Привет!

I wrote something a little different this week — about a Soviet childhood holiday I didn't realize I'd forgotten until sixteen years of Canadian Julys had gone by. Ivan Kupala was the one day a year kids were allowed to soak strangers with buckets of water, and no one was supposed to mind — it meant good health for the year ahead. It's a pagan solstice ritual wearing a saint's name, one the USSR never managed to fully erase. This is about memory, emigration, and the strange things that outlast the systems built to stamp them out. Would love to hear if anyone else has a holiday like this from home.

Embroidered Map of Russia (Chuvash National Museum).

He was aware enough of this to get off on trolling the class, though.  Whenever some force diagram in a homework assignment needed to be weightless, instead of being some generic spacecraft it would be “Mir” specifically.  And he’d always use ‘cosmonaut’ instead of ‘astronaut’, that kind of thing.

One day about halfway through the semester, he’s doing this with in-class examples on the board, and one of the students finally gets up the guts to troll back a little.  So this kid shouts from the back of the auditorium, “Hey professor, what’s the difference between a cosmonaut and an astronaut?”

Fortune telling cards (1995) by A. Maluegin PNGs

One issue featured a cover proclaiming 'We have lesbians in the USSR and transes too!' Inside, twenty-three-year-old bookkeeper Margarita Mankevich told her story. Rita identified as a true transsexual, stating 'I’ve been a woman for as long as I can remember.' She realized how abnormal this was at sixteen years old and faced such tremendous bullying that she attempted suicide. She listed Communists and the church as the two groups most hateful toward her. To earn enough hard currency to pay for a sex reassignment surgery, she moved to Moscow and began working as a prostitute for foreign clients despite finding sex 'in a man’s body' humiliating. People around Rita falsely assumed that she was a homosexual man. She quickly earned enough money to buy a fake passport with the correct name and gender listed and began modeling and acting for pornographic productions in Austria and Finland. Surgery, however, was much more expensive than a passport, especially because she intended to undergo surgery in Western Europe since she knew half a dozen individuals who received sexual reassignment in Moscow, and none were satisfied with the results. She concluded by listing her mailing address for other transsexuals who might want information on their own condition to contact her and tells those reading to not feel ashamed for being transsexual.

An article by Tomas Radek in a separate issue told another side of the trans story. Radek began by explaining that trans is an umbrella term that can be applied to both transsexuals and transvestites. Radek’s friend Nikolas started wearing women’s underwear as a child and eventually began to dress in women’s clothing. Nikolas lived a complicated life; he kept his hair short despite his clothing, used male pronouns but referred to his sex life as lesbian,and explained that when he had sex with women, he 'played the role of a woman.' He sought the advice of a sexologist on his condition, who reacted with confusion, but told him that he could continue living this way. Nikolas had a wife and was not seeking to change his legal identity, so he appeared as a normal, heterosexual male, despite how he might happen to have sex or dress himself. Nikolas remained feeling isolated, and the article concluded with his mailing address and a plea for readers who are like him to write to him."

I am going to go to school

I am going to marry my Larissa

I am going to buy my daughter a bike

I am going to go home, to Kazakhstan

And I am going to Murmansk, my fiancé is waiting for me there'

At the Window - Ilya Pyankov

Russian , b. 1972 -

"Congratulations on the work wins, dear women!"

Here it is on YouTube: