Claire Lampen '12 received an academic grant from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program to conduct research in Germany. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College

Claire Lampen of St. Louis, Mo., received an academic grant from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program to conduct research in Germany under the auspices of the German Historical Museum.

Six Bates seniors received grants for teaching English as a foreign language, with five of them awarded English Teaching Assistantships from the U.S. Fulbright Student Program: Jeffrey Berry of Redondo Beach, Calif., who will teach in Germany; Jacob Kaplove of Novato, Calif., bound for Argentina; Leah Maciejewski of Tewksbury, Mass., heading for Poland; Rebecca Merten of Warwick, R.I., who will teach in the Slovak Republic; and Jessica Plate of New Fairfield, Conn., who’s bound for Vietnam.

The sixth teaching grant recipient is Dana Ellis of West Orange, N.J., who will teach in Austria supported by a Fulbright Austria teaching assistantship, which is funded by the Austrian government.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is funded primarily by the U.S. Department of State and sends some 1,500 U.S. citizens abroad each year.

The academic grants offer an academic year of support for study and/or research in projects of the recipients’ design. The assistantships support students who both pursue their own research and work to improve local students’ English and knowledge of the United States.

Claire Lampen

Lampen, a Bates history major and recipient of a Fulbright Study/Research grant, will partner with the German Historical Museum in Berlin to study photographs, maps and documents left behind by a soldier named Wilhelm Endemann at the conclusion of World War I.

Titled “Images of the Great War: A Soldier’s Photographic Memory,” the project is significant because of the perspective and depth of Endemann’s collection. “I propose to follow Endemann’s trail,” Lampen writes, and “to flesh out the documentary skeleton he laid out to reconstruct a cohesive and uniquely personal narrative of World War I.”

German soldiers were forbidden to have cameras on the battlefield, but many defied that regulation and took personal snapshots that have ended up in albums like Endemann’s, though few are as detailed as his.

At Bates, Lampen recently completed an honors thesis on the indoctrination of German children under the Nazi regime. In 2011, she undertook a seven-month study-abroad experience in Berlin, completing a full course load in German at several institutions including Humboldt University. She was also an intern at the German Historical Museum, for which she did translations and research for a website.

Jeffrey Berry '12 received an English Teaching Assistantship from the U.S. Fulbright Student Program. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Jeffrey Berry

Berry, a triple major in history, German and French, first experienced Germany through a Bates Semester Abroad program in Berlin, and spent his entire junior year studying at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He wrote his Bates honors thesis on parallels between Freud’s psychoanalysis and the output of Viennese author and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler.

During his Fulbright year, he will divide his time between teaching English and leading a digital photography course to connect with community members.

“My photography course will display life across class and cultural lines,” Berry writes in his Fulbright proposal. “The photographic medium allows students, and myself, to capture concretely notions about what is characteristic or worthy of documentation in their daily lives and the region at large — and to discuss these issues.”

After his time as an ETA he plans to pursue graduate studies in modern European history, German studies or international relations.

Dana Ellis '12 received a Fulbright Austria teaching assistantship. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Dana Ellis

Ellis, recipient of the Fulbright Austria USTA award, is a psychology major. Like Berry, Ellis was inspired to learn more about her Fulbright destination by a Bates Fall Semester Abroad program, in her case Vienna.

“I embarked on a journey to expand my knowledge beyond what I could learn in American college courses and to immerse myself in modern-day Austria,” she writes in her proposal.

Ellis was inspired by a German-language teacher who used readings from a free newspaper to steep his students in the Viennese milieu.

“Learning a language provides the tools to interact with native speakers, but without the cultural context, the language skill is far less useful,” she says. “Bridging the gap between people of different backgrounds and exchanging cultural perspectives, while recognizing the inescapable differences . . . is what motivates me to teach abroad.”

Jacob Kaplove '12 received an English Teaching Assistantship from the U.S. Fulbright Student Program. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Jacob Kaplove

Kaplove, a psychology major, has worked closely with Lewiston’s Somali community as the program director for Refugee Volunteers, a program that promotes cross-cultural learning and exchange between Bates students and refugee families; as a researcher for Project SHIFA, an in-school program designed to promote the mental health of young Somali refugees; and as a Bonner Leader, a participant in a national program that promotes student development through community work.

He was one of two Bates students to receive the 2012 Heart & Soul Award from the Maine Campus Compact, recognizing outstanding contributions to the community.

Kaplove, who has done volunteer work in Central America, was attracted to Argentina in part because of the opportunity to work in a training college for teachers of English. This setting, he says, “will help to sustain my impact as my students will go on to teach future generations about the English language.”

In addition to teaching English in Argentina, Kaplove will work in a youth mentoring program and take courses in Spanish literature and public health. After Argentina, he plans to apply to medical school with the goal of practicing family medicine, which will allow him to continue working with Latino immigrants and refugee populations.

Leah Maciejewski '12 received an English Teaching Assistantship from the U.S. Fulbright Student Program. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Leah Maciejewski

“My Polish heritage has never been a large part of my life,” Maciejewski writes in her Fulbright proposal. “When my great-grandparents came to America, they chose to assimilate to the culture at the expense of tradition.”

Now Maciejewski has the opportunity to rediscover her Polish heritage while indulging her passion for teaching languages. “The Fulbright will allow me to do just that while also sharing my culture and experience as an American with my Polish peers.”

Maciejewski, a double major in English and Spanish, has been an accomplished student and volunteer, working in English Language Learning classrooms in Lewiston. She’s also respected for her athletic accomplishments, having captained the varsity softball team this spring and been honored as most valuable player, as a Bates Scholar-Athlete and as a member of the National Fastpitch Coaches Association All-Academic Scholar Athlete Team.

After her Fulbright commitment, Maciejewski will pursue a law degree in preparation for a career in public education policy. “I seek to explore the opportunities for bilingual policies in early education and consider new models of research and practice.”

Rebecca Merten '12 received an English Teaching Assistantship from the U.S. Fulbright Student Program. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Rebecca Merten

Merten, a history major, will travel to the Slovak Republic eager to continue cultivating her interest in education and to be immersed in a country foreign to her. She is “seeking to place myself in an environment that offers a level stage for cultural exchange, with everyone learning about a new culture.”

Merten brings considerable experience as an educator. While studying in Mexico, she assisted in teaching middle-school English classes. “While the teachers were trained, none were native English speakers, and I was a resource for both the students and teachers.”

In the Slovak Republic, she hopes to foster intercultural exchange through cooking and film clubs. As a student of history, she adds, “What interests me most about the Slovak Republic is how it has maintained its cultural identity while being at the crossroads of various military and cultural invasions.”

Upon her return, Merten hopes to remain involved in education and history.

Jessica Plate '12 received an English Teaching Assistantship from the U.S. Fulbright Student Program. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Jessica Plate

A history major, Plate minored in German and education at Bates, and hopes to become a teacher, a goal aligned with her interest in teaching English in Vietnam.

Through her education coursework, Plate amassed nearly 400 hours of student teaching and other fieldwork during her Bates career. “Some of my experience was in an English Language Learners classroom, where I worked with Somali refugees,” she notes.

As a student of history, Plate believes that this is a definitive time for Vietnam. That nation, she writes, “is surrounded by two majorly developing nations, India and China.

“Historians and policymakers — as well as the Vietnamese themselves — all have the same important questions: Where will Vietnam, whose third-largest trading partner is the U.S., stand as its neighbors grow? How well will Vietnam be able to imitate the Chinese model and develop a capitalist economy with a socialist government? How will Vietnam maintain successful relations with the U.S.?”

Attending Bates with support from a prestigious Thomas J. Watson Memorial Scholarship, Plate spent her entire junior year abroad, dividing it between Austria and India. She feels emotionally and intellectually well-prepared for this next foray into an unfamiliar culture. “My objective is to broaden the horizons of my students, so that they too may want to become cultural ambassadors one day.”

"Cro-Magnon Bacchus," a 2006 painting by Robert Feintuch, senior lecturer in art and visual culture.

The major German newspaper Berlin Zeitung reviewed a gallery exhibition in Berlin by Robert Feintuch, a member of the Bates art faculty whose portraits of men offer wry explorations of powerlessness and vulnerability.

Feintuch shows “thought-provoking, memorable, otherworldly lit, photorealistic — and at the same time surreal — scenes of powerless fighters, of brutes sinking in bed,” Ingeborg Ruthe wrote in the April 18 edition. Senior lecturer in art and visual culture at Bates, Feintuch showed recent work Feb. 18-April 28 at Berlin’s prestigious Akira Ikeda Gallery.

Shown here, the artist’s “Cro-Magnon Bacchus,” Ruthe went on, is “the portrait of an unathletic, rather ectomorphic hen-breasted type . . . What a contrast to the Bacchus motifs of the old masters.”

Ana Carbatti plays Iara in Sérgio Bianchi's 2009 film "The Tenants."

The Global Lens series of international films returns to Bates College this month starting with a screening of Brazilian director Sérgio Bianchi’s 2009 film The Tenants at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 27, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

All at 7 p.m., Global Lens screenings take place at Bates Mondays and Wednesdays through April 2. Monday screenings take place in Olin 104, and Wednesday screenings in Olin 105.

Screenings are open to the public at no cost. The series is presented by the Bates College Museum of Art. For more information, please contact 207-786-6158.

Winner of the Best Screenplay award at the 2010 Festival do Rio in Brazil, The Tenants depicts a working-class family whose new next-door neighbors are young criminals. Building tension with stylish sequences that blend reality and fevered imagination, Bianchi’s thriller offers a shrewd portrait of the social and psychological impacts of urban violence. It depicts a city of São Paulo beset — yet also aroused — by a permeating atmosphere of destruction.

Featuring 10 award-winning films in this series, the Global Lens project is designed to promote cross-cultural understanding through cinema. It is produced by the Global Film Initiative, a U.S. nonprofit that supports independent film from Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.

GFI awards grants to deserving filmmakers and supports the touring film series, whose other venues include Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

“Global Lens brings the world to Lewiston, giving viewers fresh perspectives on issues that confront people around the globe,” says Anthony Shostak, education curator for the Bates College Museum of Art. “Seeing them with other members of the community, as opposed to sitting at home, provides an expanded opportunity to discuss these issues.”

Here’s the schedule for the remaining winter-spring Global Lens screenings:

• Feb. 29: Dooman River depicts intensifying tensions between illegal North Korean immigrants and rural villagers on the Chinese side of the frozen river-border through the eyes of 12-year-old Chang-ho. While Chang-ho and his community are initially sympathetic toward refugees, mounting suspicion leaves Chang-ho torn between compassion and conflict. Directed by Chinese director Zhang Lu, the intricately detailed film has won multiple awards including the Jury Prize, Paris Cinema International Film Festival. (China, 2009, 89 min.)
• March 5: Soul of Sand is a suspenseful and eccentric thriller, directed and written by New Delhi native Sidharth Srinivasan, that explores the dark intersection between Indian modernity and tradition. A powerless watchman who guards an abandoned mine reluctantly helps his landlord’s daughter and her lower-caste lover escape when she is offered to her father’s business partner as his wife. When a masked killer is dispatched to hunt the pair down, all are immersed in a visually striking world of danger, honor and hierarchy. (India, 2010, 98 min.)
• March 7: Opera Jawa blends images of contemporary Indonesia with traditional Javanese dance, music and myth to tell the tale of Seyto and Siti — a husband and wife content until the local butcher seduces Siti. This sets the stage for an epic battle in lush forests and pristine beaches, based on “The Abduction of Sita” from the Hindu epic “The Ramayana.” Directed by Indonesian Garin Nugroho. (Indonesia, 2006, 120 min.)
• March 12: Belvedere, set in a refugee camp after 15 years of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, paints a rich and uncommon portrait of the aftermath of war. Ruveyda is a widow who takes solace in routine: caring for her extended family and searching for the remains of her husband and son. But she is tested when her nephew is selected to participate in a reality show in a former enemy enclave. Directed by Ahmed Imamovic, the film explores themes of patience, faith, love and forgiveness. (Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2010, 90 min.)
• March 14: The Light Thief is a contemporary tale of good and evil set in a wind-swept valley in Kyrgyzstan. Director Aktan Arym Kubat plays Mr. Light, a humble, trusting and compassionate village electrician who strikes a suspicious deal with a wealthy developer. With the dream of supplying wind-generated electricity to the valley and employment to his destitute neighbors, Mr. Light embodies goodwill and decency in a corrupt and changing world. (Kyrgyzstan, 2010, 80 min.)
• March 19: Street Days uses humor and gritty realism to explore desperation, decline and moral dilemmas in modern Georgia. Checkie, a middle-aged and unemployed heroin addict, is blackmailed by corrupt policemen into introducing the son of their wealthy enemy to drugs. Making increasingly bad decisions, Checkie reunites with his wife to face his deteriorating options before a penultimate choice. Directed by Levan Koghuashvili. (Georgia, 2010, 86 min.)
• March 21: The White Meadows a blend of fable and political critique set on the shores of a salt lake, follows Rahmat, a boatman who listens to people’s sorrows and collects their tears in vials to pour into the sea. But he remains powerless against a community that, in misguided attempts to appease the gods, inflicts multiple brutalities. Director Mohammad Rasoulof’s mesmerizing and surreal film won the AsiaAfrica Special Jury Prize and the Muhr AsiaAfrica Award for Best Director at the Dubai International Film Festival. (Iran, 2009, 93 min.)
• March 26: The Invisible Eye explores surveillance, repression and insurrection during the 1980s military regime in Argentina. An assistant teacher at an elite Buenos Aires private school, the lonely and obedient María Teresa adopts the school’s totalitarian oversight policies. But she soon finds herself amidst a breakdown in structure and discipline at the school that mirrors the rebellion outside. Directed by Diego Lerman. (Argentina, 2010, 95 min.)
• April 2: A Useful Life is a universally appealing tribute to the soul of cinema, set in Uruguay and filmed in black and white. When a local cinema closes due to dwindling support, loyal employee Jorge is forced to find a new passion and navigate his world beyond the screen. Director Federico Veiroj received an award for Best Director at the Valdivia International Film Festival. (Uruguay, 2010, 63 min.)

“In the moment that their shutter closes, I have the opportunity to see what they see, to experience the world as they do.”

Led by Professor of French Kirk Read and Associate Professor of History Joseph Hall, the program is an intensive immersion experience, develops strong linguistic competency and is intellectually engaging.

Emma Hitchcock '14 photographs Maud Welch '13 in front of the Aiguilles de Port Coton on Belle Île. The students are part of the intensive and immersive Bates Fall Semester Abroad program centered in Nantes. Photograph by Ebbe Sweet '11.

• See more of Sweet’s photographs of students taking photos in France
• Learn about newly renovated Roger Williams Hall, Bates’ new center for language study and off-campus study, and Hedge Hall, also renovated for academic use.

In Read’s recent blog post, he quotes the heroine, Zilia, of Françoise de Graffigny’s 18th-century Lettres d’une Péruvienne, who noted that the French seemed to possess “very different portions of those elements from which [God] formed human beings.”

Read quotes Zilia’s lament as a “way of making explicit some of the thrills and spills of encountering new cultures.” Many of the Bates students, “are living very poignant, often emotion-filled days as they struggle to navigate new ways of living and seeing the world.”

Jeff Sharlet, journalist and professor of English at Dartmouth College.

A best-selling author whose writing has explored Americans’ relationships to faith, Jeff Sharlet examines anti-Islamism through the lens of this year’s tragic massacre in Norway at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 7, in Chase Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

Part of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships’ Civic Forum Series, the event is open to the public at no cost. Supporting the lecture are the anthropology, English, politics, religious studies and rhetoric departments; the American cultural studies program; the humanities division; and the Office of Intercultural Education at Bates.

For more information, please contact 207-786-6202.

Sharlet’s talk, titled The Killer in Me: Reading the Oslo Manifesto’s Sources, reflects on the growing virulence of anti-Islamic activism and rhetoric through his analysis of a text issued by Anders Behring Breivik, whose bombing and shooting spree in Norway in July left more than 90 dead. The manifesto combines and amplifies “respectable” anti-Islamic rhetoric.

Sharlet has written or co-written several books examining the role of faith in Americans’ lives. The most recent is the essay collection Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country in Between, released in August by W. W. Norton & Company.

“The characters in Sweet Heaven . . . are rough, unfulfilled, often doomed,” wrote a Kansas City Star reviewer. “We always suspect that by the end, they will be betrayed by their beliefs, will be disillusioned or destroyed.

“But failure doesn’t make belief meaningless. It may be the only thing that gives faith meaning at all.”

Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth University, Sharlet is the author of the nationally best-selling The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper, 2009), which exposes the workings of the underground evangelical group “The Family,” whose ranks include members of Congress and other powerful individuals.

“Sharlet’s book is one of the most compelling and brilliantly researched exposés you’ll ever read,” says author and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich — “just don’t read it alone at night!”

In 2000 Sharlet and novelist Peter Manseau created Killing the Buddah, an online literary magazine described as “an electronic Tower of Babel, a Talmudic cathedral of stories about faith lost and found.” (The phrase “Killing the Buddha” comes from a Buddhist sage who said, “The Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha, but an expression of your longing.”)

Success with Killing the Buddah inspired Sharlet and Manseau to spend a year investigating the American religious experience. This adventure showed them a cowboy church in Texas, witches in Kansas, a Pentecostal exorcism for a terrorist in North Carolina and an electric chair gospel choir in Florida.

Free Press published their findings in 2004 in a book with the same title as their website. Publishers Weekly describes Killing the Buddha as “perhaps the most original and insightful spiritual writing to come out of America since Jack Kerouac first hit the road.”

Sharlet has written for Mother Jones, New York, The Nation, The New Republic, The Washington Post, Salon, The Daily Beast and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He has been a frequent guest on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” and NPR’s “Fresh Air,” and has appeared on HBO’s “Bill Maher Show,” Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” NBC Nightly News and other broadcasts. He is a contributing editor to Harper’s and Rolling Stone.

He is working on a new book called Hammer Song, which he describes as “a short book about pop, folk, punk, sex, riots and the Cold War.”

The Fulbright recipients are (follow the links to learn more):
Ana Brzezinska, a 2011 graduate, and Anne Connell, 2010, both of whom received assistantships for teaching English as a foreign language in Germany;
Emily Grady, a 2010 graduate who received the equivalent grant for teaching English in Argentina;
Peter Marsters, a 2009 graduate whose fellowship will support his research into energy use in China;
and Rachel Stern, a 2007 graduate who will study business and management in Spain.

Fulbright is the flagship international educational exchange sponsored by the U.S. government. It is designed to increase mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States and of other countries. The program is funded primarily by an annual congressional appropriation to the U.S. Department of State.

The two students of Russian began their Mount David Summit panel presentation with a black-and-white photograph showing the open casket of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova surrounded by mourners, including a visibly distraught Joseph Brodsky, a poet she had famously mentored.

In one of the 2011 summit’s many panel presentations, Nora Murray ’12 and Andrew Wilcox ’11 drew on powerful works by the two acclaimed Russian poets to explain the “Sights, Sounds and Sense of Russian Poetry.”

The session, held in a Pettengill Hall classroom filled with fellow students, faculty, staff and friends, was moderated by Associate Professor of Russian Dennis Browne.

Wilcox examined Brodsky (1940-1996) , while Murray focused on Akhmatova (1889-1966).

Eeach read poems in the original Russian, showing how the sounds of a language — whether spoken or heard simply within one’s head while reading — contribute to the poem’s impact.

Murray pointed out, for instance, how the long pronunciation of the letter “o,” repeated throughout the Russian version of Akhmatova’s “The Last Toast,” strongly reinforces the mordant feeling of this meditation on the dissolution of one of Akhmatova’s three marriages.

They also read English translations, including their own, of the same works, revealing the audience how translations of the same piece can vary widely.

Both discussed, during the presentation and in response to questions afterward, the challenges and joys of translation, pointing out how much of the result depends on the intention as well as the skill of the translator.

While some translators aim to render a virtually literal, word-for-word representation in another language, even if that sacrifices some of the meaning, others seek to virtually create a new work that is their own as much as the original writer’s, a fact that prompted Wilcox to note that Brodsky tightly controlled translations of his poetry when he was alive.

You can still make money doing business in Russia, says Jere Calmes ’92, just not in the same wild ways

By Peter van Dyk
Photographs by Erin Calmes-Keta

When a capitalist country was born out of the remnants of the Soviet Union two decades ago, many adventurous young Westerners found an unlikely land of opportunity. One of them was Jere Calmes ’92 — and he has now spent most of his working life in Russia. It is still, he says, a land of opportunity, even if the opportunities have changed.

In well-appointed offices behind the unobtrusive front door of a renovated period building less than a mile from the Kremlin, Calmes says Russia’s healthcare sector is ripe for investors to make money, and he’s putting together a private equity fund to do just that. It’s a far cry from what he found in Moscow a few months after graduating from Bates in 1992 with a political science major and a secondary concentration in Russian.

“It was a crazy time when you could do almost anything you wanted to,” he recalls. “Everybody was doing anything. You didn’t need money. You just needed an idea.”

For him, the idea was cell phones. About six months after arriving in Moscow to teach introductory macroeconomics in English at a university, he helped launch VimpelCom. He was the 11th employee.

“We didn’t have money,” Calmes says. “We rented an office from the Moscow News for barter of two telephones.” VimpelCom became the first Russian company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is now worth around $19 billion.

Much of that value is built on the Beeline cell-phone network. Calmes was VimpelCom’s first marketing manager, and he is fiercely proud of the success of the Beeline brand, considered one of the most valuable brands in the world.

“We hired a guy that I met at a party drinking vodka one night, and we did the entire Beeline branding for less than $5,000,” he says, explaining: “He was really dying to have the job.”

Starting with just 13 base stations, the company quickly made money. And in Russia in the early 1990s, that attracted attention.

“Things were pretty chaotic here, and we ran into some issues, like everybody doing business in Russia, and then I left the country in 1994 kind of in a quick way, to make sure that everybody would be OK.”

Calmes gives a little laugh, suggesting he’s understating things a little, but he won’t be drawn out further. “Without going into details, we had some problems. Those problems were resolved over time and VimpelCom continued to flourish.”

If Calmes seems, well, calm in the face of what some might consider professional catastrophe, it’s a trait he carried with him from Park City, Utah, to Bates back in 1988. In high school he was a daring hot-shot alpine skier hoping to move up the U.S. Ski Team development ladder. But he just wasn’t fast enough, so he headed to Bates, obeying the rule among young skiers: “Ski slow, off to college you go.”

At Bates, Calmes skied four years and captained the team his senior year. He also took Russian courses and studied in St. Petersburg in the fall of his junior year. He once said that his father gave him one piece of advice for college: Learn to speak Russian or Chinese. Calmes’ choice of Russian reflected his priorities at the time: Afternoon Chinese classes conflicted with ski practice, so he opted for the morning Russian classes.

If no longer a hot-shot, Calmes is still daring. He left Russia in 1994 and joined Motorola, working in London, Egypt, and Russia. Then, in 2001, with VimpelCom struggling as Russia started to boom under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, Calmes returned to the company.

Calmes remembers the original business plan envisaging 10,000 subscribers within 10 years. When he became vice president for operations in 2001 the company was adding 30,000 subscribers a month. And that was small potatoes. Less than five years after the millionth customer signed up, there were 45 million Beeline numbers in operation.

Despite the potential for profits, Western confidence in the Russian business environment has taken hits over the past decade. The biggest blow was probably the 2003 arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, founder of the Russian petroleum company Yukos, on fraud charges.

Khodorkovsky’s supporters have long said that the case against him is political, arguing that Putin wanted to punish Khodorkovsky for funding opposition groups. The Kremlin maintains that the judiciary is independent and says it has no influence over the cases involving Khodorkovsky or anyone else.

But in the years following the Yukos case, government or judicial involvement in business disputes, especially those involving foreign entities, routinely seemed to favor the Kremlin’s side.

A prime example was Calmes’ own company, VimpelCom. In the 2000s, a well-chronicled dispute between the company’s two main shareholders, Norwegian telecom Telenor and a Russian conglomerate owned by tycoon Mikhail Fridman, spilled into the Russian courts. Sure enough, the courts ruled against Telenor in decisions deemed “dubious” and “bizarre” by the Western media.

The feud didn’t end until 2009, and then only because the Russian government, in reaching out to the private sector, was seen as trying to “remove a stain from Russia’s troublesome record with foreign companies,” in the words of The New York Times.

Calmes says the Telenor dispute, and in particular the way the courts were misused, undoubtedly shook Western confidence in the security of private investments in Russia. He laments that some people have the ability “to use a legal system in Russia that is not entirely functional, that can be exploited.”

“Quite frankly, the courts weren’t used — meetings at cemeteries and guns were used.”

“In my world, [issues around the judiciary’s functionality] started when Khodorkovsky went to jail,” he says. “That was the watershed event.”

A day after Khodorkovsky’s jailing, so-called price lists — specific bribe amounts needed to influence the court case — were available to lawyers on the streets of Moscow. “Russia’s got a very strong executive branch with nothing else. So the checks and balances of the legal system pretty much aren’t there.”

On the other hand, Calmes says that it is a sign of progress that business disputes turn to the Russian courts. “Back when everybody was running by the seat of their pants, there wasn’t time for the courts, and quite frankly, the courts weren’t used — meetings at cemeteries and guns were used. The good thing about what we saw was the courts were used.”

Calmes says you have to factor the judicial doubts into the go/no-go of every business decision. “Can your rights be enforced? It’s always something to be asked. Are you going to buy a factory if getting control means going through the courts? No, absolutely not,” he says.

“And I think one of the biggest problems that Russia has today for going forward is this lack of a functioning judicial system.”

Calmes and his family — a Russian wife and three children — left again in 2006, this time for Italy and with no drama. (In Italy, he worked for the mobile group Wind, which was recently bought by VimpelCom to create the fifth-largest global operator by subscriber count.)

Calmes brought his family back to Russia within two years to take up the new challenge of the healthcare sector, first as CEO of a chain of pharmacies called 36.6, and now with the private equity fund. He is also a member of the board of directors of Tele2, a European telecommunications company with 24 million customers in 11 countries.

“There’s a certain bit of surprise that after all this time I’m still here, but I’ve changed my concept of how the world works. I don’t consider my home is Russia — I consider Russia as one of my bases, America is another,” he says. “If someone asked me where I was going to retire, I don’t know, but I hope it’s in America, probably somewhere in the Swiss Alps, and in Russia.”

But he’s a long way from retiring yet — he says there are too many opportunities to make money in Russia.

“You’ve got this dynamic country that continues to grow, and you still have a bunch of sectors that are underdeveloped, underinvested, fragmented, and it just makes a wonderful field for playing business. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”

Peter van Dyk is a Moscow-based journalist who regularly reports for National Public Radio.

The Global Lens series of films from around the world continues at Bates College with Ordinary People by Serbian director Vladimir Perisic, showing at 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 12, and 6 p.m. Monday, Nov. 15, at the Ronj, Bates’ student-run coffeehouse at 32 Frye St.

Admission is $5. Made in 2009, “Ordinary People” is in Serbian with English subtitles (79 min.). For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

The Global Film Initiative produces the series in an effort to promote cross-cultural understanding through the medium of cinema by showing little-known, skillfully made independent films to American audiences. The initiative believes that “a powerful, authentic narrative can foster trust and respect between disparate cultures and mitigate the social and psychological impact of cultural prejudice.”

Set in an unspecified time of conflict in the Balkans, Ordinary People captures the psychological toll of war on its participants, and the universal struggle of all soldiers to reconcile morality with action.

On a seemingly average day, a busload of young soldiers is sent to a remote location in the countryside and given a macabre task: the execution of a number of civilians. Dzoni, a green recruit, initially objects, but as he moves from one killing to the next, he is swept up by the specter of military authority, and quickly becomes desensitized by the apparently routine nature of his task. As he nears the end of his assignment, the quiet horror of the day slowly begins to affect him, forcing a painful reconciliation with his actions.

Perisic has directed several short films including Realitatvirtust and Miloch. His graduation film, Dremano Oko, was selected for Cinefondation at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2003. Ordinary People is his first feature film.

The National Science Foundation has awarded $619,000 to Bates College and two other Maine schools to continue a long-term study of the relationship among climate, the environment and human activity in the Shetland Islands, northeast of Scotland.

The three-year grant supports the Shetland Islands Climate and Settlement Project, an international multidisciplinary exploration of a period and place in history where “the sands of time” became more than just a cliche. The project is examining climate changes, dramatic transformations of northern coastal environments and ways that people have adapted to these crises — and sometimes contributed to them.
With Bates the lead recipient, the University of Maine and the University of Southern Maine are collaborators in the grant.

Encroaching sand

Late in the 17th century, a slow-motion nightmare struck a farming settlement on Mainland, the largest island in the Shetland archipelago. Over a period of years, sand blown from a nearby beach — possibly driven by storms of historic force during the so-called Little Ice Age, a period of a colder climate — buried farms in a township called Broo.

What happened there three centuries ago remains relevant today, says Gerald Bigelow, a visiting professor of history at Bates and the leader of the research, especially because many of the world’s coastlines are likely to experience significant impacts from ongoing climate change.

“We’re very interested in the role that climate change may have played in this disaster,” he says. “Probably it was a combination of factors that led to it, but it’s possible that human land use made that area more vulnerable to climate-related events.”

Focused on an archaeological dig at a former farm that may have belonged to one of the island’s richest families before the sand came, an international team of experts and students hopes to better understand the circumstances that drove the residents of Broo out of their homes. Today the site is a vast sheep pasture, with a thin layer of grass and topsoil over sand that’s more than six feet deep in places.

“It looks pretty grim when you see that people built little stairs to climb out of their dwelling” as the sand deepened around it, says Bigelow.

Coming from four U.S. and four U.K. schools, the team includes archaeologists, historians, geoscientists, biologists and experts in spatial analysis. With no comprehensive historical narratives to turn to, they are looking instead to a wide diversity of sources — from documentary records to the analysis of lakebed core samples that can reveal climate history — to piece together the story of this battle between sand and farmers.

Bigelow explains that a key purpose of the project is to serve as a case study in the archaeology of disasters. “What’s exciting about this project is being able to see these scenarios of real stress — and then human adaptation to that stress over fairly short periods of time.

“You get a better understanding of the role those experiences play in the way people plan for the future.”

Collaboration, inward and outward

The project reflects Bates’ deep commitment to collaboration, both across disciplinary boundaries and with other institutions. With Bigelow, who also teaches at USM, the Bates contingent consists of a biologist, William Ambrose; two geologists, Beverly Johnson and Michael Retelle; and historian Michael Jones.

In addition to the Maine universities, the other schools taking part in the overall research are CUNY Brooklyn College in the United States, and the University of Stirling, University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow and University of Bradford in the United Kingdom.

The project affords a wealth of experience to the students involved. “This type of multidisciplinary work is what it takes to understand the complex interactions between societies and their environments,” Bigelow says.

Bates students will travel to Broo in 2011 and 2012 during the Bates Short Term, an immersive five-week spring semester in which students focus on a single course. In addition to undergrads and graduate students from participating institutions, primary school students on Shetland have already been involved in the work, and Bigelow hopes to bring in Maine pupils.