I've been looking through everything trying to find items from this period until my eventual return home from Vienna, and I'm finding hardly anything. I think I threw everything from this period out before my big move to Russia (this was just months after the 1991 putsch). I can think of a couple reasons for doing this, namely:
1) the memories were so bad that I just wanted to put them behind me; and/or
2) the current (at the time of leaving for Russia) situation so embittered me to the USA that I never wanted to return and when I couldn't bring everything with me, I decided that these materials were among the casualties to stay behind.
The problem with the first one is that it still results in a lack of documentation that would be helpful now and as such was short-sighted. The problem with the second one is in my thinking (granted, with not a lot of premeditation) that Russia would be any better.
This is clearly (to me at least) a case where two wrongs don't make a right. So in continuing in this endeavor I have a couple of options. I could just drop it here and simply provide the concrete evidence I do have without actually even trying to go into a chronological narration of my history, as the details against Russia will be inevitably more elaborate not only because they were more recent, but also because I have (lots!) more documentation from that period and those events.
Or I can continue knowing that this lack could work in the favor of the US, meaning they will come out looking a lot better simply by virtue of there being less evidence and fewer details.
Even so, however, there are some details that I have against the US that I don't have against Russia, such as my dad's security clearance and the FOIA response regarding SGA's possible/probable CIA income. I don't exactly have that kind of proof against the Soviets/Russians. However, even with these kinds of documentation, the claims made in my story do not necessarily follow as a logical end; they only give evidence that points to the possibility of my story, in whole or part, being true.
Another issue here, though, is that I am writing this in English in the United States, although anyone who has Internet access could read this, as long as the language wasn't a barrier. My experience is that in Russia there was more likelihood of the aspects of my story potentially damning of the USA were more liekly to be believed, and in the USA the portions of my story potentially damning of the USSR/Russia were more likely to be believed. That being said, however, there were more people in Russia also willing to believe part against their own countries than is probably true in the USA. The types of people in the USA who might be most likely to believe my story are, in my thinking, probably small subgroups not necessarily in the mainstream.
Some of the items I wish I could find now pertaining to the period 1986 to the first half of 1989 include the following:
* copies of prayer letters I sent out
* copies of detailed calendars of the time
* copies of individual letters I sent out (I had a typewriter, not a computer, at the time, so copies would not even be on my old floppy disks)
* detailed itineraries of my deputation trips
* a journal (which I didn't keep at the time, so it never existed, unfortunately)
I do have some documentation and copies of some correspondence received from others. Most of that correspondence would be about the writer, but I will scan through them and see if there are any pieces of information responding perhaps to something I'd written them, or other helpful information from those letters.
I'll continue on with my narrative with the next post, but I felt I should interrupt to explain these things.
~ Meg
