As you get older life should get easier...in theory. But in fact it just gets complicated. And what makes these complications are the memories!
Sometimes what we recall is true but are sometimes difficult to reconcile.
Today, the day I went to St Petersburg memories assailed me from every side!
My.father was a communist. He had come out of fighting in the war, looking for a brighter future. Communism had given him some of the answers.
When as a little girl I had seen a very big teddy bear in the window of the local coop I had been amazed by finding it in my stocking one Christmas morning . My father told me its name. He was Joseph Stalin!
I grew up with that name as my much loved teddy bear .,
Filled with the euphoria of winning the war, my dad believed in a future where socialism mattered and could iron out everything that was wrong in the war torn world.
I really wished for the first time today that he was still alive.
His glorious communist state , as represented by Soviet Russia was here dismembered.
St Petersburg remains intact and beautiful whilst the soviet way of life does not.
One of the churches we saw today had been used during the soviet period as a skating rink.
I wish he could have heard the way the present Russians felt about their country before Glasnost, seen the wonderful churches, now restored to beauty with love and realised that the dream he tried so hard to make me believe was, is, will be a failed experiment that damaged people as well as churches.
If that seems hard it is I think just deserts for a man who brought up a small daughter who thought Joseph Stalin was a big cuddly teddy bear!
Till she grew up!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
1 comment:
I think that the Communists held an appeal, if you ignored the repression that went with it. It was fashionable in certain sphere like the Academic e.g Burgess and Philby.
I can remember in my childhood, a friend of my father, who'd fought in the Spanish Civil War against the Franko regime, talking about it to my father. When he returned to the UK, he was locked up as a subversive and wasn't able to join the forces in WW2 - which did seem a bit strange considering he was totally against what the NAZI's stood for? He was disappointed when Russia invaded Poland from the East, while Germany came from the West. But he said that their salvation was when Germany attacked them and they became allies.
I don't know what happened to him, but he was a nice man, if a little Earnest about his beliefs - he disappeared from our lives when I was a teenager- perhaps he fell out with my father? We were never told.
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