Values of the USSR

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

People with whom I had a chance to communicate are divided into two categories: those who found the USSR and those who did not. Very often they cannot understand each other, the differences in their worldview are colossal.

So, I was born in the USSR in the midst of stagnation, in the family of a simple Moscow turner and a simple laboratory assistant. I remember my first conscious aspiration as follows: my grandfather is sitting, reading a newspaper. I go up, look at the columns of letters, ask: "Grandfather, what are you doing?" "I am reading". I really wanted to learn how to read. My grandmother worked as a teacher of the Russian language in primary school. She taught me quickly. By the time I was six, I was reading pretty fluently. I remember I really wanted to go to school. Everything was interesting, I wanted to know so much. There were forty-two people in our first class. There were six first grades in school, and I was in the first E. Then, when I was already in the fourth grade, there were ten first grades. Yes, yes, we had the 1st K at school! Well, I mean that there were a lot of children, very much.

I must say that reading has become my favorite pastime. I read everything that I could come across - up to tear-off calendars (who did not know or forgot, there, on the back of each tear-off page, various useful information was placed). I subscribed and read from cover to cover the magazines "Young Technician", "Tekhnika - for Youth", "Science and Life", sometimes I read something from the magazine "Radio", which my father subscribed, for a long time persuaded my parents to subscribe to the magazine "Za Rulem", and persuaded the same. In "Roman-Gazeta" I read about Aniskin, in "Youth" I read "A Clockwork Orange", "A Love Story", "Crimea Island". Father was getting the Seeker somewhere - it was a whole treasure! I read Pionerskaya Pravda, and then Komsomolskaya Pravda, Trud newspaper and Vechernyaya Moskva.

Grandmother collected and handed over waste paper. For 20 kg of waste paper handed over, one could get a ticket for a book. All our closets were filled with books acquired in this way: Dumas and Jack London, Fenimore Cooper and Maurice Druon, Jules Verne and Maupassant, Conan Doyle and Edgar Poe - I can't remember all of them.

For three years in a row he spent two months at the Black Sea, in a pioneer camp. There he learned to swim at the age of six. At the age of 10-11 I soldered an acoustic switch - you clap your hands, the light turns on! Yes, I knew how a transistor works and what a capacitor is before we went through this in physics school. Once my father and I assembled one glider, but somehow a boat, there still had to be tightened the rubber bands and then they twisted the screw, but the hobby did not become, it didn’t work. At home, my father assembled a small lathe and I already in the sixth grade knew how to sharpen different parts and cut threads. In the 9th - 10th grades, there was a car business at the UPK, after the 10th grade he received a category C license, that is, after reaching 18 years old he could calmly work as a truck driver: the profession was immediately after graduation. Naturally, he could fix a car, a leaking crane, and in general almost any mechanism. Drive in a nail, drill a hole in the wall. Thanks to his father, he could navigate the forest and distinguish edible mushrooms from inedible ones. Make a fire in the rain. Catch fish in the river. Not God knows that for the majority of the inhabitants of our vast country, but for the inhabitants of the metropolis?

We did not live poorly or richly - in abundance. The state provided a three-room apartment for four. Clothing was according to need - he wore a quilted jacket and felt boots with galoshes when he was small. I still remember my first sneakers. Bicycles were bought as they grew up: "Butterfly", "Shkolnik", "Salut".

Those who have read this far may have thought: why am I telling all this? But why: I did not read anywhere then, no one told me, neither parents, nor teachers, nor TV, that a person lives for the money! I am one of those who did not fit into the market. Didn't become a capitalist. No, of course, I was not in poverty, the necessary skills so as not to starve were above the roof. I knew a lot about the world around me, but! I knew nothing in my childhood about loot. I didn't know I needed to make connections. I did not know that lawyers and economists are the most necessary and respected and widespread professions. There was a criminal article in the union for speculation, but it turns out that it was necessary to learn to speculate - I would now be a "respected person"!

And here I am looking at those who grew up under capitalism. Degradation - I can't find another word. Virtual reality and money. Money and virtual reality. Loot, grannies, cabbage, greens. Brands and cars. Heifers and whiskers.

Now, of course, everything is changing for the better. Sport is developing, they began to read slowly. Circles and sections are being revived. And this cannot but rejoice. But a whole generation of "effective managers" has grown up. After all, you can't remake them … Well, the victims of the Unified State Exam are proliferating all over the country again.

I am also looking for an answer to this question: the development of capitalism is expansion. The business must grow. Business needs advertising, new and new consumers are needed, business is not profitable with goods that can be used for decades and then inherited. Business has not been satisfying needs for a long time, but creates them and then satisfies them. Business is not at all interested in science for the sake of discoveries, if these discoveries cannot be monetized. Business is not interested in creating a business that will pay off in twenty to thirty years! Business is interested in loan interest, stocks, futures, options and other bonds. Hundreds and thousands of percent of profit, right now - what twenty or thirty years? I beg you … And what to do? What kind of system will we have? Business building? No, have not heard.

What kind of people does this business order need? Is this business system interested in smart, well-read, broad-minded sports? Who needs them at all, such people? Does a "modern" person have time to raise their heads and look at the stars? Just watch it, free of charge, for nothing? But this is not profitable. Everything is measured by profit in our business system. And we wonder why we need all this? Why is there an increase in the well-being of individuals who buy cars at the price of three apartments? What is life spent on in the battle for the loot? Don't you think that things have lost their meaning? Not things for people, but people for things. Sales markets. Not countries, not people, but sales markets. Figures, percentages, profits, dividends.

You know, I would give everything for the opportunity to return to childhood, and live it again, only consciously: realizing that, as a six-year-old boy, I can disappear on the street with friends all day until late in the evening, and know that my mother is calm, does not drink valerian and does not call the police. That prices in a year and in five years will not change, and that if I have a job, then I will not feel the need, and work is not at all the main thing in my life, but most importantly family, children, books, sports. What can you dream about space flights and other planets. That my country is the best country in the world: the richest in talented engineers and scientists, doctors, teachers and just good people. The most powerful country in the world that helps other countries.

It sounds somehow pathetic, but I feel that way, what can I do …

So, here's the main question: is it possible to remove the financial dominant from today's life? And if so, what to replace with? How to make millions of people wake up from the hassle of financial spells and become human again?