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About the officers In my childhood there were many crippled people on the move - war heroes. Drunk, legless people who walked on stocks. I have seen and heard about how “my legs were torn off, my face was burned” since childhood and I understood that we were talking about the truth. These people survived the war by only 20 years - forty, fifty-year-old men who sang on the trains about what they experienced. This carriage-electric truth is my childhood education.
I was born in Lyubertsy. And there, since Lyubertsy is a garrison, there was an Officers' House. My decent parents, doctors, sent me to a garrison school, where there was English and music. On the walls there hung portraits of spies who give Soviet children chewing gum with a razor inside (the explanations were written next to it). I would never take chewing gum from a foreigner.

Oh happiness
Next to the Planet cinema, rebuilt from a church, there was a shooting range. Black targets are flying by, and I hit them all. When you put pellets into this double-barreled shotgun, take aim (and the guys play for beer there) and at five years old you hit everything - you’re a beauty. You don't get a teddy bear, and they won't give you beer - you just get caught. Since then I know that I can hit targets and, it seems, everything.
Another picture before my eyes. My grandmother, a lonely beauty, brunette with crimson lips. Dentist-prosthetist. He takes me with him to the south, to the sea (I don’t remember where exactly). She is standing on the pier in a dress. Large straw hat with a flower. Red sunset. And there I am, digging in the sand with my dog Dzhulka, a white French lapdog. And then a beautiful man approaches her. In a white tunic and light cap. They coo and look at the sunset. And then happiness began, because the man turned out to be the chef of some local restaurant. And I spent all my holidays in this restaurant on the veranda. I ate the most delicious food in the world. Happy summer of the year, probably 1973. With Julka the lapdog, with a blue bow, in a restaurant on the terrace by the sea. The point was not that it was delicious, but that I was alone - and it was all mine.

About school
Then I went to school. In first grade, we died in the stadium along with Victor Jara. Then Allende was killed. And together with the other Octobrists I sang: “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido! Our anthem sounds, the people are invincible. El pueblo unido anchovy raw fish. As long as we eat, we are invincible." They killed Allende. They killed Victor Jara - and I'm in first grade, damn it.
Comrade Castro came to us in Lyubertsy, at the world’s only plant for the production of sugar cane harvesters. When he arrived, I was on the street. It was so beautiful - military uniform, goatee. It was completely in vain that we were taught the fight against injustice, because we had absorbed it. Since then I have believed that my work flows into the work of my republic and that as long as we are united, we are invincible.

About material
My dolls stand before my eyes in full growth. There were three of them. Katya, Natasha and Mary. Only one of them was from the GDR - of course, her name was Mary. It cost seven rubles, I was already almost a teenager when I bought it myself. In the Efir store on Oktyabrsky Prospekt in the city of Lyubertsy, opposite the Elbrus kebab shop. I suddenly really wanted it, because she was pretty: a blonde in a beautiful orange dress. Tights cost seven seventy back then. But I exchanged them for a doll. I dreamed of jeans, of course. And about “Jesus Christ Superstar” on any medium. There could be two of them: vinyl and film. There was neither one nor the other, and there were no jeans either. There were Rila jeans, but I refused to wear them.

About the shameful
Dear Maxim K., sound engineer from Leningrad radio! Please forgive me for editing your first love poems, dedicated to me in ninth grade. I added commas and wrote my comments. Sorry, I was a complete idiot.

About a dream
When my husband was imprisoned, I realized that all my dreams had come true. I always wanted to be in the novel “The Count of Monte Cristo” - and here I am in it. Only I wanted to be in the middle, closer to the end, but I ended up at the beginning. All Dumas' heroes are my heroes. And hurray, I'm in them. I know there is a good ending and what I have to go through. What the hell different cardinals and barons will have to be experienced in some way - not as written in the book. And here I am in the middle of all this shit.

About fear
I am an ideal Komsomol goddess and I have seen and seen such goddesses. I liked them. Elderly, like women, but at the same time lean, lonely, with a sparkle in their eyes. It's all about youth, all about problems. So self-forgotten. Then I thought: what an interesting life people have. And suddenly I look at myself - I’m the same. I know how this evolution ends: Valentina Ivanovna Matvienko. So, Lord, if you exist, stop me.

Adults about childhood: Olga Romanova