Vladimir Ryabushkin

How the iron was tempered

ranslation from Russian by V.Y. Lymarev

Childhood

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.

I fared well with my grandmother. She was one of a kind, as they say. She loved me madly, naturally, as I was the only grandson, endlessly pampered me and indulged my every whim.

I had virtually a toy store at home. My grandmother worked at a hotel called “House of a Collective Farmer”, which was located near famous “Children’s World” toy store on Leningradskaya Street. Every day after my classes I raided the store and every time I came back with a new trophy, a toy.

The only thing that upset me a little now is that, to my regret, there were no such high-tech toys as they have now.

I got a little distracted now and skipped the preschool years. I don’t remember much from that time, except for some stories that somehow remained in my memory.

So, let me tell this in order.

I’ll tell you right away that I might be wrong about the timeline, but you can’t catch me in a lie.

Only my parents can do that.

According to my parents, I had an obsession with technology from my early childhood, but then I was breaking everything I could break.

I especially liked to take apart an old record-player or the radio set that my dad used to secretly leave in my bed so I wouldn’t disturb him working at home.

I’d sit in bed for hours, sniffling and tinkering with the appliance until I took it apart. The interesting thing is, I have no idea now how I did it. Then my dad would take it away from me, assembly it back to the pristine state, leave it on my bed, and everything would repeat again.

Later they started buying toys that matched my age, and I began to take them apart, but unfortunately, my parents were not able to put them back together.

One of my favorite activities at the time was riding a motorcycle.

Dad wasn’t quite that excited and didn’t support me in my addiction because, unfortunately, he played the role of a motorcycle himself.

For me, it looked simple enough.

I asked my dad to lie on his back (and not necessarily on the bed, it could have been on the floor), his stomach was my saddle, his hands were the exhaust pipes. The thing I liked the most was starting the engine, so it kept dying down.

Unfortunately for my dad, I imagined the starter being on his side ribs.

Yeah, I forgot, I had to turn on the ignition beforehand, you’ll never guess, but it was dad’s nose.

My extreme motorcycle racing looked like this: I’d put dad lying in a motorcycle position, straddle on top of him on his stomach, twisted his nose, and (that was the culmination) I’d get up a little bit and kicked with my heel on his ribs and try to “start him up”.

Around the fifth attempt (sometimes there were more attempts, but never less, as I enjoyed with this process), I still started the motorcycle.

Next, there were two ways to continue.

The first scenario was that it died down at once and everything was happening again, and the second scenario was that I rode it, but not for long.

And it could not be called just “riding”, it was a crazy race on a very, very rough road. It was really tense for Dad because I was actually hopping on his stomach.

Unexpectedly, not for me, but for dad, it stopped, the engine was dead. But there was no relief for him. Everything started over. I loved riding.

That’s how I had fun. Dad, being a wise man and having thought that any technology would wear out quickly with such ruthless exploitation, decided to find a replacement.

One day dad bought me a kids’ pedal car. I all but lived in it and even used to fell asleep behind the wheel. It was from that time on that I fell in love with car racing and I still love it.

I even wanted to become a driver when I was a kid, and when I was a little bit older, I wanted to become a car tester and work at AvtoVAZ. Thank God, not all childhood dreams come true.

In general, the situation with gifts from my father was very interesting. Well, how interesting, he was very serious and the exact opposite of grandmother. Dad never spoiled me and did not give me any toys. And he was proud of it, and he always telling me things like: “I’ve only given you two gifts in your whole life that you’ll remember for the rest of your life.” That’s basically what happened.

He gave me two cars over the years: one kids’ pedal car and one real car.

Really, there was another toy that my dad brought home unexpectedly and took away just as quickly. It was a radio-controlled moon rover, the Lunokhod. It was something out of science fiction at the time. But only now, becoming a father in my turn, I realize that moon rover was a toy not for me, but for dad himself. All men are big kids who want to play with toys that weren’t there when we were little. Daddy, having played a little and realizing that these are not the times for such expensive toys, returned the toy moon rover to where it came from.

Adult reason took over childish dreams and emotions.

Truth be told, I sometimes actually find myself trying to trick my son into choosing a toy I like the most, to have a little play with it as well.

I’m lucky my son and I have the same interests, and he likes cars too. That passion for cars hasn’t gone away so far.

I started driving very early on my life. At first, sitting on my dad’s lap, all I did was steering the wheel and changing gears. Then, when my legs became long enough to reach the foot pedals, I was already pushing the accelerator, and a little later, I was actually driving the car.

Driving was a reward for my good work, and it was usually on country road where we drove to plant bakhcha gardens (places for growing watermelons and sweet melons). Despite the fact that the garden work took several hours and the trip behind the wheel lasted 5-10 minutes top, I was still looking forward to the trip.

The first hours of training were very hard for me, and I got out of the wheel sweating and wet like a drowned rat because of stress. There were moments when I was ready to give up and get out of the steering wheel, but my dad, as a professional teacher, was pushing me into continuing the ride. He took a big risk, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him to teach me, because we had a lot of moments when I could crash the car. To make it clear how he felt about the car, I’m going to tell another anecdote from those years.

A car used to be not a necessity but a luxury those times. We lived it a district called simply “116 km”, and this is such a small, as if separate, part of the city, where everyone knows each other. And everybody knew dad very well, because he was the school principal at that time.

And then one day, coming out into the yard, dad noticed some boys circling around our car and licking it. Dad got confused and came up to the boys, and asked them what they were doing. What they told him was that they often hear from their parents that the principal licks his car into shape, and they wanted to know how it is and what it tastes like.

He cared about it a lot: washed it, waxed it, in winter we put it on bricks in the garage so the springs wouldn’t deform.

In the evenings, we used to go to the garage with him, get in the car and smell it. We really liked the way her plastic smelled.

Can you imagine what dad felt when he saw his treasure heading into some roadside post?

After many years, I felt it all on me, teaching my wife and son how to drive.

So much worrying, screaming, tears…

In spite of my cherubic appearance, I was no angel, and my weakest point was my behavior, or rather, being bad.

I don’t use the word “hooliganism” because it feels too harsh for that young age.

Now, remembering things I can still remember, I wonder and ask myself a question: how did I do it and how was I even capable of it back then, being so young?

It’s even a bit scary to tell.

I messed around a lot, some antics were forgotten for good and ended without much destruction, but there were those who left a mark on my body for a long time, and some – for life.

One day, I was fooling with a pillow on my bed again, as many times before, trying to hit the head of either of my parents,

badly missed and smashed my forehead into the back of the bed.

I cut my eyebrow open. What can I say, there wasn’t enough blood and screaming! The scar will be here forever.

I must say that my brain did not work then at all, or I had no brain at all, because any adequate human capable to do even the least bit of thinking would never have thought of what came to my head.

Now, when I think back to my antics, I’m just baffled. It confirms to me once again that I had no brain at all. And neither then nor now do I understand or can answer a simple question: why did I do it?

Another time I did such a thing that I’m ashamed to admit I found a little piece of wood, and I can’t remember if it already had a nail sticking from it, or I put that nail there… So, what I did:

I’d catch a moment to put the piece of wood with a nail under my mother’s foot for her to step on, naturally with the nail facing upward.

In my misfortune, but more of course my mother’s, this wrongdoing was a success, and my mother stepped on the nail that pierced her foot through.

What was my reaction? The only thing I was afraid of at that moment was that the parents would report me to the police.

I misbehaved a lot, but the rest of my antics were erased from my memory. However, I think they are probably well remembered by my parents.

Once I had a fight with my aunt, when we still were living together. I don’t remember which one of us won, apparently my aunt, because I went for a couple of weeks with a big bump on my forehead and complained to everyone,