Year 2018

During the May 2018 Day of the City Celebration in Khabarovsk, Thomas Benke addressed the many international delegations assembled in the Khabarovsk City Duma hall.  The “elephant in the room” that day was Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea and the United States government’s claim that the annexation violated international law.  Thomas Benke addressed the volatile political situation in this speech:

Thirty years ago, the citizens of Khabarovsk and Portland organized the Portland Khabarovsk Sister City Association.  I have been a member these past 20 years.

Yesterday, I toured Khabarovsk’s historic vodka sorting plant, celebrating that great troika of Russian cuisine, vodka, borscht and pelmeni.

I am first and foremost by training a chemical engineer.  The chemists at the factory shared with me results of the elution of vodka through the coil of a gas chromatograph.  Besides that Amur river water, treated and filtered through the healthful shumgite, the results showed predominantly, ethanol (happiness) and barely detectable yet physically inevitable, methanol (poison).

I cannot help but see the world as a I am, a chemical engineer.  I know that the laws of thermodynamics (not the laws of men) determine the ratio of ethanol, methanol, propanol, butanol and etc. in distilled spirits. 

Time, temperature and pressure are all factors, as are the precursors (ingredients) used – perhaps wheat, barley, rice, corn, potatoes, grapes and other fruits, the common elements being starches and sugars.  

Apply too much pressure or heat and you drive the process, the chemical reaction, to a less favored result. Start with inferior precursors and you get an inferior liquor.  Introduce impurities at any stage and you will get an inferior product.

If you are careful and wise you get Khabarovsk vodka, happiness.  If you are careless or corrupt you get that stuff they served me in Lermontovka one time, blindness and a roaring hangover.

So I see the world as a chemical engineer.  In this room I see the components of a potentially wonderful product, peace.  I ask you all to join me in urging patience upon our governments, perhaps just the right amount of heat and pressure, that we may have world peace.


  • Thomas Benke and Lee Perry represented the City of Portland in the May 2018 Day of the City Parade.