Recently, Shimun Vrochek wrote a book about his Soviet childhood. Since his childhood and mine happened during the same years (he was born on November 1, 1976, and I was born three months later, on January 28, 1977), I was very curious to see how someone from my “generation” experienced it, but in a different part of the Soviet Union. He was born in Kungur, in the Urals, and grew up in Nizhnevartovsk, while I spent my entire childhood in Minsk.
I even had the same school uniform as the one he wears in the photo, though it wasn’t so easy to find in Minsk—my father brought it from Moscow.
The book originated from notes that Shimun wrote in his blog (at least some of which could be read individually). Eventually, those notes were compiled into this book. That’s why it isn’t a sequential narrative but rather a collection of short memories about various things, with no clear structure or connection between chapters. Sometimes, this approach works very well (just think of The Un-Chekhovian Intelligentsia or The Life of Remarkable People and Animals by Boris Akunin).
Even though there was a great distance between me and the author, many of the feelings and experiences resonate, making the book truly transport me back to my childhood. Like Shimun, I believed I was living in the best country in the world, where everything was wonderful, and a bright communist future lay ahead—a future of fairness, with no poverty, and so on.
For bringing me back to those years, I am truly grateful to the author.
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