Tanya Kumenko

Past Past Present. My Soviet past haunts me. It only partially caught me with its wing, only some 10 years, but it was enough. I can see it in the faces of the older generation, in the eyes of old women, living on a miserable pension and feeling betrayed. They were young and marched in slender columns to a bright future. And then it turned out that it didn’t exist. A bright future melted away like mist along with the communist ideology and the Soviet system of coordinates. Instead, there was something completely different. People who were confident of the future, and in this confidence raised their children, felt as if knocked out of the ground under their feet. Strange suspended state did not allow them to flow into the mob of new Russians, quickly found, which side of bread is buttered. I can see it in their faces, objects, atmosphere that surrounds them. I can feel it in myself. From the past only signs remained - artifacts of time, they left to stay in silence and little by little go to ruin under the influence of time. I come across them as if not noticing, but should we take a look... and they begin to act. They act from the depths of my childhood, from which I can not get away – in present. I can only guess them as riddles inside of me. Zhukovsky is my hometown. I know every corner of it. Used to know. Now everything has changed. The era has gone. In my favorite nooks there are high-rise buildings now. A town-satellite, one of a number similar small towns scattered around Moscow, was founded in 1947. The town of Science, the town of Soviet engineers and aircraft designers. Central Aerohydrodynamics Institute, for and around which it grew up, now came to standstill. With the end of the Cold War and the Space Race financing of the institute was reduced. Now, my town is not much different from bedroom districts of Moscow. And now it feels even stranger to see the symbols of the Soviet Union on the main square. And the people - with the seal of the Soviet past.