[13:16 - 19:59] A High School Essay Contest Leads to an Unexpected Encounter with Yuri's Friend

I had one request, don't look at the presidium, you keep glancing at your phone there. No, I'm not looking at my phone. I'm just looking at Patrick. Patrick even moved so you wouldn't look there. But I don't know where the camera is for the presidium. I don't know either. Excellent. So no. And I only have one eye. Don't squint. Alyona can't see. No, no, no, she's, she's visible here, but she can't see there. Yes, so she doesn't get distracted. You keep glancing there. No, no, no, I just look like this, I tell Patrick, now Patrick will run away, you sit closer to Alina. Then my angle of vision. I think it's fine, I think it's fine. So, I wanted to diverge a bit from you. You were talking about this period, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I understand that you were in school then. You wrote yourself. And you said that Yuri was interested in youth, what they were doing. And I wanted to ask a little about how you first. Oh, to tell, to tell a story. So, Yuri and I had a very strange, strange story, which Yuri didn't admit until the last moment, until he came to visit me and, as it were, saw the evidence and explained what had happened. The story is as follows: In '82, in 1982, I was finishing school. And while finishing school, my school was a specialized biological one, we wrote a school essay. And this was an international competition. And the essay was called: 'About Space.' But, I'm not an astronaut, I told my Russian language and literature teacher. To which the teacher told me: 'Well, I'll tell you,' I said: 'I'm not an astronaut, what am I supposed to write about?' Because I had to come to school at a specific time, which was inconvenient for me, and write. And we had an arrangement with the school that I had painting in the morning, I needed light. I would paint in the morning. I was preparing for an art university. And I would come in the afternoon, and I would submit everything. This was in high school, it was possible to arrange this even for tests. But here, I had just passed a test, I had just won some regional Olympiad for the school, and they tell me: 'Come again.' And I had painting. And that means it was inconvenient for me. I say: 'Am I, like, an astronaut?' She says: 'I'll give you a failing grade now, and you'll have a C for the quarter.' And I needed good grades, A's, because I was going to a university where there was a very high competition for art. I came, wrote it, and forgot about it. Then it was sent to the Moscow Astronomical Council, then somewhere else, then somewhere else, and, at the end of spring, it suddenly turned out that I had received, that this competition, announced by the United Nations, and I received the highest award - a silver UN medal. And the gold one, because of Nehru, the gold one was for other people, so to speak. And, the one I competed with, it was North America, Canada, Australia, and Europe. So I was the winner for these countries, because Asia competed separately, and the countries of South and Latin America competed separately, and African countries competed separately. So it was like, and we, the Soviet Union, turned out to be quite a European culture, heirs of the Greek order altogether, we competed among ourselves. Well, and it was, of course, a sensation, because my face was in every Soyuzpechat kiosk on Gorky Street. I smoked a lot. I walked and smoked on the street. People would come up to me and say: 'Aren't you ashamed? You're disgracing the image of a Soviet schoolgirl. Why are you smoking?' So, I suddenly found myself in the spotlight. And it was very painful, it was very uncomfortable, because I immediately got the full treatment on that topic. But writing people also became interested, because this essay was published. And then Yuri's friend, who worked with youth, was older than him, suddenly says: 'Listen,' he says, 'you need to go to Yunost publishing house now and there talk to this girl who won the medal.' He's like, 'What medal, what for, where?' He's completely far from that. And then he gave it to him to read in the car. And Yuri, then, said: 'Oh, exactly! This is our kind of person, we need to educate her, and where did she go? To architectural school? She went to the wrong place. Okay, then, we'll transfer her, it's nothing, a journalist can be an architect,' that's what we need. So, Yuri immediately, for his own reason, that there's some ownerless person wandering around, he needs to be immediately brought into the common team. With this, he goes up the stairs, the old man, to Yunost publishing house, in the center on Mayakovsky Square. And I'm standing there with friends. Smoking. I'm wearing a ripped sailor shirt, ripped jeans, painted sneakers, dreadlocks. I'm quite a free-spirited hippie. And I'm smoking Belomor. I only smoked Belomor, they're very coarse cigarettes. And then a man comes up the stairs, in a cap, a leather jacket, jeans, who looks at me very slyly and says: 'Young lady, why are you settled here? Isn't it a bit early for you to start?' 'Oh, by the way, would you perhaps offer me a cigarette?' To which I, without taking the cigarette out of my hand, say: 'Isn't it a bit late for you to be scrounging cigarettes from girls? It's time for you to earn them yourself, old man!' He says, Yuri turns crimson, I don't give him a cigarette, although by etiquette, when someone asks you for a light, you should give it. And by that hippie etiquette, you should give what you're smoking. Nothing of the sort, I just got terribly tense. And I feel that I practically won. After 15 minutes, I enter the hall and see that this comrade is also sitting in the presidium. We are introduced, now I'm backtracking. And a public spat simply begins between us, because he says one word to me, I say 10 to him. I say a word to him, he says 20 back. Well, when it all ends, I, then, angrily leave with my friends, because I already have friends there. Getting acquainted was all very quick, we were all very sociable, quickly identifying each other as 'our own' or 'stranger.'