She wants to know how things are over here, what life is like after socialism…What is our life like? You walk down a familiar street and see a French boutique, German, Polish—all of the stores’ names are in foreign languages. Foreign socks, shirts, boots…cookies and salami…You can’t find anything that’s our own, Soviet, anywhere. All I hear is that life is a battle, the strong defeat the weak, and this is the law of nature. You have to grow some horns and hooves, a thick skin, no one needs weaklings anymore. Everywhere you go it’s elbows, elbows, and more elbows. This is fascism, this is the
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