Until only recently, Georgia was part of a country whose falsity began with its very name. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as it was called in full. Four assertions, and all four of them lies! Nevertheless, we lived, laughed, grieved, joked, studied, and experienced both fear and joy all the same. Gathered together here are 70 stories that recount the personal experiences of 70 authors, or of individuals very close to them. The majority of these people were unfortunate enough to spend a significant portion of their lives in the sort of country that you talk about and talk about, and can no longer believe yourself what you're saying.
Why there are 70 stories should be clear: there's one for every year that the USSR existed - an entire lifetime! But why the same number of authors? Couldn't fewer artisans of the pen and word (of whom you'll encounter many here) have managed more? The thing is that each one of us lived through a Soviet Union of our own, filled with our own experiences both bitter and sweet. I believe that the canvas we have succeeded in painting together is far more engaging, and far closer to the truth.
Author(s): Buba Kudava (editor)
Publisher: Artanuji
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 296
City: Tbilisi
Tags: Georgia, Communism, Soviet Union
Cover
Contents
Foreword
1. Disclosures from sports broadcasting
2. Selective medicine
3. How I didn’t become a KGB agent
4. A land of beautiful cakes
5. The tin box
6. The wheels in the attic
7. Hello, Comrade Petrov!
8. “Chakrulo” or “Moscow nights”?
9. The truth
10. My doodle of Lenin
11. The blood of the proletariat
12. A story once heard
13. “Be prepared!”
14. Kiev versus Moscow
15. Forbidden activity
16. The young doctor and the granny who saw the war
17. The Georgian Pavlik Morozov
18. The lighter and arker sides of education in Soviet Georgia
19. The instruction to mourn
20. Forbidden genetics
21. The passport
22. Squaring the circle
23. I only know one bank
24. Mania
25. The bliss of ignorance, and dictated freedom
26. A tale of God and white bread
27. The mystery of the opened envelope
28. Gnulovka
29. White blotches
30. “Verbovka”
31. The last supper
32. Total control
33. Two times I cried
34. A wedding night at the Hotel Rossiya
35. “Until he dies”
36. Babrak Karmal
37. By rote
38. Subscribing to newspapers and magazines
39. War and peace
40. Bombs
41. The reward
42. Forbidden literature
43. The Chernobyl tragedy
44. The Georgia beyon the border
45. Domestic censorship
46. A tragicomic tale
47. How I learned to mask my faith
48. Don’t look back, go in peace!
49. To study without studying
50. Title: Fear
51. Persona non grata
52. The Soviet embassy to France and May ʻ68
53. Служу Советскому Союзу?!
54. The silent “Resistenza”
55. Surveillance by child
56. First pain
57. The inverted vineyard
58. The “labour” semester
59. Compensation for a loss
60. Not until Moscow reports it
63. The troublesome book
62. The montage
63. The black box recorder and the apprentices of the absurd
64. Night-shift in the vineyards
65. “Himmler”
66. Long hair and the Komsomol
67. 1984: The Soviet army, Pink Floyd, and the modest charm of “soft power”
68. How Ateni and Tsromi became Athens and Rome
69. My first meeting with the security services
70. The leather dust cover-clad computer
The contributors
