that the only way to prevent

another murderous global event

was to unite the European continent:

this Soviet dissident would become a father of the European idea.

Herman co-founded the European Federalist Party;

while never winning any elections, the EFP

would help move European nations

to a new level of intra-state relations.

Herman’s mentoring, both formal and informal,

was anything but normal,

but owing to our collaboration

I became the first non-European member

of the first all-European party.

Herman is long gone

yet his vision of a united Europe lives on,

inspiring the European unity project to move ahead

defying the notion that its prospects are dead.