Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Faruk Šehić

make us be like them in every way possible – frowning, moustachioed men who performed important tasks for the existence of our great and powerful State. But I didn’t want a moustache and wasn’t in a hurry to grow up. I believed in the red of my Pioneer scarf.And intheblood of all earthly proletarians, whowould close ranks in their dim, underground factories, thirsting for world revolution, when Marx, Engels and Lenin would raise them from the dead. Later it would just take Karlo Štajner’s anti-Gulag classic 7000 Days in Siberia for me to strike communism from the list of beloved, sacred ‘isms’ in my high- school diary, albeit it in pencil and with a wavering hand. In the language of the Party, I had had become a revisionist; I was like Rosa Luxemburg,

whom we hated because she had abandoned the true current of the revolution and become a vile agent of imperialism – at least that’s the way it was served to us in the Marxist textbooks. Everything had to be in the service of our powerful State, the fourth-largest military force in the world, whose wings of steel we were more thanproudof. Evenour town’s park boasted small patriotic trees (more like bushes)

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