Every generation has its war.
Folk Wisdom
 
Sentimental  explanation, 1941. I was three years old and I can still remember the bombings, the howling sirens and the searchlights in the wonderful, dark blue sky. Blue, blue, light blue…For some reason we think that one generation will be spared a war. I see this blue series as the second. The population of the city has shrunk to 250,000 inhabitants. Fifty to eighty percent of the factories and plants have shut down. More people are dying than are being born. For a long time the dead were buried in polyethylene bags. You have to bring your own sheets, syringes, medicine, etc. with you to the maternity home. The rats are the first to leave the sinking ship. These little animals… Everybody knows that the old people have to die first…My son Iljuscha has been living in another country for three years. Thirty people have frozen to death on the streets. This prompted my friend to open an exhibition. Homes were not heated for three long winter months at minus 22 degrees. A nineteen-year-old girl stole my shoes in the train. Having woken up by chance, I caught up with her barefoot at the end of the carriage. Perhaps I should emigrate and live with the French? The door to my relatives’ home was broken down and their home was burgled. You are scared to enter a dark hallway. The bank does not return the money. Everything stinks of urine. But an acquaintance of mine, a photographer, has opened a restaurant and sold his camera. Another breeds dogs. A third heals people.
1994-1995. People earn four times as much, the average salary is now around twenty dollars. But it has not been paid for months. Prices rise. They are almost as high as in New York or Berlin. There are more and more shops with Western goods. There are people who shop there. Is it perhaps a good thing that fewer people will live here in future? But more Chinese people? ‘Everything will turn out fine’, the radio broadcaster says today. I have forgotten something. The sewage system stopped working in the summer. Soldiers watch out that nobody bathes in the river. Many people have diarrhoea, but cholera has not broken out. We are pleasantly surprised that tumbledown houses in the city centre are being renovated. Pregnant women often find it difficult to cross the road because of heavy traffic. I have already seen a picture for the new pink book, at dawn: A woman held up her new-born son by the foot, then lifted him up above her head, and he suddenly looked like a Buddha. The woman kissed him. A new life has been born.
B&V. Mikhailov,1996.