“Soviet civilization,” despite all its inhumanity and anti-intellectual choice, left loopholes and spaces for the intellectuals who remained human. It tried to educate the international population with the help of the Russian classics that in fact denied everything happening in the country where victorious socialism had overcome human intelligence. It humoured children with wonderful cartoons nurturing sentimentality and compassion in them. Finally, it squeezed and thus by means of the terrible ideological pressure gave rise to tough and courageous opponents of the regime. Among the crowd of the Communist party organizers and Komsomol members, those people were the very few, they were considered rubbish. However, they were the ones who remained in history.
It is hard to admit that both opponents and neutral residents of relatively free spaces, both indifferent citizens and paranoid adherents of communism, formed a kind of integrity.
Once I saw Cheburashka in my dream. He was hugging a ballistic missile. It really appeared in my dream.
Waking up, I tried to fasten on the rocket as on a phallic symbol (Freudianism is immortal!), but then I decided that the unconscious prompted me the image of the late socialism regime.
Today those that we could have considered citizens of the “parallel world” are passing. Well, no. They were wonderful, talented Soviet and anti-Soviet people inconceivable out of context of those times.
They all – Cheburashka and the crocodile Gena, and even (particularly!) the old woman Shapoklyak had Soviet passports.
Perhaps, I am another.
We are the stones of the Egyptian pyramids.
Lest we forget.
Borys Khersonskyi