The world I grew up in was not built for dreaming. It was a place of long queues and short tempers, where the winters stretched on like unfinished sentences, and the summers were brief, almost apologetic interruptions of heat and…
There was a time when the world was easier to understand. When the grainy flicker of Soviet cinema could paint the world not as it was, but as it ought to be. And in those darkened halls, amid the scratchy…...
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I grew up amongst books, although never knowing for sure whether it was a blessing or a burden. In those days, you didn’t choose what you read. You took what was given, what was printed, what had survived the censors,…
The leaden days of socialist monotony in the 1970s and 80s had an odd way of pressing on the spirit, like a cold fog that never actually lifted. But even in the dreary grind of lining up for bread, sugar…...
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The dimly lit, rain-soaked cinemas of 1980s Soviet life provided brief but significant havens. Among the films, Sergei Tarasov's 1985 Чернaя стрела (The Black Arrow) stood out not only as entertainment but also as an event—an artefact of a society struggling with its paradoxes. Under the heavy shadow of a collapsing Soviet ideology, this rendition of Robert Louis Stevenson's story connected as both metaphor and adventure, a revolt against the ordinary disguised as historical epic.