City N, like many other cities of the then country, was not a blooming garden, did not amaze with masterpieces of architecture. There was nothing remarkable about him, he was dull and gray. Here, perhaps, a palace of culture in the style of Soviet eclecticism, but there were quite a few such palaces built according to a standard design.
That is why the city was seen as a casual visitor and a business trip exactly the same as thousands of other cities of a great country, having visited one, you know all the others. It was not even a city, to be precise, another name was found for such places - the Industrial Center.
The barracks of the shift workers that were being built not far from the new factories somehow imperceptibly turned into communal apartments, crooked fences and sheds grew to them with mold, and boiler houses and shops, fast food canteens, garages and warehouses were hurriedly blurring to them.
Everything grew, expanded, seethed swallowing nearby sleepy villages that for hundreds of years, by some miracle, retained their fabulous Vedic names and the measured old-fashioned way of life. The roar of excavators, blocks of concrete and reinforcement, the cries of workers, the wind of the new era without regret ripped open the belly of the streets, uprooted houses, drained swamps, changed river beds.
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The result of these events was the city - a huge territory strewn with factories, factories and quarries, mixed with small villages between which rare buses ply and trucks rushed.
In all this squelching dirt, in the interweaving of barracks, factories, wastelands, sour fences, groves, fields and eternally unfinished hangars and rickety warehouses, all the dullness and uncomfortableness that we, the generation born in the city, in the country building socialism, despised so much that now it has been lost, alas, irrevocably.
It was not a city or a factory, a country - it was a single organism. He breathed and squelched, smoked pipes and thundered with trains - he lived and none of us, then the children could not see and understand his integrity and power.
Someone this organism imprisoned and even took life, someone glorified. We, children, received from him pioneer camps, cartoons and children's films, strawberry fruit gum, pencil cases and books. There are many books, bicycles, dolls, plastic pistols and construction sets so that we grow up smart, value friendship and peace, learn to take care of little ones, protect and love him - our homeland.
And then, back in the distant thirties, a new large cement plant was being built. He quickly and for a long time plunged the surrounding into clouds of cement dust. The roofs of houses, trees and grass covered with it have turned white. When someone from the factories got out into the forest, into nature, to the river or to pick mushrooms, he quickly went crazy from the unusual fresh air and smoked, smoked greedily, dragging on one after another, hurrying to return back to the understandable and familiar sweaty embrace of the cement haze.
What's the plant? The plant was not alone, it needed raw materials, the quarries needed machinery to extract raw materials, the machinery needed specialists. They needed special transport, large Belaz, strong roads and bridges. Everything needed everything and all this needed people and all the arriving people needed housing. And the plant gave it to them. Not only houses were built, but also schools, kindergartens and nurseries, boiler houses and baths, fire departments, police stations, power plants and treatment facilities.
Next to the cement plant, a slate plant and another one that produced concrete blocks, road slabs and ceilings and a house-building plant grew, and to them a machine-building, woodworking, plastics plant and a monster of all-Union significance - a chemical plant about the construction of which was even filmed a feature multi-part film.
No, there is no way to list everything. As a child I could have counted 12 different large enterprises on the shaky bus from the outskirts to the center.
And behind all - not just names but human destinies, lives.
Potatoes were squelching in pans on the stoves, girls in canvas dressing gowns cradled children, the darkness of the night was torn through the windows, fighting the light of electric lamps, somewhere, in the darkness, carriages rattled and pipes smoked and the wind beat against the walls of houses. The warmth of my mother's hands cradled us and carried us to a wonderful future. We did not know the words death and melancholy, and we were destined for a starry sky and endless happiness for all time.
The balance of the factories included a palace of culture with its clubs and sports sections, a sports palace with an ice stadium and a swimming pool, kindergartens and nurseries, rest houses, one, in my opinion, was even in the Crimea, a health center, children's pioneer camps. Leisure parks with swings, plaster statues of pioneers and women with oars, boat stations and gazebos.
All of this was paid for, serviced, built, repaired, expanded and maintained by factories.
In all this cement dust and eternal dirt, a plexus of rusty sleepers and dim lanterns that were also living and breathing a huge country. Children ran and played in it, gardens grew in it, where everyone could pick apples for free, the shops had glass doors and showcases without bars, there were no guards in pharmacies, and there were no turnstiles and blank fences in schools.
A generation has grown up and, in my opinion, there are more than one that will not understand what I am writing about, will not understand why. Because once, somehow imperceptibly and quickly, everything changed.
And it started like this:
On a spring night, already falling asleep, I suddenly heard people walking down the street and talking in French.
Since Napoleon's time, my city has not heard French. Real French without a Ryazan accent.
The voices began to sing some kind of French song….
The plant was bought by the French. More precisely, some kind of French company. Who sold them and why I did not know and then I was not interested. But the factory workers did not switch to Renault or start eating Dorblu cheese.
The new owners first of all gave up all non-core assets, as it is now called. Namely - to pay for kindergartens, nurseries, schools, palaces of culture with rest homes. Something was sold out, something was abandoned and stolen. The nursery that I used to go to was once burnt by homeless people a few years later, and for a long time, for many years, it stood gaping with surprised black windows. The Palace of Culture stopped showing films, the plaster was crumbling on it, it somehow still lived, moving to the balance of the city like an empty stadium overgrown with grass ….
But this was only the first swallow.
It seemed that life was still seething and something was moving somewhere, but everything was already dead. The city turned into a flying Dutchman like the whole country.
It's like removing a gear from a watch, any tiny screw and the whole mechanism will inevitably stand up.
What is the point of, say, a technical school if it was built to train specialists for a cement plant?
Students underwent practical training at the plant, orders for future specialists came from the plant, all students were guaranteed to be provided with work. Who needs it? Yes, the technical school did not want to die, frantically clinging to insane ideas of self-sufficiency and even profitability, began to produce courses in accountants and management, computer literacy and cookery. These courses were taught by the same cement workers, mechanics, but what could they do? But, and they left, grew old, and with them the last hope was gone and the era was gone.
Tell me, how can you learn to be a technologist without ever visiting a factory, from books? Can anyone hope to get a job with such an ugly education? And even now, having built a new plant, where can he get qualified personnel?
How many books have already been written about this and films made. No, I am not crying for the past, I am not sobbing over the fragments of the past, I draw attention to the fact that the plant and with it the city have been destroyed, and the region and the region and the country with the city. Everything collapsed like a house of cards overnight. What many still cannot realize, although so many years have passed and the country has collapsed into many different great and not so independent Tartary and Yane Tartary.
Here is the plant - it seemed to be still working and even its profitability increased. Only the statues in the park stand with broken hands, the boat station is abandoned, the pond is overgrown with mud. The nursery was burnt down and the home kitchen and dining room were closed. The workers of the children's polyclinic and the music school were left out of work. The factory hostel and the small city hotel are closed. The fountain is clogged, the playgrounds are empty. The house-building plant was ruined, and the plant of reinforced concrete structures stood behind it, unable to buy cement at new prices and sell the already manufactured products. And so, the level of sales at the cement plant itself inevitably fell, which immediately led to massive reductions.
Everything, I am writing this, in passing, in a very exaggerated way, of course, a sophisticated reader will find a lot of inaccuracies here, but in general, the picture is exactly like this.
Now the cement plant has stopped. Ruined, emaciated and exhausted, owned not by a French but by a certain Swiss company, it finally stopped. Everything that was possible was removed from it and sold for scrap. The last 2,000 people were unemployed. Will anyone notice it today, tell it in the news? Will she remember that distant spring evening where a French song was heard on the dark street of the city outskirts?
The USSR died, formed like a domino. The story I told is one of thousands of exactly the same. And how could it be in a state where everything was like a blueprint the same? Homes, factories, lives were built according to standard designs, the same people studied in the same schools, went to the same houses of culture in the same clothes?
The country died long ago, and no matter how good or bad, the past cannot be returned. There is no that country, but there are people. And they live, remember, thanks to them new specialists appear and new factories are built in a new country.
But what destroyed a powerful country in the world with a strong economy, which won the Second World War, a country whose creation required so much effort and so many lives? What was it? Was it a meteorite, a UFO attack, a nuclear war, a flood?
What will our descendants say after 50 years after finding a map of the USSR in the museum? What's the difference? The king is dead. Long live the king! New Tartary forges its own history.
I told how my country perished. I was a witness of such events, so I saw everything, remembered and told you. Do not blame me.
Author: Sil2