Israel honoured Gorbachev with a doctorate at Israel’s Technion institute of technology
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and I
Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, you wanted it or just couldn't prevent it, but it was you who became the pharaoh who "let go of my people". Thank you for that. Rest in peace.
Parents are discussing in a low voice who will become the new Secretary General. This is the third time it has happened in the last two and a half years. That's why I already know that they are afraid of Romanov's arrival. Romanov is an anti-Semite. The surname Gorbachev says nothing. But it's not Romanov — it's already good.
A "fight against alcoholism" has been declared in the country. The queues for alcohol differ from others in size and some special insulence.
Entrepresing neighbors two floors below begin to drive moonshine for sale. The suffocating smell of fumes from their playground sometimes fills the entire entrance. In the evenings, suspicious shadows of the suffering silently slip into their apartment. The world is changing. But so far somehow indistinctly...
I know German well. Of course, as part of the school curriculum. I'm bored in class and so as not to interfere, the teacher allows me to decipher German complex nouns, in which sometimes a whole sentence is merged.
For some reason, I remember one of these words. It means: "participants of the Soviet-American summit at the highest level in Reykjavik". I don't even know how important it is to me. Only many years later, I find out that at this meeting Reagan will force Gorbachev to start letting the Jews go...
The world around is changing more and more rapidly and, as in Carroll's fairy tale, it is becoming "strange and stranger". The magazines "Ogonek", "Youth", "New World" and "Banner" are so excitingly interesting and stunningly bold that parents manage to subscribe to them only by blat.
But the most incredible news comes from Moscow and Leningrad. They're starting to release Jews there. Now I know exactly how to get to Israel - in three years I will be 18 and I will be able to leave.
In fact, everything happens even earlier. Our family is among the first to leave Perm. The stream of Jews coming after us is rapidly growing into a stream. And behind them is the seemingly unshakable "great, powerful Soviet Union" collapses...
"Technion" has a summer semester. At the frontal lecture on differential equations in partial derivatives, we, student repatriates, are eight people. One has been in the country for almost two years and understands Hebrew better than others. According to him, in the news, talking about Gorbachev, the verb "to remove" was used, not "to move". What it means is not yet clear. The news also showed tanks on Red Square.
One of the girls is sitting in radio headphones right at the lecture. At the lecturer's reasonable remark, she throws a phrase about her parents in St. Petersburg and runs out of the hall crying.
A couple of days later on the screen is the face of Gorbachev, who returned from Foros. He looks crumpled, but satisfied...
Gorbachev receives an honorary doctorate in Israel, in Haifa, in Technion. People in civilian clothes are busy scurrying around the already blocked amphitheater, carefully looking under the benches. In a few hours, the first and last president of the USSR will speak here...
Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, you wanted it or just couldn't prevent it, but it was you who became the pharaoh who "let go of my people".
Thank you for that. Rest in peace.