How My Mother Scared Brezhnev
By Darina Rebro, European Conservative. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, Bundesarchive/Höhne, Erich; Pohl, Erich)
Editor’s note: never underestimate the power of truth to topple totalitarian regimes.
There is a family story that my grandfather finds hilarious. On the 9th of May 1981, he came with his wife and daughter (my mother) to the opening of the Motherland Statue in Kyiv, because he had been one of the engineers who worked on the project. He and his wife had tickets for the celebration, while my mom, still a child, did not. Due to her age and connection to her grandfather, it seemed unlikely that any problem might occur; but it proved to be otherwise. The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, was an honorary guest at the event, and his security was the biggest priority. When the guards saw a young girl, who—the horror!—didn’t have a pass, they bravely refused her entry and returned to their job with a feeling of fulfilled duty. “Your mom scared Brezhnev himself!” grandfather would tell me again and again, grinning at the story.
The reason why my grandfather finds this story so hilarious comes from the experience he had living in the Soviet Union. The system of that country was built with the intention of making a person feel inferior to the glory of the Communist world. The Soviet governmental buildings were ridiculously huge, grey, and gloomy; the monuments were numerous and threatening; and the people were hard-working and hard-living. They were little ants working for the grandeur of the USSR, who could easily have their heads bitten off and be thrown out of the anthill for the smallest error of thought. Like the statue in the nightmare of King Nebuchadnezzar, the communist colossus stood on its bronze legs of socialist ideas, with a rusty body made of prisons and gulags, and arms covered in gore, wiping the bloodied mouth of the proud head. And yet when a brave dissident would raise his voice and speak against the system, that statue would suddenly shake in fear and try to get that person off!
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