"...Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative..." — Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)
***
"Put your bag at your desk". My teacher, my first ever teacher was screening me from head to toe. I had a giant white bow on a clip hugging my hair into a ponytail. My uniform was brown with a crispy white apron and crispy white cuffs. Everyone was dressed in uniforms of the same color. But mine was a bit different. Instead of three buttons stretching to my neck and holding my collar tightly together, mine was a zipper.
"Where is your uniform from? Did your parents have it made?". She continued not picking her eyes off of my collar, a mesmerizing process that had me in her invisible grip.
"No, comrade Khachatryan, my mother bought it when we were vacationing in Saint Petersburg this summer". I whispered.
"From a department store?"
"Yes".
Her face suddenly shone off. "That's excellent. That is an excellent uniform". She said. "And you are an exemplary student. You will be the head of the class". And through this unclear to my childish mind logic, I was immediately promoted into a level of privilege. I had access to our teacher any time I wanted. The other pupils could of course approach her with questions during the break, but only I could approach not just ask questions but have discussions with her on organisational matters.
***
This is the story of my first ever First of September. First of September was a ritual, a very important ritual of the Homos Sovieticus. It was a threshold between milestones of year-by-year programming that was aimed at turning us into decent communists. My generation was viewed as the lucky one for we were the closest ever to LIVE the communism and not just be concerned with building it or fighting for it. A lot was expected of us in terms of education. We HAD to be the best students on the face of the Earth for "we were born to make fairy tales come true" in a fashion of dialectic materialism. (More ... http://grishoyedova.blogspot.com/p/good-and-bad.html )
