A lot of people glorify perestroika…Everyone had very high hopes for the future. I have no reason to love Gorbachev. I remember the conversations we’d have in the staff room: “Socialism is ending—what’s next?” “Bad socialism is over, now we’re going to have good socialism.” We waited…pored over the newspapers…Pretty soon, my husband lost his job and they shut down the institute. There was a sea of unemployed people, all of them with college degrees. The kiosks appeared, then the supermarkets where they had everything, like in a fairy tale, only there was no money to buy any of it.
