I'm sorry. When I was a teenager (in the 80s) I developed a bit of a fascination with the Eastern Bloc, largely as a result of being skint and having been given bits and bobs of weird stuff that no-one else seemed to want (Zenit camera from St Petersburg as mentioned somewhere upthread, and an MZ motorcycle from the hard-to-spell Zschopau in DDR, spring to mind). I think the interest was certainly naive and romantic, having made friends with Poles who came over here when that became possible and having found out more about life there. But the allure of this kind of mystery place where no-one was quite sure what was going on was quite a thing. And that was probably coupled with a kind of vanity / inverted snobbery, that (especially with my friends in the MZ club) we appreciated something that most people overlooked. I think that might be one attraction to the saxophones, but that could just be me projecting my peculiar psyche across the internet.
Thanks for your interest anyway, folks. And if you are bored and want a lump of 'east' to look at, I really do recommend 'The Lives of Others'. (It's pretty grim in spots, and 'Goodbye Lenin' might be required to bring you up again afterwards.)
You didn't have to explain yourself, I applaud your interest.
I remember growing up, I'd read National Geographic (OK initially to see boobs, but inevitably even an early teen boy's attention is caught by article titles....)....and there would usually be ONE article on someplace, somewhere in the USSR.
They intrigued me, those articles....because they usually portrayed very hard life conditions (portrayed with a very, very jaundiced-eye western media lens - not that I was aware of that, then), living under fear, seemingly backwards in industry and technology.. often a family, society or micro-society always seemingly on the brink.
Yet is struck me that, usually, they would end reporting on some party or celebration or gathering of family or neighborhood or municipality...and there were actually portrayals of people laughing, smiling, enjoying themselves...seemingly in complete contradiction to what the article had been reporting.
Even at that age it struck me...the human condition...how even just a bit of joy or calm or connection or gratitude ...dare I say an unextinguishable flame ....could be found/extracted by we humans in what would seem to be the most dire contexts.
I never particularly thought we, both here and in UK, greater degree here, perhaps, right now, today.....would be experiencing that very thing in our own lifetimes. We do not have to 'imagine' it, here, now....
But being in deep what we are in currently, I often think back to those old articles and the people there, and now can understand it much more clearly.
So, glad you responded with what you wrote above.
So easy for westerners to just take the media bait, cold war-influenced back then, something quite different and threatening influencing, now...and not think about "them" or sympathize or even be curious about any connection we have/had with those societies and fellow humans.
I know that might not be exactly what sparked your interest, but nevertheless....your side-hobby immersed yourself in a connection to something most people would never have given a thought to, so....Kudos to you.
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