Kiev 1966. I remember everything about that evening and the preparations that led to it with Mama making me a dress out of her old one, the color of ocher yellow, a dark and moody natural color of a forest fox. Some call it orange. Mama made me a trim out of her brown fox fur color. Just for that one night. But it is really a borderline red. Mama really loved me when she made me clothes when I was very young. As I got older and life became more challenging, I eventually learned to make them for myself. I never again felt quite like the shining star I was the evening I was the fox. In some ways, this may have been my moment of the end of innocence. I started realizing how difficult everything in our everyday life was soon after.
I remember playing the role of a sly shrewd animal and loving every moment. I remember the feel of the fox dress fabric, and the scent of the fur, the scared children awaiting their turn in the New Year show, and my happy starring role that lasted but a few minutes, but gave me joy for years. I remember my soft shoes and the room filled with rows of parents on children’s seats, applauding everything, even their children’s inabilities to retain and deliver a few lines. I had a big part and even Mama was impressed how finely I delivered all of my speeches.
A gorgeous tall New Year’s Tree, so beautifully decorated, was guarded at the snow-cotton-covered tree-stump by Snow Girl, a Russian folk character, who always assisted Grandpa Frost with presents. You cannot see him but his white cotton torso was surely standing to the other side of that tree-stump.
The portrait of Grandpa Lenin, everybody’s “sage, loving and caring leader” is on the wall in front of me, adorned by embroidered towel, an Ukrainian rushnik, just as the darn icons would have been before the Bolshevik Revolution.
To hell with god – that’s what we were being taught every day, every hour, in preparation for our role in the Soviet Socialist society.
The children were lauded as the most privileged and protected citizens of the USSR. We were certain that we were the best of the children in the world. The most deserving. The future was ours for the taking…
So many of our generation are dead now. Some died in Afghanistan. Some, during and after Chernobyl. Some die in Ukraine from poor medical care, like no help in hospitals for seniors at 50 or 55. Flu medications are not dispensed to seniors, for instance.
Some died from hardships during the post-perestroika era. Some were killed by profiteers and other modern day bandits.
Most became cynics and condemned the regime that raised us.
Many disbursed throughout the world.
The true communists amongst us did what they were programmed to do – they continue to spread the disease of Leninism-socialism to all odd places it has not yet infected. In many countries little girls like me have been reciting their poems during what should have been Christmas-time celebrations. They stare into Grandpa Lenin’s portraits to the applause of their Marxist parents too eager to deny god as the dogma of religious “opium for the masses” just as Lenin taught.
More than half a century later, from the shores of United States of America, I look at the innocent little girl I then was and pray to GOD that socialist takeover meets its death in 2020. I pray it will become COVID’s most deserving victim.
I pray that Christians will continue to be Christians and Jews – Jews, practicing their religions openly and proudly, without communist imposition of atheism or Islamists’ “convert or die” contamination.
The younger Americans and even my contemporaries know so little about history, they have allowed revisionism and thought control.
We are a week away from 2021 – I am hopeful!
I want Truth to prevail and preserve USA for the future generations of grateful immigrants like me and their well-informed descendants, who will erect beautiful Christmas Trees and light Hanukkah menorah candles every year, and live together in love and peace.