“First of all, he did not know if it was true that the year was 1984. About this - no doubt: he was almost sure that he was 39 years old, and he was born in 1944 or 45; but now it is impossible to establish any date more precisely than with an error of a year or two. … But it is curious that while he was moving the pen, a completely different incident lingered in his memory, so much so that at least now write it down. It became clear to him that because of this incident he decided to suddenly go home and start a diary today."
J. Orwell. 1984
History and documents. Our previous material on the topic "Back to the USSR" caused, one might say, a whole flurry of requests to continue the topic. Well, we can continue, especially since the topic is really interesting and, in my opinion, needs some sorting of the gray matter of the brain, at least my own.
However, before writing further about how the children of the Land of the Soviets received information, I would like to begin with a fresh example of what magical qualities this strange "substance" called information possesses.
And it so happened that with our granddaughter, for a long time we did not talk about the past at all, except perhaps about certain everyday moments. No one told her about the events of 1991, or about the collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its consequences. We did not watch the news on TV at all, so she did not receive any information about that time. At school, we also chose a teacher for her, who taught exactly how to count and write, and did not talk about her rheumatism and how good (how bad) it was to live before. And so, when she was already in the second grade, we somehow got into a conversation about communists, and I take it and tell me that I was also a communist. My granddaughter looked at me so apprehensively, lowered her voice and asked: "Does grandmother know?" I almost fell off the chair laughing. My grandmother came here too, and with our joint efforts we read to my granddaughter something like a lecture on political literacy. "Even so …" - she said thoughtfully, and we did not return to this topic for a long time. But I am still terribly interested: where did she get the idea that being a communist is fear and horror? They don't read Solzhenitsyn in the second grade, the teacher couldn't tell them that, I know for sure. And the question is: where does the information come from?
Moreover, this question is directly related to my childhood memories. In the previous article, I already wrote that it was not customary for us, children of that time, to ask adults about something. Rather, they were asked, but in the most, so to speak, critical cases, and so we ourselves learned everything from somewhere. “Do not meddle, do not bother, go away, you are still small …” - a typical set of excuses for our questions. It is from snippets of conversations, remarks and grins of adults, from radio and television programs, posters on fences, and we learned the world, plus school and textbooks, and also books. That is, a certain information space existed around us, and it shaped us. Everything, by the way, is exactly the same as now, only the methods of obtaining information have changed, and its availability and volumes have also increased.
The negative, by the way, came from him. Once, at the age of five or six, I picked up somewhere on the street a funny poem about a reddish gorilla who was doing some strange business with an unfortunate parrot who shot himself. The rhyme was beautiful there. But there are many unfamiliar words. But my memory was wonderful. I learned it, repeated it, and then came to my mother and grandmother and gave them … "poetry." I must say that from a pedagogical point of view, they did the right thing. That is, they did not groan and gasp and scold me, but explained, and very delicately, that the words in this rhyme are bad, and good children do not say them. That these are obscene words. And that was enough, because among us, street boys of Proletarskaya Street, it was the very last thing to say such words. It was impossible to complain to adults for a broken nose with a comrade, but it was possible to tell them publicly at once: “And he said in a foul language (or“by maths”)!" - and it was not considered shameful, and the culprit was immediately beaten like a sidorov goat.
Due to the disordered reception of information, we learned about many events from the world of adults by chance. For example, this is exactly how I found out about what happened in Novocherkassk in June 1962. He sat on a bench in front of the house and dangled his legs. I waited for my comrades to go play. And then a staggering, obviously drunk citizen walks by, sits down next to him and says: “Remember, kid! They shot at the people in Novocherkassk. Understood?" I answer - "understood", I was warned in general, to be afraid of drunks and not to contradict them. Well, he got up and walked on, and I went the other way. And I thought: “Once an adult said, even if he was drunk, it means that it is so. And who could shoot at whom? " By that time, I already knew exactly about 1905, from a feature film about the revolution shown on TV. They sang a song: “Your eldest son on Palace Square / He went to ask the Tsar's mercy, / He covered him like a stern canvas / Bloody snow of early January…” I remember that I really liked the film, although its name was forgotten. From it I learned about "Macedonian bombs", after which I unscrewed the ball from my grandfather's bed, stuffed it with "gray from matches", fitted a wick from a clothesline and threw it into the garden. It exploded cool, just like in the movies! But here it was clearly different … And suddenly it dawned on me: people like this guy were going somewhere, apparently, hooligans ("all drunkards are hooligans!"), And they were shot at for it. And rightly so, you can't roam the streets like this.
The next day I asked my mother: "Is it true that people were shot at in Novocherkassk?" But she put her finger to her lips and said that it was impossible to talk about it. Well, you can't and can't.
Then there was some kind of bad bread. Sticky, and the loaf is empty inside. They said it was corn. But I liked him. Why? And it was very cool to shoot the girls in the head with pellets of such bread from a glass tube, and it was also beautifully molded and then dried up tightly. In this way I blinded a "real" Mauser out of it, and it was something!
Or here's another case. One evening, when my mother came home from work from the institute and my grandmother was feeding her dinner, and I was trying to fall asleep to their conversation, which was not easy, since the walls in the house were very thin, I hear that she is telling something interesting. It turns out that at the department of Marxism-Leninism they found a teacher who wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU with a complaint against Khrushchev, accusing him of … many bad deeds. And that a letter came from the Central Committee to arrange a meeting of the party committee and expel him from the ranks of the CPSU. But here in Moscow there was a plenum of the Central Committee, and at it Khrushchev "was finally removed and sent to retire," and now the party committee is discussing what to do with this teacher. It seems like it is necessary to praise for an active civic position, but somehow inconvenient. But at least they stayed in the party.
In general, it is completely incomprehensible how, but by 1968 I had become a real orthodox "homo sovieticus" and everything that happened around me was good!
In class I was chosen as a political informer, and I regularly listened to the radio and watched the news on TV, and, of course, approved the entry of our troops and tanks into Czechoslovakia, followed the newspapers how many American planes were shot down in Vietnam, and regularly donated money to the fund of the fighting Vietnam.
In the same year, I visited Bulgaria in the summer (this was my first 13-day trip abroad), I really liked it there, and now I could also tell as an eyewitness what was good there and what was “not so good”.
In a word, I was a proven and savvy young man, because both the class teacher and the school party organizer wrote a description of me with permission to travel abroad.
And then I suddenly hear on the radio that the International Conference of Communist and Workers 'Parties is being held in Moscow (June 5-17, 1969), the Communist Parties of different countries (75 communist and workers' parties in total) are participating in it, and it turns out that many of they don't support us! They say that the introduction of troops into Czechoslovakia was a mistake! And it would be fine, one or two people said so, but no. And the Australian CPA, and New Zealand, and the French, and who just did not express their dissatisfaction there about this! But everyone knew, including me, that we would help and help everyone … And here is such a gratitude to you! I confess that I was at that time in great perplexity. "How so?! How dare they ?!"
Many of our films have caused me frank bewilderment. For example, Volga-Volga. Well, what a funny film, but where did this fool and bureaucrat come from, because of whom it all started? Why wasn't he dismissed from his job? Or Carnival Night is a great movie. But even there, in the bosses, a complete fool is shown, and Comrade Telegin, a deputy of the City Council and a member of the Central Committee of Trade Unions, is laughing at Ogurtsov, and for some reason he is in no hurry to pull up and replace. Why?
But at that time I was especially impressed by Alexander Mirer's novel "The Main Noon", which I read in 1969. Not only do the aliens land there not somewhere out there, in America, but land in our Soviet city, they also talked about the "graters" between the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Minister of Defense, which resulted in various "absurdities" ". I remember that then I felt even more bewildered than a year ago: “Well, how can you write like that? This is clearly … anti-Soviet. " However, I was not the only one who thought so, which is why Mirer was not published after this novel until 1992. But the question arises: why then the book was printed at all? Who missed it? If they didn’t let it pass, then we wouldn’t have to prohibit … The main thing is, before that I read his book "Submarine" Blue Whale ", a completely innocent children's fiction, and then suddenly something like that … But how could we have such a thing in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, even and in a fantasy novel?
This is how, gradually, the informational boundaries of knowledge about our society gradually expanded. And everything was, in general, the way I read at the same time in one very good educational book called "Expedition to the ancestors": "Teaching is light. And information is illumination!"
