THE USSR

The years were early 70s and I had entered my teens. There was hardly a medium save for radio those days. There were no active media. We believed what radio and print fed us. In any case, a teenager's mind is like a piece of wet clay; raw and soft. It records imprints and those imprints, over the years when winds of time and sands of circumstances blow over them, harden. Those were the days when acronym NAM (Non Aligned Movement) was very popular. Our government claimed it had not aligned with any power but it actually did. The USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) was perceived a great friend. Photos of Indira Gandhi and Leonid Brezhnev were splashed commonly all over. 

 

When you picked up a piece of paper, you were bound to see something or the other related to the USSR. Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982.

As children, we subscribed to magazines like Sputnik, published from the USSR Embassy in New Delhi. I loved its contents and photos anyway, it fascinated me. A world out of our reach and a fairy world at that. There were many subjects it covered but the two topics I remember most are space exploration and community farms. All said and done, the USSR was a formidable fort. It was big in every sense of the word, like Big Brezhnev!

I do not condemn a particular form of governance, nor do I appreciate another. But yes, theoretically, communism sounded so good: all equals with equal opportunities and shared resources. Whereas on ground, it was a different story. May be the very idea of communism is good but all over, in all communist regimes, the implementation in letter and spirit lacked. Or may be the evil side of human prevailed and corruption seeped in, polluting and thereby failing the system. May be. The only democracy I admire is that of the US. It works the most. Despite its occasional black holes it works pretty well.

There is no more USSR. It disintegrated on 25 Dec 1991, resulting in birth of 15 smaller countries. The demise of the USSR also sounded the death knell of the cold war.

The author acknowledges the photo shown here as copyright of RIA Novosti (Russian International News Agency).