Владимир Рябушкин - How the Iron was tempered

Vladimir Ryabushkin

How the iron was tempered

ranslation from Russian by V.Y. Lymarev

Logically, this book should have been the first one. It would tell you the story from the very beginning and move smoothly to the continuation (and I hope there will be a continuation and not an end), but, as is often the case, it turned out the other way around.

This book was the second I decided to write. There may be a lot of questions: how am I different from other people, how am I better than other people, do I have any extraordinary abilities, and so on and so on?

Why am I writing a book about myself?

I’m not a celebrity, I didn’t steal a billion, and didn’t make a billion, and hadn’t become president or at least a minister, and I’m not a genius.

I’m a humble man, an ordinary middle manager, doing generally well, as they say, I can’t complain. And I actually become president by chance, though not president of a country but a regional triathlon federation.

That was a recent one. If you read my first book, you already know that this is my favorite sport. So, it makes sense here.

And I thought, why not, who said that creative work is a privilege for some special people?

After all, I have the opportunity, the desire and at the very least the right to write a book and tell about myself, and you always have the choice to read it or not.

And in the end, after all of my internal conflicts and disputes with myself, I won.

I will start from the very beginning, I mean, with what I remember from my very early childhood.

I was born (pay some attention) on April 22, 1969. Do you recognize the date? Does it have any importance for you?

For any Soviet citizen, it had. Each and every one of us knew it as the birthday of our first leader, Vladimir Lenin.

And now guess why they called me Vladimir? That’s right, after Lenin.

At those times, it was very exciting and honorable to be associated with Lenin in any way.

I’ll tell you more, I was a very curly sweet little boy, a little angel of a child, as people often called me, at least those who saw me for the first time and were not familiar with my personality and temper.

I used to get special affection in adults with my disarming smile, I knew it and used to take advantage of it as hard as I could.

The most interesting thing is that I was a spitting image of Lenin as a child, as he was depicted on our Little Octobrist badges.

By the way, could be it the reason for me being treated like a special person? According to the logic of the adults around me, I had to be as smart as Lenin was, and it put an additional psychological pressure on me, because I definitely wasn’t up to the challenge.

I also understood it very well, but for some reason the adults didn’t.

I had to work hard and brazen it out over and over again so as not to disappoint the adults.

Soon I realized that to feed their illusions, it is enough to make an angelic expression, and it’ll never get to an actual comparison between Lenin’s mental abilities and my own.

An additional mark on my image was made by my parents, or rather, their profession.

Although they are both retired now, but the profession of teacher is in their blood, and therefore they were, are and will be teachers.

In this case, we can draw an analogy with the police. They say there are no “former” cops, and in case of my parents, there are no “former” teachers.

Back then, when I was very young, I did not understand fully the phrase “abandoned child”, but I heard it a lot of times. Guess from whom? From my grandmother. Why? Yes, because in fact, my parents were away at work day and night, fostering and teaching other children, and, of course, they didn’t have enough time for me.

To be honest, it didn’t bother me much, because my parents were very strict. Sometimes I was very okay with the fact that they couldn’t find time for some proper spanking.