During my pre-hospital days, when I still hung out with a lot of ‘the system people’, I had been if not an ‘honorary Jew’ then certainly a sympathizer. Therefore it often happened that my Jewish friends and acquaintances did not mind my presence when they felt like saying an honest thing or two about the ‘damned natives.’ I never argued with them but listened with interest. Here are a few examples.

‘The system’ Jews seldom used the word ‘Russians’ but preferred euphemisms such as ‘common oafs’, ‘proles,’ ‘peasants,’ ‘ignoramuses,’ ‘dull wits,’ or ‘straights.’ Once, a guy was telling me about the book Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut that he had just read. I remembered how he described in his own words an episode where US POWs arrive at a German concentration camp. The main character of the novel mentions Soviet POWs standing against a barbed wire that divided the British and the Russian areas, begging for food. His offhand comment ran something like: ‘If you can imagine! All these oafs could think of only one thing — the grub! Imagine what a dull bunch of bastards! Especially compared to the Brits — always clean and orderly Brits!’

He failed to notice what Vonnegut was driving at — that the Soviet POWs, unlike the British ones, were barred from the Red Cross food, so they were slowly dying from starvation. Yet, for him it was a proof of their ‘oafishness.’ Read more

The ‘system’ members always proclaimed that the drugs were necessary for artistic creativity. Using drugs was also a form of political protest and an activity that distinguished the self-ordained elite from the vodka-soaked proletarian crowd.

The most common drug — cannabis — was easily obtainable through friends and acquaintances, but it was also freely shared among the ‘people.’ Drug pushing in its pure commercial sense was uncommon, at least within the ‘system’ crowd. In fact, it was easy to obtain ‘weed’ for free.

Speaking of drug dealers, the first one I encountered was a 24-year-old Jewish guy nicknamed ‘Michael the Kind’. He was a truly mysterious figure, and incidentally, he was the person who gave me my first taste of pot. I met him through a personal introduction. Supposedly, he was an excellent guitar player who enjoyed being a local celebrity while leading the life of a carefree vagrant. What traditional Jews call a ‘luftmensch’.

According to rumors, his father defected to the West a long time ago while Michael continued to live with his mother who doted on him incessantly. He neither held a job nor did he study. This despite the Soviet law that people convicted of a ‘parasitical lifestyle’ could go to prison for three years. (You were a parasite if you were unemployed more than three months.) Read more

This essay is a reflection on certain aspects of my past in connection with a counterculture of the former Soviet Union and its main architects, participants and driving force — the Jews.  I had been a disillusioned young man at the time I joined the so-called ‘system’ movement, and although my personal involvement with it was rather brief, the very association with ‘the system’ and its people — in itself quite a bizarre experience — has drastically altered the consequent course of my life.  It is still difficult for me to write about ‘the system’ (the original slang name for the Soviet counterculture was ‘the system’, or ‘sistema’; its participants or members often termed themselves ‘hippies’, ‘pacifists’ or ‘punks’, but those names were completely arbitrary. The general nickname they preferred to use was ‘a man of the system’ or, ‘sistemny’ or plural — ‘the people’/ ‘peoply’).

Although ‘the system’ was an important and visible feature of Soviet urban life, one hardly hears of it nowadays, as if this particular phenomenon had disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole without a trace. Allegedly, it had united hundreds if not thousands of young men, Jews and non-Jews alike, who shared a rebellious attitude towards the Soviet System. It promised to break stagnation by the united strength of the younger and disillusioned generation of Soviet youth who had nothing to lose, as they had not got even chains. Yet, all these silent protests and supposedly rebellious activities came to naught; they disappeared into the past, or they were deliberately erased. Read more