The Cold War and unbearable gravity of change
I was born into the thaw of the Cold War. A few weeks later, “Korean Air Flight 007” was shot down by a Soviet interceptor over the Sea of Japan. People remember that time of history as “the atomic annihilation of 1983.” Portrayed by a Danish filmmaker Peter Anthony in the documentary “The Man Who Saved the World.” It was the tensest moment of the conflict. The outset of the last “episode” of the Soviet Union, starring reform-oriented technocrat Gorbachev. USSR fell off. When was that? 1992? Most books and movies of that time showed warfare, street crime, fear, and poverty. But the feeling I remember is the unbearable gravity of change.
I grew up in the family of a psychotherapist and an architect in the World’s capital of soul-searching and human suffering. The grey skies and harsh weather of St. Petersburg suggested a great deal of contemplation. I spent my youth reading classic Russian literature and works of dead Austrian psychiatrists from my mother’s library. I strolled old cobblestones, the same streets Rodion Raskolnikov and Eugene Onegin could have walked. I wish Steve Jobs had created an iPod a decade earlier. Music and words became the real friends of mine. I suppose I learned the difference between loneliness and solitude too early.