Russian Garden Gazette

The sign in the Russian Cultural Garden reads Dedicated September 9, 2018. The Garden was in fact opened on September 8, 2018. And behind that small historical discrepancy lies a very Cleveland story — the weather.

The opening of the Russian Cultural Garden was originally set for September 9, 2018. The date was not chosen at random: it was the 190th anniversary of the birth of Leo Tolstoy.

Tolstoy was to be one of the first names on the Walk of Fame of Russian Culture — and it seemed a fine thing to open the Garden on his birthday.

Then the weather interfered with our carefully laid plans.

A storm warning was issued for September 9: heavy rain and gusting wind. After some thought we moved the ceremony forward a day, to Saturday, September 8.

There was, however, one small loophole.

So perhaps it worked out correctly after all.

And now, every September, the Russian Garden has two nearly coinciding birthdays: the date on the sign, and the day we actually cut the ribbon.

Eight years have passed since then.

The Garden changed. Gagarin arrived, the Walk of Fame continued, the trees and hydrangeas grew. People changed, events changed, Cleveland itself changed.

But the names in the paving stayed.

And among them — Leo Tolstoy.

There is one more remarkable way to look at Tolstoy — not as a bronze bust, a portrait in a textbook, or the author of enormous volumes.

We can see him alive.

Tolstoy is one of the few great writers of the nineteenth century whom the film camera caught in time.

Not a character in a film. Not an actor. Tolstoy himself.

And every time you watch those few moving frames, something strange happens: the distance between us and the nineteenth century suddenly gets a little shorter.

After One World Day we were talking with friends about how differently people find their way to Cleveland.

At the Parade of Flags we see countries. But behind the name of every country lie quite different geographies — towns, villages, languages, family histories.

And that is where the idea came from. What if, at the next One World Day, people told us not only which culture they represent, but also where they themselves come from?

I was born in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia.

My grandmother was the daughter of exiled Poles. They lived in the village of Ganzurino, alongside Buryats and the Semeiskie — Old Believers whose own ancestors had once ended up in Siberia, far from where they came from. They were exiled in whole families, which is where the name Semeiskie comes from: semya is the Russian word for family.

And my mother was born in Tarbagatai, one of the traditional Semeiskie villages.

And here geography turns into something else entirely.

Semeiskie culture is extraordinarily bright — literally.

Vivid costumes, polyphonic singing, traditions handed down from one generation to the next. Old amber necklaces that families will tell you are three hundred years old.

You look at those impossible reds, blues, greens and yellows, and you begin to understand where an otherwise inexplicable love of bright things sometimes comes from.

On the first weekend of September in Cleveland, it is hard not to look up.

The Cleveland National Air Show has taken place over Labor Day weekend for more than sixty years. In 2026 it returned to Burke Lakefront Airport on September 5–7.

But we wanted to show it a little differently. Not so much the perfect close-up photographs of aircraft.

Here are a few frames shot by someone from our community, simply on a phone. In places the camera cannot keep up with the plane. In places the heads of spectators get into the shot. You can hear voices.

But you can see the thing that matters most: people looking up at the sky.

And watching those frames, you find yourself remembering a poem written more than a hundred years ago.

In 1910–1912 aviation was still a wonder. And Alexander Blok wrote “The Aviator.”

At the start the poem is almost pure delight. The aircraft climbs higher and higher. Its engine sings. The pilot disappears into the sky. Below, the hangars, the people and the earth are left behind.

But gradually the poem changes. Delight turns into unease.

The flight ends in a fall — and the closing lines suddenly look far beyond the fate of a single airman. Blok seems to see the future of aviation itself.

Within a few years this would stop being a poetic premonition. The aeroplane — one of the most beautiful proofs of the human capacity to overcome the impossible — would also become a weapon.

Flight did not change. What changed was what people made it serve.

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space.

His sculpture stands today in the Russian Cultural Garden — not as a monument to a state or a political system, but as a symbol of one of the greatest human achievements. That is how the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Federation describes it too: as a symbol of the daring of human dreams.

And two years after Gagarin's flight, something else happened.

On June 16, 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.

And here our story returns unexpectedly to Cleveland.

Valentina Tereshkova's story is told at the International Women's Air & Space Museum, located here in Cleveland — in the terminal of Burke Lakefront Airport.

And that context matters a great deal to us.

From the beginning, the Russian Cultural Garden deliberately excluded political, military and religious symbolism from its space. This is written into the Garden's stated principles: to preserve the humanitarian and peaceful character of the Cultural Gardens.

So Tereshkova interests us here not as a political figure of a later period. She interests us as the first woman to leave the Earth.

The decades that followed made feelings about her name a great deal more complicated. A historical symbol became bound up with the political system of an altogether different era.

But can an achievement be cancelled after the fact?

You can argue about a person's later actions. You can reject their political position outright. You can see how power makes use of the authority of historical names.

The flight of 1963 does not disappear because of it.

Perhaps this is where Blok comes to mind again. A great human achievement and what it later comes to serve are not always the same thing.

The International Women's Air & Space Museum sits inside the building of Burke Lakefront Airport. The same Burke over which the aircraft of the Cleveland National Air Show had just been flying.

And the airport's own future is very uncertain.

The City of Cleveland is considering closing Burke and rethinking an enormous site on the lake shore — some 450 acres of land and nearly two miles of shoreline. Among the city's stated goals are wider public access to the lake and economic development.

But the conversation is far from over. In 2026 City Council held a series of hearings on the financial side of a closure; the Federal Aviation Administration and both of Ohio's senators came out against it; the mayor's administration has not stepped back from its position. The obligations attached to federal and state grants do not expire until 2039.

And here another contradiction appears.

The organizers of the Cleveland National Air Show say it plainly: in their assessment, without Burke Lakefront Airport the Air Show cannot continue. The 2026 show went ahead as planned; what is at stake is the years that follow.

So what should happen to this place?

Today that conversation no longer sounds theoretical at all.

There is an airport. There is an Air Show that has been drawing people to the lake shore for more than sixty years. There is the International Women's Air & Space Museum. There are working aviation services.

And there is an enormous stretch of one of the most valuable spaces in present-day Cleveland — the shore of Lake Erie.

Which matters more?

Perhaps the question is put wrongly. Perhaps it is more interesting to ask:

We began this issue with a small date on the Russian Garden's sign.

From there we reached Yasnaya Polyana.

Then Ulan-Ude and Tarbagatai.

From Siberia we came back to Cleveland.

We looked up at the sky alongside the crowd at the Air Show.

We remembered Blok's Aviator.

We climbed higher still — after Gagarin and Tereshkova.

And we came down to earth again, on the shore of Lake Erie, wondering what that shore will be tomorrow.

Memory, most likely, is built this way.