Some time ago in Moscow I made a program “Family Photography for History.” In it, employees of the Moscow Freedom Bureau, each in their own way, answered the same question: “What will you tell your children and grandchildren about the history of the 20th century?” I unexpectedly received a lot of responses to this program, mostly positive. Among them is this (from the “hereditary” listener of Freedom from Moscow, Mr. Smirnov):

“I would like to hear answers to the same questions from people whose voices we have known for a long time. These are Savik Shuster, who is absent in Moscow, and your New York colleagues, especially Boris Paramonov, and Pyotr Weil, and your Italians - Giovanni Bensi and Mario Corti. You correctly noted: these are people of a different life experience and culture, therefore their answers to me personally will be much more interesting than the answers of my compatriots.”

Today we are fulfilling this request.

The first program from this mini-cycle, dedicated to how my colleagues see the history of the passing century, talking on air every day about what often becomes the past the next day, was conceived as a kind of family photo card. This is how it seems to have turned out: the “cheerful family” of the Moscow Bureau of our Radio, many of whose members are not even married yet, half-jokingly, half-seriously talked about what they would tell about the history of the 20th century to their grandchildren and children in the 21st century. They and their unborn grandchildren still have everything ahead; all of them, including the guests of our Moscow studio who took part in the program, are so young... It was this feeling of a cheerful young perspective that I wanted to capture in that Moscow “photography.”

I’m afraid that in today’s “photo” you won’t find such youthful gaiety and aspiration for the future. And not only because all its participants are a circle older than their Moscow colleagues; as Mr. Smirnov from Moscow rightly noted in an email to me, “another life” (we are all emigrants in one way or another), “another experience,” and all this, combined with age, if it does not sometimes increase sadness, does not add much joy either. However, let's see.

The first person in today's program to answer the question of what you will tell your children and grandchildren about the history of the 20th century is a person who was absent in the previous one for good reasons - the director of the Moscow Bureau of Freedom, Savik Shuster. So, what will you tell your grandchildren, Savik?

Savik Shuster:

I believe that I will have to speak Italian with my grandchildren in Florence, the city that has become home to me.

First of all, they will need to explain why my name is Savik. I will tell them that I was born in Lithuania, a small country on the Baltic Sea that was then part of a large empire called the Soviet Union. That my parents named me Shevelis, that no one liked this incomprehensible botanical name, and already in kindergarten they began to call me Savikas. (In Lithuania, “is” or “as” is added to all given names and surnames.)

I will tell my grandchildren that Lithuanian is my native language, just like Italian is for them, but I hardly speak it anymore, because I left when I was 20 years old. In Canada, where I studied, people love brevity, so the “ace” was immediately removed, and I became Savik.

I will tell my grandchildren that the Soviet Union broke up into many states, and that I worked for several years in Russia, in a cold, snow-covered country that has become very close to me.

I will definitely tell them about Pele, this great football player-dancer, before whose gestures the whole planet froze. Here is the film "Independence Day", in which the entire planet unites in the fight against aliens, by that time this film, of course, will already be for children, and Pele united the entire planet with just one gesture. Pele's skin is black, I tell them, like many children on the streets of Florence; in my last century they were not considered equal, and people like Pele made it clear that talent and goodness have no boundaries. Then I will tell them about Diego Maradona, who was born into a poor Argentine family and, thanks to his unique left leg, practically became the Emperor of Naples. He played football with the same ease and grandeur that Mozart wrote music. Diego became a victim of the great misfortune of my age - drugs, but this misfortune can be overcome if you understand that drugs make you a slave. At this time, during this last explanation, I’m afraid my grandchildren will fall asleep...

Vladimir Tolts:

In the same year as Savik Shuster, 1988, Dmitry Volchek, who was then working on the editorial board of the human rights magazine Glasnost, poet and essayist, and publisher of Mitya’s Journal, published since 1985, began collaborating with Radio Liberty. Born in Leningrad in 1964, Mitya became an employee of the Moscow Bureau of Freedom from its founding, and from 1993 he worked at the Munich headquarters of Freedom. Now he is in Prague, editor and presenter of Liberty Live. What will he remember about his 20th century?

Dmitry Volchek:

How to convey the experience of a person who tried Coca-Cola for the first time in his life when he was 30 years old? - Joseph Brodsky once addressed this question to an American student audience.

...I’m about 8 years old, and my parents bring a wonderful box - a prefabricated plastic house for the railway, with the inscription on the side: “Vero Company, GDR.” I look at the assembly diagram and can’t understand why there is so much multi-colored crumble. I finally realize that there must be flowers everywhere: windows, flower beds, the garden behind the fence - explosions of colors. I look out the window - snowdrifts, gray brick high-rise buildings, it gets light at 9, it gets dark at 4. It’s still unclear to whom hatred is directed, beating its sleepy tail.

...I'm 12 years old, my parents and I are in Kaunas. There is not a single trash can on the streets, a humiliating search - where to put the bag of garbage? Finally, we notice a trash can near the city committee building, we get rid of the package, a sensitive policeman immediately runs up, snatches our pathetic package, and unfolds it with trembling hands. One of the adults realizes that he is looking for an explosive device in the bag. I don’t understand anything - who could plant a bomb near the city committee? For what? And why is there a strange silence on the bus when we start speaking Russian? And why does the sweet Lithuanian old lady not answer my question about how to get to the amusement park and look at me unkindly?

...Happiness: one of my father’s colleagues gives me a photograph of the Beatles, color photographs - 4 guys with guitars, speechless with delight, I look at them for hours and decide that I will grow the same hair as the one with the round glasses. But the class teacher, an overweight, fierce woman, leaves me after class and snatches off my strands with huge scissors - it’s forbidden. Bell-bottomed trousers are also prohibited, but I still persuade my mother to sew bell-bottoms into blue trousers; a new school uniform has just been introduced. They also say that one guy at a nearby school has real jeans, and there are light bulbs inserted into the bottom, and when he walks, they light up. ..

...And now it’s a different era - you have to line up for milk at 5 am. Landsbergis and two guards with machine guns are going down the stairs of parliament, the railings are broken, there are overturned chairs in the corridor - they were dragged to the barricades and thrown.

...And now Rutskoi, two steps from me, is taking the oath of office as the President of Russia. He is flushed, a drop of sweat creeps unsightly down his cheek. It’s two o’clock in the morning, but there are crowds of people in the White House, and at the buffet Barkashovites receive sturgeon sandwiches with coupons.

And back again. A policeman stops me on the street and asks me what I am carrying in my bag. “Textbooks,” I answer, barely audible. The heart sinks - in the bag "The Gulag Archipelago", they gave it to read at night. The cop looks lazily, but does not notice what is written on the cover.

Back again. My father tells me about Prague and Budapest - these are fabulous cities, there are tables right on the streets and anyone can sit down and order the waiter coffee or mineral water...

Trying to figure out how old I was when I first tried Coca-Cola? Not that many, 10, probably. Only then it was called the drink “Baikal”, yes, exactly, “Baikal”.

Vladimir Tolts:

Publicist and international commentator Giovanni Bensi is a veteran of Freedom, on our Radio since 1972. Worked in Pakistan, Italy, Yugoslavia, Portugal, USA and many other countries. But Giovanni is going to tell his long-awaited grandchildren not only about this.

Giovanni Bensi:

Dear grandchildren, I will simply tell you that in this century the leaders and ideologies of the so-called terrible simplifiers were established and established, that is, people who thought that everything in the world, all problems, all social issues, relationships, and so on, can only be resolved if one reason is known.

Already in the last century, already in the 19th century, some uncle Marx appeared, Karl Marx, who said that everything in the world depends on only one reason - the class struggle. In our century, attempts were made to implement these provisions in Russia. Russia was the Soviet Union, and they established a communist regime.

But other people appeared who, practically, reasoned in the same way, but slightly replaced the elements of reasoning. In the homeland of my ancestors, after the First World War, another uncle appeared, his name was Benito Mussolini. He decided that there are developed nations, less developed nations, there are full-fledged, inferior and so on, and they fight among themselves and from this struggle comes the development and progress of history. If class socialism came from Marx, fascism came from Mussolini.

Well, then, thanks to another terrible guy, I mean Adolf Hitler, it became National Socialism. This means it became socialism (the same as Marx), but only based not on the struggle of classes, but on the struggle of nations or on the struggle of races.

And when these people come to power who think that they know everything and that there is only one reason that can be changed, and then the whole world will change, these people are very dangerous. There is only hope that you, dear grandchildren, and other people who will grow up with you will not repeat these mistakes.

Vladimir Tolts:

Irina Lagunina. Ira was born in Moscow, graduated from MGIMO there, and is an international journalist. On our Radio since 1995.

Irina Lagunina:

Someday I will definitely tell my grandchildren about prisons: in my work there were six of them.

I will tell them about the famous Maze prison in Northern Ireland. There are militants in it - Catholics and Protestants, IRA fighters and Unionists. And the prison guards are their hostages, because outside the wall, where the guards’ families live, the militants are the masters. There is something like a gentleman's agreement between the guards and the prisoners: they do not touch each other. The museum of prisoners' handicrafts amazes with its ingenuity. The most beautiful exhibit is a Kalashnikov assault rifle, made of soap and painted, so you can’t tell it from the real thing. They tried to escape with him in their hands. The most read book is Lenin’s “State and Revolution”. However, this name will probably mean nothing to the grandchildren. Prisoners are allowed to go home on weekends and holidays. There was one case when a person did not return, but IRA fighters brought him in a car with a slight delay: they apologized, the person drank, and overslept. The city of Belfast, near the prison, is also divided into zones.

I will not be able to explain to my grandchildren why for decades people deliberately destroyed each other and their lives in the oldest region of European civilization.

The prison in Sarajevo in 1994 did not look like a prison at all: a simple administrative building in the city. There I met a young man, a Serb, 21 years old, who raped 22 Muslim women and it is unknown how many people he killed. He was later tried by the International Tribunal in The Hague. His Serb father lived in Sarajevo itself throughout the war years. The neighbors didn't bother him. He, like all the residents, was hiding from carpet attacks: the Serbs on the mountains around the city turned down anti-aircraft guns and covered the roofs with fire. There was no water, electricity, food. It was the second year of the blockade. I asked the Bosnian escort why, even in such conditions, women use cosmetics so much. National peculiarity? She answered: no, the girls just think that a Serb will see her through the sights, look and say: “Beautiful girl, I won’t shoot at her.” The lipstick cost 300 marks on the black market. When I arrived in Sarajevo, I saw the words scrawled on the wall: “The truce lasted 22 thousandths of a second.” I thought: why am I here? Then the Bosnian Muslim showed me the corpse of his son and shouted: “Look what your Yeltsin did!”

I will tell you about the Afghan prison Puli-Charkhi near Kabul. There, there are 70 people in a cell for 20 people. It’s dangerous to go in, the prisoners may have knives. The prison is not very fortified: people rarely escape from it. People are sentenced to 20-30 years and often earn as much in prison as they would never receive in the wild. In this prison in 1990, I found a man from the Soviet Union. They took him along with a group of Mujahideen and did not investigate. Sentenced to 17 years. He left behind a wife and daughter in Kyiv. It was an accident that he met me there: the Soviet representatives did not miss his disappearance. He got there because, I will explain to my grandchildren, because the state of the Soviet Union, which was in the last century, decided, according to the psychology of the last century, to fight for territory, for access to the seas and for minerals, such as uranium. And I will let my grandchildren read Kipling.

I will also talk about the Russian prison. Institution US-5, “Pyaterochka”, as it was called in the Ministry of Internal Affairs Directorate for Control of Correctional Labor Institutions. There was a man sitting there, a former Soviet prisoner in Afghanistan, convicted of being a prisoner of war. In the late 80s, the Prosecutor General of the Soviet Union announced that they would no longer be sent to prison for captivity. I wrote an article that finally something is changing, Stalin’s laws are being repealed. And then I received a letter from a former prisoner. His name was Andrei Mateuts. He was still sitting. He served 4 and a half years out of 7. I went to see him in prison and for the only time in my life I made a professional deal: I promised the prosecutor to write a laudatory article in exchange for the release of a former prisoner. While I was dealing with the fate of Mateutsa, I found out that no statements from the prosecutor would free those who were already in prison: a law on amnesty for prisoners of war was needed so that the prosecutor’s office would begin to deal with the cases of those who were convicted of captivity in Afghanistan. I published the article, then went on television and said that a law is needed. It took a year for this law to be adopted by the Supreme Council.

Already now, all these stories seem absolutely wild. I can imagine what my grandchildren will think about them.

Vladimir Tolts:

Poet and prose writer Igor Pomerantsev emigrated 21 years ago. In London he worked for the BBC, then for Radio Liberty. Since 1991 in Munich, and then in Prague, co-editor of the program “Above Barriers”.

Igor Pomerantsev:

When I hear politicians and journalists calling this or that event historical, I am involuntarily amazed at human conceit. I remember that a major American television company called its interview with yet another Iranian leader historical.

History sorts itself out with the help of historians.

If I am lucky with a grandson or granddaughter, then for them I can only be a character in the story. My son grew up in England, so I will most likely have to speak English with my grandson. Sooner or later he will notice that his grandfather speaks his native English with an accent, and then he will learn that his grandfather is an emigrant. Then he learns that there is such a thing - a political emigrant and that there are still displaced persons, there are refugees, there are defectors, that tens or even hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century defended their freedom and often their lives with their feet. That the 20th century was a century of legs, running legs, and people, tens, hundreds of millions of people speaking the language of their children and grandchildren with an accent. And that many of these people chose an accent over a groan, a wheeze, a muffled whisper.

A person has no other story than the story of his life.

Vladimir Tolts:

My office neighbor at work, writer Peter Weil (he will soon celebrate his 50th birthday), emigrated to the USA in 1977. At Radio Liberty, first in New York, from 1988, now in Prague, he is the executive editor of information programs. To my question, what would he tell his grandson about our century, Petya replies:

Peter Weil:

I would tell him about the Titanic - I would start, at least with the Titanic - not with the film, of course, which was recently released, but with the event itself in 1912, which, in my opinion, became key for the entire 20th century.

We must remember that this was a time of triumph of science and reason, or so it was perceived in any case. The cinema, the automobile, and airplanes had just been invented. The man felt himself omnipotent, and at the peak of this omnipotence, such a beautiful, wonderful, grandiose image was created - a huge ship, unsinkable and self-confident. And suddenly this piece of human genius collided with a piece of ice and sank to the bottom.

Then this signal from the Titanic was not heard by practically anyone, and only now, in retrospect, can we hear and appreciate this signal. This was a signal that not everything can be arranged according to the laws of reason, science and logic, not everything can be reduced to a formula.

And just two years after the sinking of the Titanic, the First World War began - a grandiose war, which was the first war not of man against man, but also of technology against technology. Then, three years later, a revolution that brought to power a regime that also wanted to arrange everything rationally, clearly and scientifically. And distribute happiness in a thin, even layer - take away pieces of happiness from those who had a lot of it and give it to those who had little. As a result, it turned out that the people were distributed in a thin, even layer across the vast expanses of Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Russian North.

Elsewhere, at about the same time, a scientific, correct and reasonable idea also arose - to make the race pure. That is, to raise a people of beautiful, strong, healthy, blue-eyed, fair-haired people, and those who interfere with this or supposedly can interfere with this must be sent to, again, scientifically organized gas chambers and ovens.

Elsewhere it was thought that if an evil enemy resists and does not surrender, then instead of throwing thousands of bombs at him, one can build one bomb, which is equal to thousands. And although after Hiroshima and Nagasaki the atomic bomb was no longer used, the idea of the so-called peaceful atom arose. And again the man confidently decided that he could subjugate something that was actually beyond his power; all this ended, as we know, with Chernobyl.

The 20th century lies between the Titanic and Chernobyl. His whole story is a story of faith in reason and science, and the formula as the ultimate truth, and disappointment in all this.

Vladimir Tolts:

Elena Kolomiychenko, co-editor of Giovanni Bensi for the Continent of Europe program, is a doctor by her first profession. The historical paradigm outlined by Peter Weil seems extremely important to her. And Lena, without waiting for the onset of the third millennium, is already explaining to her daughter Sasha, who is finishing high school in Munich:

Elena Kolomiychenko:

Soon we will learn to control human feelings, soon it will be possible to grow people with given abilities. You and I recently read this in the newspaper, lying on a hot sea beach. “We are indeed approaching the end of human history, because we are preparing the end of man as we knew him. And then a new, post-human history will begin.” - These are the last phrases in the article by the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama.

I want to think that he will be wrong now, just as he was wrong when he predicted the end of history after the end of the Cold War. I want you to be able to cry and rejoice not from pills. But doctors and Fukuyama counter with facts: Nearly 35 million American patients are already taking the mood-improving drug Prozac as prescribed by doctors. 3 million overactive children are given another drug, the sedative Ritolin.

“Until now, philosophers have only explained the world in various ways; our task is to change it” - this is Karl Marx. In the euphoria of the first communist years, the Soviet machine wanted to change not only the world, but also people. The family, as an institution, was supposed to perish, children were supposed to be raised not at home by their parents, but in some kind of general schools, and according to the plan of the social engineers of that time, they were supposed to become more or less identical adults, such as is necessary for the construction of a new world.

Strong men and women smiled joyfully with socialist realism in paintings and sculptures. Socialist realism is everywhere - in life, in art, in poetry, in prose. “Let’s put an end to the suffering of the intelligentsia!”, “Let’s educate a new person, and re-educate the old ones through labor on the construction sites of socialism!” - and they re-educated... The experiment failed, but the ideas remained.

Having added the idea of black varnish to the red ones, it was picked up by supporters of fascism: “pure race”, equally purebred, strong German children from good parent material are brought up in closed boarding schools. “The sick and unfortunate have no right to live!” “Nation of masters” and “nation of slaves”... - Failed.

Today's Germans are more sensitive than others to all kinds of experiments on human nature, they were more afraid than others of the consequences in connection with the appearance of the cloned cute sheep Dolly, imagining in the near future squads of cloned people - soldiers, doctors, artists.

True, in the scientific world they say that the principle of cloning itself is promising, because it is possible to reproduce not an entire person, but to create, for example, a worldwide bank of human organs - hearts, kidneys, what else? - arms, legs for the sick. - Maybe this is what is needed. But Marie Curie did not know how the results of her much-needed discoveries would turn out...

I want the worries in Fukuyama’s predictions to not come true, so that you laugh and cry, worry and rejoice, I want you to love, to have ordinary children. I want you to live in a human era, not a post-human era.

Vladimir Tolts:

An expert on Russia, a translator, and now an aspiring Russian writer, Mario Corti was born in 1945 near Milan. He spent his childhood years in Argentina. He worked at the Italian embassy in Moscow, secretly sent samizdat from there, and then, already in Munich, studied it. He is now the acting director of the Russian Freedom Service.

What are you going to tell your grandchildren about your 20th century, Mario?

Mario Corti:

I’ll tell you about one of my great disappointments in life.

I was 9 years old, we lived in Argentina, in a village 120 kilometers from Buenos Aires. The dictator at that time was Juan Domingo Peron; in the last years of his reign, he had a conflict with the church. Rumors began to be heard from the capital about the burning of churches and persecution of the clergy. The priests changed into civilian clothes and went into hiding. The persecution reached our village and arrested our only priest, the rector of the parish. My father called me and said: “Today we are going to prison to visit our priest.”

You can imagine my excitement: having read stories about the torment of those persecuted for their faith, I imagined the abbot in a dark cell, in shackles, tormented by hunger...

We set off on foot, walked through the square, on one side of which there was a church, on the other - the city hall. On the side street behind the city hall, the commissariat building is one-story, like almost all houses in Argentine villages. We walked through the main entrance and were taken to the first room on the left. There, at a large table, a gray-haired, half-bald commissar and the abbot were playing cards...

I will not draw conclusions; let everyone draw their own moral from this parable.

I could talk about many other things, but to whom? My children live and work in different countries - a son in England, three daughters - in Paris, Munich, Milan. In our century, the century of globalization, the extended family, the family consisting of grandparents, parents and children, has disappeared. They lived all over the place, and when a conflict between children and parents arose, the children turned to their grandparents for advice and support and everything was smoothed out. Now this is gone, and the children have no one to turn to. Disappeared into this social mechanism for regulating conflicts between generations. And there is no one left to tell my grandfather or grandmother, to pass on my experience...

Vladimir Tolts:

This episode of the “Time Difference” program is continued by prose writer and journalist Sergei Yurienen. He was born in 1948 in Frankfurt an der Odre. Lived in Leningrad, studied in Minsk and Moscow. In 1977 he received political asylum in France. On Radio Liberty since 1979. He is the initiator of the Ex Libris and Over Barriers programs.

Sergei Yurienen:

I don’t know what will happen to the grandchildren the day after tomorrow, but I’m already worried about their possible mothers today, while the girls who were born in the Soviet Union during the years of perestroika and got the chance to become “Eurochildren.” “What is communism, and what is perestroika, and what is the Soviet Union?..”

Having left almost half my life ago, I grew up, naturally, then and there, and at the age of these new girls, I remember asking questions about the 21st century, the newspaper image of which was precisely kindled beyond the horizons of the forcibly limited consciousness of the Soviet people: “You will live under communism.” At that time I had no reason not to trust the Kremlin. The uncertainty came from something else: the main question that I asked myself was completely selfish - will I live, will I survive inside such a huge, rough country for four whole decades to find myself in the promised fairy tale, populated by new beautiful people of the future?..

I didn’t ask in vain, but having a grandfather who was released half-dead from the St. Petersburg “crosses,” and not having a dad who was shot by mistake: he rushed to Berlin to participate in the SVAC party conference, and they, “their own,” thought: the bastard is leaving for the free sector.

I received the answer at the age of 12 and for me, their grandson and son, alas, the realm of pure abstractions did not disappear, the Orwellian formula, the symbol of the 20th century - a boot stepping on a person’s face. I turned out to be a man, the boots turned into galoshes, which were put on the service boots of the “garbage”, who were strongly concerned about the need to patrol the factory area on one chilly evening of Soviet Constitution Day.

Would I tell them about this? Hardly.

The sky in “Star Wars” no longer threatens them, except perhaps in Lucas’s new film, but “in diamonds” too; however, no one promises them diamonds. I would like to see them free and beautiful, but I’m afraid they cannot avoid infantile trauma either. The era of extreme, transcendental and boundless humiliation of people, despite our feasible resistance to it, has gained such inertia for a century that it is stepping with a face-crushing sole onto the shore of the next millennium. So, beloved grandchildren will still have to deal with the totalitarian legacy both in the world and in themselves, it would be nice if their fathers were alive.

I hope that at least in this way their age will not be like our orphan age.

Vladimir Tolts:

Philosopher Boris Paramonov emigrated from the USSR in 1977, when he was 40. Since 1986, he has been a full-time New York employee of Radio Liberty, where he hosts the weekly program “Russian Questions.” Since 1990 it has been published in Russia. Boris Mikhailovich is a permanent employee and member of the editorial board of the Zvezda magazine, St. Petersburg.

Boris Paramonov:

I must say that your question did not arouse much enthusiasm in me. Better to say - I find it difficult to answer, even better to say - I don’t know what I would tell my grandchildren, and, by the way, I have two of them, about my experience, about life in the 20th century.

Two-thirds of my life was spent in Russia, in the then Soviet Union. The American third of my biography has developed in such a way that here, too, I deal with all sorts of “Russian issues.” So I have nothing to say to my descendants about America; they themselves, living here, will learn everything they need.

I do not undertake to generalize the American centuries-old experience; Russia remains. And here’s the question: do my grandchildren need knowledge of Russia?

It’s hard to believe that America could find itself in a situation in which the Russian-Soviet experience would be useful. The problems here are different and will have their own specifics.

Is the Russian experience universal, universally significant - that is the question. I'm not sure I can answer this definitively.

I will proceed from conjectural, conditionally subjunctive considerations - “what if?..”

In this case, the Russian lesson can be formulated something like this: the most fatal, one might say tragic, human error, demonstrated exemplarily by Russia in the 20th century, is maximalism. In Russian, exact translation, it is called Bolshevism. You cannot set yourself ultimate, ultimate goals - this is a utopian approach.

The second, related feature of utopian thinking is perfectionism, the desire for perfection. Bigger and better does not mean biggest and best. If only because human goal-setting and human ideals do not contain guarantees of indispensable truth. It has long been said that when people try to reach heaven, they certainly end up in hell. Nobody knows what is best and most correct. A person must proceed in his activities from the current situation and considerations for its specific correction. (“Creeping empiricism” was called this in the Soviet Union.) Absolutely right, this should be the approach to solving any problems. I’ll even say this: don’t strive for the best, but think about not spoiling it. Metaphysical modesty - that's what you can call it.

But, in general, everything said here is what every American knows. My American grandchildren, I repeat, will learn all this from their own upcoming experience. It’s like I’m formulating for myself the lessons of what I’ve experienced. And in general, this is what I always say when speaking on Radio Liberty, that Sancho Panzo is a more valuable social cultural type than Don Quixote - he won’t mess things up and won’t go into battle with windmills.

Can we say that the experiences of the 20th century have weaned humanity away from quixoticism forever? I doubt. Firstly, you cannot reason in terms of eternity and consider your reasoning to be true forever. And, secondly, Don Quixotes are more beautiful than their squires.

I recently came across an old play by Jean Geradou “There will be no universal war”, it says why people fight wars - because of beauty. - The Trojan War, there will be Trojan wars! I really hope it’s not in my lifetime....

Vladimir Tolts:

As in the first program - the Moscow "photo card" of Freedom for History - in our today's "snapshot" there is a random but welcome guest - the writer Yuz Aleshkovsky, heading from Russia to the States.

Yuz Aleshkovsky:

I don’t know whether I’ll live to see grandchildren appear in my family, in my family, since I’m about to turn 70, but perhaps, to my readers and listeners, to a not so simple question: what do I think about the passing century, I would like, without thinking too deeply, to answer this:

I have a two-fold attitude towards this centenary; firstly, it marked 70 years of my personal life, for which I am eternally grateful to heaven and happy occasion. And the background, the background of the time against which these 7 decades have passed is another matter...

I think that in most of my troubles, and at times misfortunes, I think that in all the dramatic vicissitudes of my fate, it is not the 20th century, not time, that is to blame, but myself. Although, of course, as a person I was formed not only from my own will, but also from the same 20th century. Fortunately, I don’t remember the “year of the great turning point,” the year of my birth, but literally from the age of four I began to feel something abnormal in the atmosphere of general life, in particular, in the life of our communal apartment, communal apartment. First one room, then another, was vacated in it, I stopped meeting in the huge corridor first one uncle, then another aunt, then husband and wife, then grandfather, then grandmother. Particularly etched in my memory was the sudden silence, which was always broken by the work of the gramophone-gramophone and in the corridor the voice of the then idol of the Moscow public could be heard: “At the samovar, me and my Masha, and it’s been dark in the yard for a long time...”

I don’t know if the time of arrests and disappearances of people left some kind of heavy mark on my psyche, but, of course, the secrecy of my parents, the lack of conversations on so-called political topics, sharpened my interest in everything that was kept silent in conversations and conversations. I was raised, in general, by a courtyard that humanity had nothing to do with, and by that war, the Second World War, which one way or another became the evil fate of all humanity.

I am still fascinated by the creations of the 20th century - the modern car, airplanes, and now computers and the advanced music recording industry. I, like everyone else, brings pleasure and comfort to all sorts of innovations in the everyday services of humanity. However, now I’m thinking more and more about the fact that your, and perhaps my grandchildren will have to pay dearly for the high that my generation caught and is catching thoughtlessly, partly believing that there will be a flood after us. I'm afraid this flood is for us...