Ages of Enlightenment

		Frontispiece
		Prologue
	Chapter I	Voltaire and the Encyclopedists
	Chapter II	The Hegelians
	Chapter III	Heaven on Earth
	Chapter IV	Empire of the Czars
	Chapter V	Llano Estacado
	Chapter VI	Dawn of the New Age
	Chapter VII	Man of Steel
	Chapter VIII	Wolves are Closing In
	Chapter IX	Stalin and Roosevelt
	Chapter X	Shifting Alliances
	Chapter XI	Cold War
	Chapter XII	Lost Empire
	Chapter XIII	Apre le Deluge
	Chapter XIV	Paper Centerfolds
		Postscript

Paper Centerfolds

Love is the favorite expression in the lingua religiosa. From the love offerings to the hole in the sheet, religious pundits are obsessed with love in general and sex in particular. However, despite of millennia of morals based on religion, the bond between love and money was seldom broken. For centuries, Christian missionaries preached in China about evils of prostitution with Shanghai remaining the world's capital of the carnal pleasures. After the People Liberation Army took over, prostitution in Shanghai disappeared overnight. The same happened in the Russia and other socialist countries. After the Fall of the Soviet Union, religion and prostitution returned. As the time goes on, the guys and girls in the East Europe and former Soviet Union are finding out that instead of love and friendship and poems they used to read to each other they were handed out guilt and shame imposed by religion on things sexual and sex cum violence peddled by the media. Embracing instead of human beings paper centerfolds. Nostalgia for the temps perdu emerges in the movies of the new generation of Russian filmmakers, such as Maxim Voronkov's (2001) Under the Polar Star, according to Kinotar (June 7, 2001)

 ... one of those films that invite us to look back and remember the days when work ethic and friendship were the dominant values. Based on Yuri Goryainov’s (2001) book of the same name, the movie takes us to Long-Yugan, a small settlement in the northern Siberia where, in 1973, a group of workers builds a compression power station for distribution of natural gas for the rest of the country. Recalling Ivan Pyrev’s Skazanie o zemle sibirskoi (About Siberia), this films returns to a forgotten time, when in the words of Max Voronkov, and Yuri Goryainov “we had not only strong government, but also romance and love.”

Black Sea

 

Summer of '57

Talking about love and friendship made me to remember the summer of 1957. It was the year of Vasily Solovjev's song Evening in Moscow Suburbs. That year I spent the summer on the northern coast of the Black Sea, shielded from the Arctic winds by the Caucasus mountain range. I was seventeen years old when, in Odessa, I embarked the Soviet SS Peter the Great, scheduled to sail eastward to Batumi, Georgia, with stops in the Crimean port of Yalta and Georgia's Sukhumi seaports.

 

 

 

 

Akula, akula! My cabin was in the steerage so I spent most of the time on the upper deck. It was getting hot and when we stopped in the Suchumi harbor, I jumped overboard hoping to cool myself while swimming to the shore.

I made only few strokes before the ship's boatswain dragged me into his motor-boat and escorted me to the bridge. The captain told me: "You know, this harbor is infested with sharks. Don't do it again." The door to his cabin was ajar and I caught a glimpse of a girl looking at me.

At that time I thought she is the stewardess, perhaps bringing the captain a cup of tea. The sky was full of stars and around midnight, the girl I saw in captain's cabin laid down next to me in the aft corner of the upper deck.

Chance Meeting   After Peter the Great arrived in Batumi, our ways parted. The next time we met was 40 years later. That day I was waiting in the line at the Foreign Office of the Czech Republic, as my visa was about to expire. In front of me were two middle-aged ladies talking in Russian. I was strangely drawn to one of them and after a while, I interrupted their conversation with some trite question. And then we recognized each other. The girl I thought of all these years as a stewardess was Peter the Great captain's daughter. That night we were drinking polusuchoe, singing Kalinka (sound clip) and Evenings in Moscow Suburbs.

I closed my eyes and traveled back many years when the sky was blue, the life was young, and I and my friends were singing Katusha (sound clip).

Then Baba-Yaga came and brought me back. The year was 1997, the top hit was the Barbie Girl with lyrics

The new realities of the post-Soviet Union world began to take on contours that no longer could be ignored.