Tag Alexander Van der Bellen

Van der Bellen II

Alexander Van der Bellen has been re-elected President of Austria. As I wrote in 2016, when he won his first term, Van der Bellen’s ancestors had moved from the Netherlands to Russia in the 18th century. They lived in Pskov…

Alexander Van der Bellen’s father in 1917

In his memoir, Lighted Windows (1978), Veniamin Kaverin recalls scenes from Pskov in the first days after the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd: Kostya von der Bellen was a student from our class. He was very short, important-looking, jug-eared. A line from Chekhov’s notebooks – “A tiny…