Wasted country: the experience of living in the USSR turned out to be unnecessary

I replied that I would definitely study piano at the Moscow Conservatory. And in the end I will become the conductor of the orchestra.

As a result, I didn’t learn. And by no means became a conductor.

But I’m still delirious under the bright spring sun from the lessons – in black short shorts and with a utterly wrinkled briefcase. With a twisted sweaty rope – a red tie around his neck. And you have to go through garages overgrown with acacia. Then through the apple orchard. Then there is the volleyball court.

It wasn’t there…

– Are you otkel? – the starshaks who have arisen from the thickets from an obviously unfriendly area poked their front fix.

– Since the 24th.

Bang!!! – the most severe blow with a sudden foot under the balls:

“We’ve been since the 40s, poel!” Get out from here.

Immediately dropping the school stuff from my hands, curling up in three deaths, wiping my tears, exhausted from pain, I retreat back home.

Howling, like the Serpent Gorynych, I fall home.

– Who? the father asks.

Although everything is clear.

He runs out of the doorway. He sees in the distance the fleeing backs of the kid. He picks up a briefcase from under a bush.

The next day he takes me to the boxing section. And a new life begins…

It seems that every second person from there, from the distant past, can tell a similar story. The history of one’s own awareness, personal assimilation of great meanings. With the motive of growing up and growing up – behind the backs of the great Soviet wrestlers, boxers, hockey players, gymnasts … Behind the backs of a mighty nuclear power. Ankle-deep in slogan promises of “continuous growth of prosperity”: an abyss of graphs, tables of social competitions, wall newspapers with fake milk yields.

At the same time, an unfortunate, impoverished, closed country. Fenced off from all honest light by a steel lattice of ideological dogmas, stupid propaganda. Considering a salary of 150 full-fledged engineering rubles as a metaphysical pinnacle of being. Property. The conquest of socialism. (Actually, a trivial joke. A perverted conclusion of the Marxist-utopian theory of egalitarianism.)

Holding on to these iron bars with tenacious hands, we tried to look out there in the distance, in an unknown galaxy of loudspeakers hissing with Floyds, reflections of the enchanting fireworks of someone else’s beautifully glossy life. …Where we are now and vegetate.

In turn, from the height of time, gazing intently and even with some hope back at the USSR.

By the strength of the new ideological leaders, he turned in some way into canned goods from Art Nouveau. And rotten. In a monstrous extract of memories: ice cream-soda-Crimea-education. Plus huts for free. Plus equal opportunity. “Zarnitsa” – Kalash-pioneer camp-graduation. “The beautiful is far away”… Turning around, sour with lies, with elementary nonsense: “Don’t be cruel to me …”

Fifty years…

For the universe – dust.

For a man – eternity.

Happy is he who is free, as simply as I am now, to take and flip through half a century ago. So, got there. It was not in vain that he suffered, prayed in oblivion of the disastrous endless black “Tuesdays”, “Thursdays”, denominations.

So, philosophically, there was a reason to get stuck from hooligans then … It made you stronger.

You broke through the thorns of the pseudo-alcoholic 80s, wild 90s, wars, crises, defaults. You write an angry experienced text. You are, and that’s what matters. What’s in the past?

Do you hear?..

Exodus of the sixties. “Blood, Sweat and Tears” compete in improvisation with the “Crimsons”. “Earth, Wind & Fire” went to the top of the charts. The Beatles are in agony. Although in the USSR only a few heard about them.

Eaten by mosquitoes, these units with indescribable delight sing along to the drunken guitarist under the Christmas tree Okudzhavov’s song “The Last Trolleybus”. The quintessence of thaw-bleating dullness:

I’ve been out of trouble with them more than once,

I slapped them…

How much, imagine, kindness

in silence, in silence.

Hiding in the rain in canvas camping tents, our young parents, without realizing it, hid there from … Well, for example, the illusory nature of the opportunity to fully express boiling emotions (they could only be expressed by a few artists flooded with the party); be realized as it was depicted in beautiful Soviet films about the Komsomol and science (could be some – verified, recruited, signed the protocol).

Infected with the ghostly-feigned virus of freedom of the sixties, the microbe of the world Moscow youth festival, the virus of Platonic-Khrushchev communism around the bend, our relatives … Obediently swam with the flow there – where the more successful contemporaries rowed. By hook or by crook, they squeezed their way to the top: heading the controlled Soviet glossy magazines (all kinds of “notebooks” of an agitator, political informant, “Soviet Union”, “Soviet Woman”, etc.); saddling party bodies, patronizing radio-TV-culture-cinema-theatres.

Having arranged there at home, on Olympus inaccessible to cattle, life is quite tolerable. With all the consequently due to “lords” and “sirs”, hated in Gribachev-Simonov’s prose “bourgeois”, capitalist bells and whistles.

Below – leaving Soloviev’s “demons”, zombie people, “ready to repeat.” But…

Year after year, decade after decade, living paycheck to paycheck, advance to advance. Not seeing, not hearing absolutely anything, except for work from morning to evening, in the summer the month of vacation Crimea – and again … From cover to cover. From night to morning. And vice versa.

No significant career prospects. Without foreign trips anywhere (unlike the bourgeois party leaders).

Without the likelihood of honestly and quickly change-purchase housing. Buy a car honestly and quickly. Without a clear probability of saving money for the same apartment and car. Only if you are not involved in the untouchable clan of the CPSU – in its highest form in the Kremlin. (Provincial party bureaucrats were also not so hot, to be honest.)

Come on – stop!!

… where we are now: under the yoke of absolutely the same circumstances that seized us 50 years ago.

The only thing that survived several wars. Losing a host of people. 15 republics. Profukav thus a couple of generations. Profukav aviation, mechanical engineering, electronics. Having plundered space, science-medicine-education. A handful of those close to power mercilessly plundering natural wealth and resources. Belonging, in principle, Russian.

Having built fabulous Hollywood palaces inaccessible to people … Having bought huge yachts. By sending children to the mercilessly scolded from all the US TV throats.

Was there any point in starting?

Alas, history is unlikely to answer.

In any case, in figure skating we are at an unsurpassed height – without any oligarchs and corruption. As then. On patriotism alone, right? As if then, in the Union. Something sacred must remain … Without any: “Pah on you!”