"Everybody was still alive, everybody; everybody…"

Irina Malenkov

This song was played on the radio most often just before the 22nd of June – anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. Because the song was about the day before the war began. "Everybody was still alive, everybody, everybody..." Eduard Khil was singing. If you listened carefully to the text of that song, you got a cold, chilling feeling and tears in your eyes.

Of course, we have changed so much since. They call us "'free people" now. Songs have no effect on us nowadays whatsoever. In the past we couldn't sleep at night thinking of some sad movie scenes, such as drowning in a quagmire of the Soviet young female soldier Liza Brichkina in "At dawn it's quiet here" or even of what wasn't actually shown on the screen as such: murders of the little boys who were in the wrong place at the wrong time – in a post-war Lithuanian forest, by "brave" "forest brothers" in the Lithuanian film "Nobody wanted to die" and in a telephone cell by gangsters in the film "Place of the meeting can't be changed". In the past we used to think what the young hero of "Bumbarash" film, communist Yashka must feel when the bandits were burying him alive. But today we watch, without blinking, American and local made by their example horror films where blood is being shed by buckets and human beings are being cut into pieces – and it doesn't bother us. And when we get bored with that, we surf on Internet searching for the color photos of the victims of yet another American/NATO aggression: bloodied bodies of those who died on a bombed train in Yugoslavia; full of unspeakable fear big eyes of a young Yugoslav refugee girl who had witnessed how an American "liberators" bomb killed her mother... Or the torture of the Iraqi prisoners. Photos of that real American woman – who smokes and tortures male prisoners while expecting to bring a new life into this world... A fine mother she will be! Or the court case reports – about what exactly has done "the hero of our time" Colonel Budanov, with the Chechen girl Elsa Kungaeva... Well, we don't even really need the Internet: it's enough just to simply go out and to walk by a homeless man who dies just around the corner in freezing cold. Most people nowadays don't even look at them and continue to walk. Or when we hear a heartbreaking scream of yet another victim of our "freedom" and "democracy" from the darkness and just turn to the other side in bed, plug our ears and continue our quiet sleep, with a clear consciousness, for the rest of the night...

That's how – absolutely without worries, peacefully – snores somewhere at this moment in time our Nobel Peace prizewinner, Mikhail Gorbachev and his mates, Yakovlev and others. They would say that they have a clear consciousness. In fact, they simply don't have it at all. They don't dream about homeless kids of their "perestroika" begging on the streets and unwanted by their parents and society. They don't dream about the subject of our fat pop star Alia Pugacheva's fun song "Second hand girl" – girls who are selling themselves instead of being able to attend school. They don't dream about my schoolteacher – a retired lady who sits on the pavement, drunk, trying to sell some electric bulbs. They don't dream about my classmate – a bright girl who had the best marks and also became a teacher, but is being forced to sell some Turkish clothes on the market instead, just in order to survive. They don't dream about hungry women – textile industry workers from Ivanovo, "City of brides", who now are "liberated" from the opportunity to make a living. They don't dream about mutilated corpse of betrayed by them and butchered by fanatical Taliban Najibulla and about forced-back-into their-burqa Afghan women. They don't have nightmares about millions of refugees around the world who are forced out of their homes, countries and out of the lives they used to live, robbed of hope for the decent future, – by the submission of these Russian "heroes" to Western imperialism. They don't dream about pregnant African women drowning in the sea trying to reach "civilized" land. No nightmares about African children frozen to death in the luggage compartments of planes heading in the same direction. Or about Moldovans trying to sell their organs in order to feed their families. Or about migrant workers from ex-Soviet republics who are building their chic villas in Russia for peanuts, without having any rights, while only yesterday they were our fiIIy-righted compatriots...

...The 9th of May 1985. I was a student in Moscow, a city that was then still really a pleasure to live in. I remember the smell of the apple trees blossom. I remember .the feeling of pride for our country that had defeated fascism. I remember our annual minute of silence on that day that really had a deep meaning for most of us. I remember the annual fireworks – and the shouts of "hurray" on the streets. Even though they try to make us believe now that it was all "forced': it wasn't. People were really celebrating our victory. Celebrating life. People simply had all the reasons for celebration...

The 9th of May 1985. "Everybody was still alive..." – those who will die in the course of numerous civil wars in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Pridnestrov'ye, Karabakh, Central Asia. Those who will not make it into retirement years because of the "free" market economy. Those who will freeze to death on the streets of Moscow, under indifferent looks of the passers-by who simply don't care, or searching for food in the waste dumps. Those little boys who will grow up only to be murdered in Chechnya where they will be sent in order to kill the other little boys who will grow up just to declare jihad on all who are not "one of their own". Those little girls who will grow up just to spend the rest of their short lives as a piece of flesh for satisfaction of somebody's dirty desires in brothels. And other little girls – who will grow up to become human bombs in Moscow that has betrayed not just them, but us all. And those countless millions in other countries who will have nowhere to run and nothing to look forward to. On whose heads will the Americans and Brits be. dropping their bombs – something that would have never happened if our country wouldn't become such an ugly poisonous mushroom during these almost 20 years.

And when I hear this song today, I am thinking not about 21st of June 1941, but about the time of my youth when none of us could even imagine how our world of "the new political thinking" and "common human values" declared by the cancer of Gorbachev and it would turn into such an evil and horrendous "chamber of laughter". When everybody was still alive. When it was not too late yet to lead such a course that they would be all alive today.

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