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‘It took me decades to realise what Gorbachev gave me’ | Russia-Ukraine war News


Kyiv, Ukraine – Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms began when I was 10 years old, and I see their course as part of my teenage transition.

What made me an adult killed the Soviet Union, the country of which I was born and once proud. I hate Gorbachev for it – because he destroyed my house and my hopes, and destroyed my parents’ career and life savings.

In the West, they affectionately call him “Gorby“. But most of the adults around me – who found themselves disillusioned and destitute, clinging to the smoldering ruins of communist astigmatism – called him “Gorbach,” a hunchback.

It took me decades to realize that Gorbachev gave me and nearly 300 million Soviet citizens the freedom to speak, write, see, read and believe what we wanted; to choose a career or a place to live, to travel abroad – and not be brainwashed by boring, numbing propaganda.

As it turns out, most of us don’t deserve this freedom, because it has to be fought for and won. That’s what Ukraine is doing these days, and it’s what most Russians are too scared or complacent to stand up for.

Back in 1985, when Gorby took the helm, I was an elementary school kid in Soviet Uzbekistan and was in charge of Vladimir Lenin’s “corner” in my classroom.

It is a dozen volumes that describe the exemplary childhood and lifelong struggle of the founder of the Soviet Union to create a Communist utopia, the most just and advanced society in human history.

I’m proud to live there, really hate America and its capists, and dread a nuclear war.

I had a nightmare and calculated whether my small town outside the Uzbek capital Tashkent could survive nuclear mushrooms. The town has a nuclear research facility that is, most likely, believed to have been hit by a separate bomb.

My thirty classmates and I are said to have no God, but we treat Lenin as one. We were also told that we were already living in the era of “developed socialism,” and that real Communism would be only a few decades away.

We don’t realize that our ethnic diversity stems from deportations and purges.

Beside me were Tatars and Greeks in Crimea, Germans in the Volga, and Koreans whose ethnic groups were deported to Central Asia en masse for allegedly “collaborating” with Nazi Germany or its Japanese allies. Their copy.

The ethnic Uzbek, Armenian and Ukrainian children in my class learn in Russian because their parents want them to have a future in a Russian-centered world.

Most Uzbeks have a Quranic name – but anything related to religion is forbidden.

I started my journalism career when our elementary school teacher asked me to provide 10 minutes of weekly “political information” to the class.

I started watching news programs, reading newspapers – and narrating my notes to the whole class.

They hardly care.

They imitated their parents by saying that they hated Gorbachev. Adults don’t like his country accent, the red birthmark on his face, his rambling speeches, his lack of consciousness, and the things he says about changing our way of life.

His reforms were never meant to be radical and groundbreaking. He wanted to reshape Soviet socialism, but never doubted the “greatness” of Lenin’s legacy.

But then he simply lost control of the changes – and his own voice drowned in them. He tried to suppress ethnic wars in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and sent tanks against crowds of people in the Baltics demanding independence.

His anti-violence efforts are inconsistent and at odds with his own policy of openness and transparency. Communist dogma has given way to truth, and it is far from pleasant.

Millions of news reports and publications of classified documents made us realize that the statue of the Soviet Union and its propaganda machine stood on the bodies of millions of “enemies of the people” frozen into the ice. eternity of the canyons in Siberia.

Among them were my maternal great-grandfather (a Muslim cleric in western Siberia) and grandfather (descendant of the prophet Muhammad in central Russia), who were executed in the late 1930s at point of Josef Stalin’s purge.

It took me years to find the dates and details of their deaths – and to understand why and how widows and their children came to Central Asia.

The thaw caused by Gorbachev’s reforms did not end in a tropical paradise. When the ice melted, we saw the corpses, the dirt, and the ruins of the utopian buildings, and we had to clean everything up and build a new world.

But my classmates and I are hormone-filled and curious teenagers. What perestroika gives us is color and nuance. The world is no longer black and white. It is no longer limited on land between Kamchatka and Kaliningrad, Tallinn and Tashkent. We could watch Western music videos – and listen to local rock musicians, whose lyrics are much stronger than anything Gorby said.

We can read translations of once-banned books like George Orwell’s 1984, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Islands – or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

Diverse magazines and pornographic videos flooded newspaper kiosks and silver screens, and the founders of the “cooperative,” or the first independent business, made dozens of times more than my parents. .

They are true capitalists – not wearing caps, but wearing old German cars, fashionable clothes, criminal backgrounds and beautiful girlfriends.

Inflation turned my parents’ savings to zero. My mother gave up her job at the nuclear facility to sew sports caps in the basement of my music school.

I started selling swimwear, jeans, and shoes on weekends at a giant flea market. Once I had to run away from corrupt police – and throw a pair of sneakers in their face.

However, we can barely afford meat and basic food, because government-owned shops have almost stopped selling them, and markets and markets are exorbitantly expensive.

Who was guilty? Of course, Gorby.

“It is right to serve him,” I said on August 18, 1991, when a friend said he had been arrested by Communist leaders who were against perestroika.

I was sweeping the dusty asphalt in front of a grocery store where I worked and was paid in Soviet rubles, onions, and increasingly worthless sugar.

Within days, Gorbachev was freed. Within months, the Soviet Union disintegrated, although nine of the 15 Soviet republics voted to remain in it.

But the future President of Russia Boris Yeltsin declared Russia’s independence from his empire, and at the end of 1991, Gorby signed a decree abolishing his own work.

Instead of the vast motherland of Communism, we found ourselves in 15 “newly independent countries” in the midst of a painful and tumultuous transition.

Tens of millions of people blame Gorby for this transformation that rendered their careers futile, because of organized crime, the loss of contact with relatives in the former Soviet republics and the emergence of corrupt and authoritarian governments.

I had Gorby out of my mind for a while, though his legacy continues to reshape my life. I learned English so I could make some quick money as a translator, buy a bigger TV and build a house for my parents.

In 2003, I won a scholarship to study journalism in San Jose, California, USA. I returned to Uzbekistan to start working for the AP news agency but had to leave Moscow because Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan at the time, began political purges that were hostile to Stalin.

As a journalist, I’ve reexamined my attitude toward Gorbachev – and this time, it’s less one-sided. From 2007 to 2013, I interviewed him several times. He still lives in Moscow, still talks a lot and is still debating how the Soviet Union can thrive if it doesn’t collapse.

I realized that this man was the only true villain of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin – my predecessor and former idol, Lenin.

Most of Gorby’s failures were much larger than those of Stalin and Lenin’s greatest achievements.

My daughter cries for the children killed in Ukraine – but she doesn’t have to fear a nuclear apocalypse. At the age of nine, she went to seven countries and took a dip in three seas – while I left the former Soviet Union for the first time at the age of 28.

I told her today that a great man has passed away – and I cried for him.

But she was more concerned with a new pair of leather boots in the shape of a cat—something her mother and grandmother couldn’t have imagined when they were nine years old.



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