I thank you for giving me an opportunity to address your meeting. It is like a unique chance to make a time travel and to return to the past in which many things were different and we were a bit younger. It gives me a chance to recall the camp near Nalchik. I may again make trips to the mountains, eat and drink at the parties in the collective farms of Balkaria and Kabarda, visit to the now devastated by landslides Tyrnyauz. I may again do some construction work on the site of a pioneer camp and participate at our discussions over many problems which no longer matter much between the delegates from the United Kingdom, USA and the then existing Soviet Union.

Many things now belong to the past and yet there is a number of things which survived the ruthless march of Time.It turned out that the words about friendship between our peoples which were inscribed on a red poster put in front of the camp were not just a propaganda phrase. I remember the darkest days of my country's history in the end of 1991 when our state and economy collapsed. The New 1992 Year was coming at the time when the food shelves were empty and prices skyrocketed. Suddenly in the last hours of 31 December my daughter phoned me and told me that a food parcel arrived from the USA. It contained impossible things at that time and it changed the whole atmosphere of our New Year's party. The parcel which brought belief in the goof life to come was from the former Nalchik camp participant Neil Horton. He could not find better time to help me and at the same time to demostrate that the friendship born in the Nalchik camp can overcome even the vicissitudes of national catastrophes. I use this chance to thank Neil for all his help to me, including his hospitality in California in 1977 and 1988 and his help during 1998 Russian finacial crisis.

When I recall things which survived the march of Time I also think of the spiritual experience which we acquired during the Tripartite camp. I do not know who came out with the idea to bring together memebers of the Young Leninist Communist League and the Friends, but I am sure it was a good thing to do. The contact of divergent ideas and experiences, frank discussions on all that mattered for the young people of the world at that time surely opened their minds to new vistas of thinking. I can't say how the contact of the British and American participants with the Young Communists changed their thinking and in what way, but since my first contact with the Friends philosophy and the practice of open discussions I was impressed by many of the ideas which followed from them. If I rightly understood these ideas they meant for me searching for the Truth in open confrontation of divergent points of view and tolerance for ideas alien to your way of thinking. Sometimes when I find myself at the deadlock in the process of working at the paper I wish I could find myself at a session when people of different outlooks sat together and kept silence until somebody began talking of things which came to his (hers) mind.It would be much easier to grope for the Truth when you see how somebody else is trying his best to do this.

I wish you all good health (and strongly recommend cycling every day in summer, spring and autumn, and skiing every day in winter, if the whether allows). I wish all of us to keep contact between us and I especially thank Feola and Russel for their attention to me.If it were in Kabardino-Balkaria I would have raised a toast: "For peace and friendship between our peoples, between peoples of the whole world (including Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan)! For the friendship of former participants of the Tripartite camps!" And I would insist that the toast should be drunk bottoms up.

Sincerely yours
Yuri Yemelianov. Moscow. May 23. 2002.