A little about Reyna, a lot about Russia
Reyna is moving to Nottingham Forest. Which reminds me of Russia, so I indulge in a long-winded reverie.
Gio Reyna’s moving to Forest, which reminds me of a few things…
Among the many travel talismans in my self-made, haphazardly curated museum here in Pennsylvania is a Nottingham Forest pin. This pin was given to me in Russia. It was bestowed to me in Moscow, more specifically, though not awarded via new friendship with a Muscovite but rather by a man of proud English stock that I’d met at a pub in Volgograd the night before England played Tunisia in the 2018 World Cup.
Now, “Volgograd” may not ring out with immediate historic meaning but perhaps “Stalingrad” does. For it is, of course, Stalingrad that the city was formerly called. This was before Iosif (Joseph) Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, born of Gori, Georgia fell out of favor with the Soviets, and in 1961, amidst a wave of formal de-Stalinization, his namesake city was renamed.
What was formerly named Stalingrad is now named for the river cutting through it, the Volga, and it hosted four matches during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
Anyway it was in that town, named Stalingrad from 1925 to 1961 (home to one of the most consequential battles of the twentieth century, the furthest east the Nazis ever reached, a rather significant place for Vladimir Putin to place World Cup games, with a giant “Motherland” monument looming over the city like Christ the Redeemer), that I first became acquainted with a gaggle of lads whose hearts bleed proud for Nottingham Forest.
Should you go to Russia, by the way, you may quickly learn that Stalin has been all but removed— not only from the city now called Volgograd. The Georgian revolutionary responsible for millions of deaths has been long since scrubbed from most public places, though Vladimir Lenin seems to hang around a bit.
You’ll find Lenin himself, of course, embalmed in Red Square. I made a slow quiet circle around him one afternoon between football games, feeling a dark chill down my spine as I paced around his earthly body. Outside in a long line waiting, I’d watched as toward the edge of Red Square, a lone person with an indecipherable sign arrived, holding it briefly above his head before a car slid next to him and summarily carried him off. It happened so abruptly and with nobody noticing, that to this day I wonder if I’d seen a mirage, or if my mind had made it up entirely.
Beyond Red Square’s embalmed tomb of the October Revolution’s leader, there’s not much to note Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in the grand expanse of Moscow’s rings, or in the ornate majesty of Saint Petersburg further north.
But should you board a train and traverse deeper into the east, descending unrestrained into cities like Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk (or Volgograd for that matter), you’ll find tributes to Lenin persist somewhat pervasively. Judged solely by presence of statue, it’s as though the leader of that 1917 bloodbath, which saw the royal family of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty, children and all, carried off and bayoneted to death in a basement in Siberia, had not made a mistake. Things simply deviated from the righteous path when Josef of Gori showed up (those defiant victories against the Nazis notwithstanding).
I realize you’re here to consider the loan of Gio Reyna to Nottingham Forest, but I’m afraid that I must first digress a bit further.
Something about Russia I fear often goes unnoticed is that its people are far from a monolith.
If you spend enough time lurking about the pubs of Russia’s hip metropoles in the west, for example, you’d find plenty of people who whisper their dissenting visions. A flashback strikes me here of a night in 2019. I had returned to Saint Petersburg for a second time and was drinking vodka with a friend from a shared carafe, washing it down with loaves of bread and caviar, when a man from the next table stood up and bowed to me, asking permission from my friend to address me. Turning to me, he’d said, “You have a beautiful face. Why are you in my shit country?”
Later, after our tables had convened, he whispered while rolling a loose-leaf cigarette, “I don’t like my president”. Oddly enough there was a photo of that president on the wall behind us, placed next to one of Vladimir Lenin.
Anyway he was far from the first person I had met to whisper that quietly in the cumulative three-odd months I’ve spent in Russia.
Back in Volgograd during the World Cup, for example—the place all a-flutter with English football fans—I was connected to a couple that offered to tour a few of us around the Second World War Museum and the ethereal Mamayev Kurgan monument.
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