Page 290 - The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1

Nicolai Levashov. The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1. Born in the USSR

57
this state of “affairs”. One day there was a car accident on a Georgian road. The
participants were a Georgian with his “Volga”, an Armenian with his “Lada” and a
Russian with his “Zaporozhets” . The Georgian got out of his “Volga” and said: “Vay,
58
vay, vay! I will have to work a whole week to buy a new car!” The Armenian got out of
his “Lada” and annoyingly flapping his hands began to groan: “Vakh, vakh, vakh! I will
have to work a whole month to buy a new car!” The Russian got out from his
“Zaporozhets” and said bitterly: “I’ve been breaking my back all my life to buy this car!”
The Georgian and Armenian looked at the Russian and asked: “Why did you buy such
an expensive a car then?”

Involuntarily I recalled how the events which happened in the USSR are presented
to the rest of the world. It appears that the Russian people “imposed” communist
ideology and the Great Russian chauvinism on all other peoples of the USSR and later

on the people of Eastern Europe, converting Russia into a prison for them! But for some
reason, the “enslaved” people lived much better than their enslavers in the USSR, as is
obvious from the anecdotes of the time.

By the way, now both the Georgians and Armenians are free of the “Great Russian
chauvinism”, as well as of the opportunity to parasitize on the back of the Russian
people, (although, they creep into Russia by any means to make a profit out of Russians
as a matter of habit) and at the same time fling mud at it. Both Georgia and Armenia are

now very poor countries with the population reduced to penury and now not a single
Georgian or Armenian from those anecdotes asks a Russian “Why did you buy such an
expensive a car?” Most Russian people have not started to live the life they deserve, but
they have a future and this future is very promising. And what future is waiting for those
people who got their “freedom”?

Again I am getting a little carried away. It is simply that my soul hurts and
sometimes needs to spell out this pain for my people, for our real culture and real history!
The last time traffic cops stopped me on the Moscow ring road and received from

me the next “tax for starving cops”, it was because I had a Mercedes-Benz and they were
sure that in this case they would reap their “harvest”. Nowadays there are a lot of foreign
cars on the roads of Russia, but in 1991 they were pretty rare.

When we entered Moscow I reduced the speed and drove at 120 km/hour, Svetlana
looked around and asked: “Why are we going so slowly?” When we rushed all the way
at a speed of about 200 km/hour, she got used to landscapes flashing past the window of
our car, and 120 km/hour seemed, to her, the speed of a tortoise.

This was my first and last journey to Svetlana’s Motherland. It was the first and the
last time I saw her father alive. Svetlana also saw her father alive for the last time. I had
videotaped this journey and our conversation with her father. It was the only videotape

we had with Svetlana’s father in it and later it was stolen. We weren’t sorry about
anything else which was stolen from our apartment, except for this videotape. Later,
when Svetlana’s father died, she often grieved about this, but now nothing could be done
about it…

57 Georgia – a former Soviet Republic, now an independent Eurasian country, chiefly located in the South Caucasus, at the
juncture of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
58 Brands of Soviet cars. “Volga” was considered the best and “Zaporozhets” the worst.
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