Memories vs Statistics
Highland. Anapa. The place is wild (especially in 1979), but cute! Modern photo anapastar.ru
"Railway transport system of the USSR
transported 2–3 times more cargo than in the USA,
and passenger turnover was tens of times higher.”A. B. Petrov
transported 2–3 times more cargo than in the USA,
and passenger turnover was tens of times higher.”A. B. Petrov
People and story. Today we continue the theme of memories of the past. It is clear that, like all particular examples, they are subjective, but to a certain extent they are indicative, since they really reflect what happened. Which, by the way, is not difficult to verify after reading this material.
However, I would like to start it with a number of comments from readers of our site. I liked them because of their logic and clarity of formulation, and these are not mantras that are usually found in the comments of their ideological opponents. Some are downright worthy of good scientific work. But, as I already warned above, my material will contain only my personal life experience.
The leadership has clearly become disconnected from the people
From which it follows that in the USSR there was a negative selection of power: at the top there were disproportionately more people with proprietary interests than those who care about the interests of Soviet society and the working people of the whole world (Stanislav Shishkin).
Paradoxically, growth and development were combined in the USSR with serious illnesses - then, when growth was significant and significantly outstripped the factor of degradation, there was a feeling that it was not there, but it was always there. A sort of “complex decline” VS “focal high-intensity growth” (Knell Wardenheart).
Instead, the approach has degenerated into a “cult of spells” through which they are trying to shake up the average person, for some reason in their frozen ideas this is a practically unchanged every person since the time of the King of the Peas, and accordingly they are trying to use “on him” the same methods as and in those days. This problem of perceiving things was visible back in the days of the “middle USSR”, when in agitprop the bourgeoisie from the cartoons was still wearing a top hat, a monocle and white gloves, whereas by that time he had not been like that for 100 years (N.Z).
In my opinion, “Stalinism” can be formulated as “a dogmatic and authoritarian left-wing policy that uses aggressive radical populism, as well as practices of legal alienation and extra-legal actions to achieve or approach stated goals.” (Knell Wardenheart).
It so happened that in 1978, my wife and I went on vacation after a year of work in the village to Anapa. We boarded the plane, arrived, immediately found an apartment and had a very good rest. The owners invited us next year as well. And a year later, we again took plane tickets (for the train there was just a terrible line at the ticket office!), flew to Anapa, settled in the old place and immediately went to buy a ticket for the return journey.
It turned out that even at the Aeroflot ticket office you need to sign up for a queue and go to roll call at 5 am for about a week. “But that’s nothing,” they warned us in line, “you need to register at the railway ticket office two weeks in advance, so a week here is nonsense!”
We signed up, I went to roll call for a week, and when it was my turn, they told me that there were no tickets for the number of tickets I needed. And the same thing happened the next day, and the third... It turns out that we were stuck in Anapa! And most importantly, there was no guarantee that there would be tickets for this flight at all - that’s what they told me at the ticket office.
What to do?
There is only one way out - go to the railway ticket office and buy train tickets. Let's go, sign up... And time flies! And you have to pay rent and eat three times a day. And it turns out that the two weeks that we have already lived through, plus two more roll calls, plus the time before departure...
And in the end it turned out that we simply did not have enough money to stay in Anapa. Or we'll have to starve! Of course, you could give a telegram to your parents. But we lived with them according to the principle of the Indians, who said: “Respect the old people, but don’t trust them!”
It is clear that our “ancestors” did not like such independence too much, and every now and then they tried to punish us with at least a ruble. Only we didn’t give in painfully and never asked anyone for money. So this path was also closed for us.
My wife almost went into hysterics, but I convinced her that with me she had nothing to fear, that “we’ll steal the money, but we’ll get it.” And they got it!
We went to the High Bank, where at that distant time there was a bottle warehouse, and all the rejected bottles were thrown off the cliff into the sea. Therefore, the entire shore was strewn with beautiful multi-colored pebbles made of green bottle glass, but there were also red and yellow pieces of glass. They sent my daughter to collect them (for a five-year-old child this is the perfect activity), and we started catching small “stone crabs.” We caught about a hundred, no less. AND…
I buried them all in an ant heap nearby in the park. I bought a jar of epoxy glue and, when the crabs turned into dried mummies, I got busy with “creativity”: I put glass pellets greased with epoxy (this was necessary so that they would shine as if wet with water!) into piles, and also placed a crab covered with epoxy resin on top. The result was small, easy to transport in a suitcase, and even a souvenir shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow.
I also made several vases of simply wondrous beauty by pouring glass, smeared with resin, between two cylinders of paper wrapped in plastic film - epoxy does not stick to it.
And then with all this I went to the path leading to the beach, where local entrepreneurs usually sold boiled corn, Marlboro bags (the gypsies demanded from 6 to 10 rubles for them) and... large crabs on varnished plywood. But their makers had no taste, so their “product” looked very poor compared to mine. And how can you transport such a healthy crab in a suitcase? It will break, because it is fragile...
I settled down... It was then that the “beach-goers” walking past me pounced on my shiny souvenirs and started buying them, so that there was even a queue!
In general, by the time my wife and daughter showed up on this path, I only had one vase unsold! Expensive, they say 6 rubles.
Then my wife realized everything and began to buy it from me, and it turned out that “she came up second, and I was the first... And why are you, girl, bothering me, I’m already buying. I’ll buy it for ten... No, I’ll buy it for ten...”
In the end, the vase went for 10 rubles. And we celebrated our earnings of 326 rubles in the restaurant. Now we already had enough money, but I repeated this “action” one more time, so that we went to roll calls at the cash desk now in complete confidence in our fate. We bought tickets and returned home, having stayed in Anapa instead of the two planned weeks for a whole month and a half! Wonderful, isn't it?
But during all this time I almost never had a chance to get a good night’s sleep, since I had to get up at 4:30 and run to roll call at 5 o’clock!
And the question is, if our trains ran so well, why were there always not enough tickets for them? Moreover, that year it was reported that 1,5 million people came to Anapa. But last year, when we again vacationed in the Krasnodar Territory, and the year before, 1,5 million people also vacationed in Anapa. That is, since 1979, the number of vacationers in this city has not decreased, but for some reason there are now enough train tickets there.
There were no tickets for the next year, 1980, but here we had already calculated everything in advance and were ready for any eventuality. But more about that next time...
PS
It is possible that one of the readers of our site was vacationing in Anapa just at this time. Let me remind you that the railway “beach” ticket office then stood on a vacant lot in the place where the “Aquapark” is now located.
Or maybe some of you even bought such a “shiny crab”?
It would be great if he kept this souvenir. Although you can hardly count on it. A lot of time has passed.
By the way, I subsequently wrote about making souvenirs from Anapa glass pebbles in the book “From everything at hand,” published by the Minsk publishing house “Polymya” in 1987.
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