UnlearningSilence.blog

When I was growing up, history was not something we studied.

It was something that was happening around us.

I was born in one of the Soviet republics in Central Asia during the final years of the Soviet Union. By the time I started school, the country in which I had been born no longer existed. New flags had appeared. New currencies had appeared. New political ideas had appeared. Almost everything seemed to be changing at once.

What I did not appreciate at the time was that while our country had changed, many of the people teaching us had not.

Our teachers belonged to a different world.

They had spent most of their lives in a country that no longer existed. They had been educated within one system and suddenly found themselves trying to prepare children for another. Looking back now, I cannot imagine how difficult that must have been.

The textbooks changed almost overnight. Old Soviet books disappeared from classrooms. Some were discarded, some rewritten, some replaced entirely. New textbooks appeared, often produced quickly and carrying new narratives about who we were and where we came from.

History itself seemed to be under revision.

As children, we accepted this without question. Children rarely stop to consider how extraordinary the world around them is. They simply assume that whatever exists today has always existed.

The adults knew better.

The adults understood that they were living through something unprecedented.

Many of my teachers were Russian, Jewish and from other ethnic backgrounds. They represented a generation that had grown up with a very different understanding of identity and belonging. Yet despite the uncertainty surrounding them, they continued to teach with remarkable dedication.

What I remember most is not what they taught us about politics.

It is what they taught us about people.

Again and again, they returned to stories of cooperation, solidarity and shared history.

They spoke about the Second World War and how people from every corner of the Soviet Union fought together against a common enemy. They told us about families who lost everything and communities that rebuilt together.

They told us stories about children evacuated thousands of miles from the front lines and welcomed into homes by strangers. During the war, many orphaned and displaced children were sent to Central Asia, where families who were themselves struggling opened their doors and shared what little they had. Those stories left a deep impression on me.

They spoke about the devastating earthquake that struck Tashkent in 1966 and destroyed much of the city. They told us how people arrived from every Soviet republic to help rebuild. Engineers, builders, volunteers and workers travelled across enormous distances to assist a city that many had never visited before. Entire neighbourhoods were reconstructed through a collective effort.

As children, we listened politely.

Only years later did I begin to understand what my teachers were really trying to preserve.

I do not think they were teaching us Soviet history.

I think they were trying to teach us values.

The world around them was changing at extraordinary speed. Political systems were collapsing. Economies were being transformed. Old certainties were disappearing. National identities were being redefined.

But they wanted us to remember something that they believed should survive those changes.

The idea that people belong to one another.

The idea that communities matter.

The idea that there is value in helping those who need help.

The idea that friendship between different peoples, cultures and nations is worth protecting.

As I grew older, I began to understand how radical those lessons were becoming.

The world I entered as an adult often seemed to reward different qualities.

Competition rather than cooperation.

Individual success rather than collective wellbeing.

Material achievement rather than community.

The shift was not unique to my part of the world. Across much of the globe, the decades following the Cold War were shaped by the belief that markets would solve most problems and that individual freedom would naturally produce better outcomes for everyone.

In many ways, those decades brought enormous benefits. Millions of people gained opportunities that previous generations could only dream about. New freedoms emerged. New possibilities opened.

But something else happened too.

Communities became weaker.

Trust declined.

Loneliness increased.

Many people became wealthier while feeling less connected.

Thirty years later, much of the world seems to be searching for something it cannot quite name.

Perhaps that is why I find myself thinking about those teachers more often.

Not because I want to return to the past.

I don’t.

The Soviet Union had profound flaws. Many people suffered under its system. It restricted freedoms that should never have been restricted. It made mistakes that should never be repeated.

But rejecting a system does not mean rejecting every value that existed within it.

One of the great mistakes of human beings is believing that every change requires us to abandon everything that came before.

Wisdom rarely works that way.

The challenge is not choosing one side and rejecting the other.

The challenge is deciding what deserves to be carried forward.

What should we preserve?

What should we discard?

What lessons remain valuable regardless of ideology?

The older I get, the more I think my teachers were asking those questions too.

Perhaps that is why they kept returning to stories of cooperation and solidarity.

Perhaps they understood that political systems come and go.

Countries rise and fall.

Borders change.

Currencies change.

Ideologies change.

But the need for human connection remains remarkably constant.

The need to belong.

The need to help one another.

The need to feel part of something larger than ourselves.

Those things survive every revolution.

Today, when I think about the extraordinary changes that shaped my childhood, I do not remember politicians or economic theories first.

I remember teachers.

Men and women who found themselves standing between two worlds.

People who were trying to make sense of a changing society while helping a younger generation find its place within it.

They could not stop history.

Nobody could.

But they understood that while history changes, certain values are worth protecting.

Kindness.

Solidarity.

Friendship.

Community.

Responsibility.

Perhaps those values matter even more today than they did then.

Because in an age when we are constantly encouraged to think about ourselves, they remind us to think about one another.

And perhaps that is the greatest lesson my teachers ever taught me.

Not how to remember a vanished country.

But how to carry forward the best parts of it.