Proletarian revolution shall prevail and America and England shall become proletarian countries, we were told behind the Iron Curtain. We hoped Americans and Englishmen knew better.
By the age of fifteen everyone i knew had realized that we lived in a farce and that what we were thought was a lie. All of it.
We were told that a person who was raised in socialism had nothing to do in the West. The West was rotten, you see.
Evil capitalists were sucking blood from the working class that suffered – but, due to unknown circumstances, the latter weren’t yet class-conscious enough so to get the manufacturing tools into their hands and overthrow the parasites- capitalists. We weren’t thought how much it would take them to do so, but the future looked bright and we were encouraged to be looking forward to living in it.
It all sounded very much like Tikkune Olam being completed, the ultimate Judaic spiritual correction of the world, with the difference that the Messiah – Marx – had already arrived.
But, we needed to better our consciousness for his teachings to start working fully. He had proved that capitalism will fall – and there was no way of avoiding that, it was just a question of time.
Meanwhile, we had to move from socialism, where everyone gave according to abilities and was given according to needs- to communism – that’s where the money would finally stop existing and everyone would be perfectly happy to contribute selflessly to the society whatever they could, while the society would take care of every single whim of theirs, or something like that.
I was 13 or so when i told to my father that it won’t work, that there is no way it would – as no one would get up from their beds in the morning under such circumstances.
He said i didn’t get it, you see, he believed in the fairy tale he was told, in the proletarian revolution, which turned out to be the biggest Jewish upraise in history, following the appearance of the long-awaited Messiah – Carl Marx.
It’s only that everyone denied they were Jewish – and Marx in the first place.
For the communist, the chosen one, it did not matter.
Marx was the new Moses, Engels was his brother – Aaron and Clara Zetkin was the incarnation of their sister, Miriam.
Capitalists were the Egyptians from whom we had to escape – the might of the super-powerful Soviet Union, which in the new pantheon had replaced (infamous by then) Hashem – would have protect us from the Capitalists- Egyptians, as the chosen proletariat would cross the parted Red Sea and reach the communist shore of the other side.
Then all would be happy, on this shore of milk and honey and we would forget all we suffered back in Egyptian capitalism and would live happily ever after.
It’s only that we were still in the desert, after 70y of parting from the Capitalistic Egypt, and manna had stopped long time ago.
Marx had retired to some Sinai of his, yet wasn’t showing signs of coming back.
Tzaddikim, righteous souls, in form of the Presidium of the Communist Party were there to protect us though.
The mixed multitude that followed the chosen Soviet people on their way to communist freedom was indeed mixed – it constituted of Afghans, Mongolians, Cubans and even Africans, but all were equal (albeit we could see that some were more equal than the others.)
We witnessed miracles which proved it – Gagarin was in cosmos after all. The TV and newspapers were repeatedly proving how our prophets were right – every day in every way we were getting better and better and all of it was documented.
Throughout our communist history we were thought poisonous replicas of Biblical stories. Stalin had sacrificed his own son, in the same way in which Abraham the patriarch was ready to sacrifice Isaac… it’s only that in Biblical account, on some deeper level, Abraham’s binding of Isaac represented restriction of one’s own negative inclinations, while Yosif Visarionivich turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic and mass murderer; back then we couldn’t know any of it.
They had even invented a calendar of their own, which varied slightly depending on whether you were in the Eretz USSR – or – in diaspora, in one of its satellites.
But the High Holydays were observed by all, with no exceptions.
The Victory Day, May 9th was one such Holy Day where you were commanded to make pilgrimage to the nearest monument of Unknown Soviet Soldiers, bow deeply and present sacrifices – the bouquet of carnations.
The New Year was, of course, the communist Christmas and Ded Moroz aka Grandfather Frost was the new incarnation of the late Santa Claus, he had lost his sanctity, but had gained a granddaughter, Snegurochka – the Snow Maiden – who would become his companion and consolation in the modern times.
The Christmas tree was still there – only it was renamed “elechka” – little fir tree – and was crowned with five-pointed red star at the top.
There were traitors, the infamous Spies who were sent as forward observers to those distant lands; some of them would give in to their negative inclinations and would cross over to the giants, the sons of Anak who saw us as grasshoppers. They were cursed for ever to burn in the capitalist hell, headed by – as we were thought – by some second rate actor, who by default couldn’t be a first-class president. Unlike our presidents.
It’s only that ours were dying one after another, and their was thriving.
We would have days off school when yet another mummy-like looking Soviet president would die and we weren’t happy when Gorbachov came into power; he seemed too young to be dying anytime soon and we felt deprived of the free from school days.
He was dabbed Mineral Secretary as he started the war on Votka. He never knew what chaos would start when Russians finally sobered up.
Copyright ©2012 Lena Ruth Stefanovic, All Rights Reserved
