If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay!
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My father was convinced, I think rightly, that if he stayed in Russia, he would have trouble with Lenin.
I know not every mom is a secret KGB spy, but every mom has this whole other life. Every dad and every person has this whole other life.
Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then.
Russia is now very far from being a communist country, but when I walked around Moscow, I kept glimpsing these haunting images. There were statues of Lenin and some neon signs of the hammer and sickle. I remembered myself then as a little girl, living under that oppression.
My mom grew up in the Soviet Bloc, and she was a Tiger Mom. We didn't get away with much.
Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree.
My mother, for the last 20 years anyway, would not call herself a Marxist but a human rights activist.
I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.
The thing is, I grew up in L.A., so I had this unique opportunity to live in both communist Russia and see that life, and then move to America as a young girl and experience a completely different life.
I am convinced that the norm in Russia should become a family with three children.