The ‘Bright Tomorrow’: Growing Up in the Brezhnev Era

Anastasia Edel, New York Times

Image from article, with caption: "The author's grandfather addressing the October Revolution parade."

Excerpt:

Lying seemed to be the only staple we would never run out of. Every other night, our neighbor from the next floor came down to gossip about the “idiots” whose party history he taught during the day at another institute. Behind closed doors, he’d lecture my mother on what he called alternative history, drawing material from Radio Freedom and Voice of America. She knew this because she, too, listened to the same banned radio stations on a crackling shortwave radio. It was similar to one that Grandfather had brought back from Berlin in 1945, most likely thanks to which she was the only girl in her third-grade class who was not shocked and didn’t cry at the announcement of Stalin’s death in 1953. ...