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In Russia you
must simply believe
The IPPNW European Student Congress
2005 in St. Petersburg
 Winston Churchill
once called Russia
“a riddle wrapped insie a mystery in an engima”.
One hundred medical students
from all over Europe were able to make up their own minds about this
statement
when they met up with their Russian colleages in St. Petersburg for the European
Congress of
the IPPNW Medical Students for Peace and Social Responsibility.
Once a year,
medical students form all over Europa gather in order to look back on
what has
been achieved and to plan the activities of the coming year. Besides
workshops,
plenaries, the evaluation of past projects and the development of new
ones, the
social aspect of such a meeting also plays a crucial role.
The students have
long recognized that sozial activism can also be fun – and indeed has
to be. The
onctact with like-minded colleagues from all over Europe
is an important motor behind the student movement and the sparks that
are
ignited at such meetings fly a long way and are able to motivate and
inspire
old and new students alike.
After the
successful conferences of Tallin, Berlin
and Dublin, this year’s meeting took
place in one of IPPNW’s
founding countries – in Russia.
Although the physicians of St.
Petersburg are working within IPPNW for 25 years
now,
there was up to now only a handful of medical students to continue in
the
footsteps of these great doctors. In order to change this status quo,
the
European Student Conference was moved to the marvellous city of Peter
the Great
– the former Leningrad.
Participation at
this conference was broader than ever. Thanks to a successful
recruitment
campaign, students from Poland,
Spain, Italy and France
joined their fellow
students from the rest of the continent
and contributed to the success of the conference. The worrk of the
former
German National Student Representative, Kathrin Pippert, deserves
special
mention at this place, as it was her work that brought most of these
new
students to the conference. The fact that next year’s European Student
Conference ist due to take place in Naples, Italy, attests
to the long-term effects of this recruitment.
 With
the NPT Review
Conference in New York
the dominating theme in the news, the motto of the conference as
fittingly
“Nuclear Age of Security?” This play on words reflects the deeper
questions
which many of the participants wrestled with when they came to Russia:
is this
world, which the nuclear powers have created really safe? Can the world
ever be
truly safe as long as there are nuclear weapons around? The Nuclear
Weapons
Inheritance Project (NWIP), which sends delegations of medical students
to
nuclear weapons states in order to start off public discouse about the
countries’ nuclear inheritance introduced itself and its work. It also
informed
the participants about the current
events in New York, where diplomats and NGO’s from all over the world
gathered
in order to discuss the future of the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty.
Besides this main
theme of nuclear security, the European students also dealt with the
medical
aspects of development and peace and with the cultural influence of
tradition,
socioeconomic background and philosophy
on the definition of health and sickness. Finally, the
Russian IPPNW
member Dr. Roman Dolgov talked on the problem of World War II -
landmines in Russia
and
presented the work of his group, which actively seeks the total
abolition of
landmines.
But the conference
would not have been an IPPNW conference, if the particpants had not
worked on
concrete projects as well. The productive project workshops yielded
their first
results with the restart of IPPNW’s multilateral medical exchange
program MedEx
and some concrete plans for raising awareness about the nuclear threat
amongst
students.
 The
fact that this
year’s conference was able to take place in St. Petersburg
at all was owed to the immense effort of Russia’s current National Student
Representative, Anna-Polina Shurygina. Together with the European
Student Reps,
Vicky Fera from Ireland and
Simon Achter from Austria,
she has given the European students the opportunity to get to know Russia
and its people. At the same time, this conference was a chance for the
students
of St. Petersburg
to get to know IPPNW and to see with their own eyes how many people
from all
over the continent are actively trying to work for a world without the
constant
threat of nuclear annihilation.
Which brings us
back to Churchill’s quote about the “riddle Russia”
mentioned in the beginning
of this short article. In a world where Russia
and the US
have enough nuclear warheads in hair-trigger alert to annihilate the
world
population many times over, we as Europeans have to somehow deal with
this
situation and these two countries. While the US
has been in the focus of attention for many years, this conference in Russia
was a
first step towards getting to know this ambiguous country in the east.
Although
you cannot even pretend to understand Russia
after merely a week in St.
Petersburg,
you might not need to – if you believe the Russian 19th
century poet
Fyodor Tyutchev:
“You cannot
understand Russia
with your mind ...
…in Russia
you must simply believe."
Alex Rosen
5th year medical student
Heinrich-Heine
University Düsseldorf, Germany
International
Student Repesentative of
IPPNW
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