Jurij Galatenko

"As soldiers we played at funerals. And I've just seen a lot of hanged men who were not able to survive something like that. They'd served maybe a year and a half, thirty days to civilian life, and they'd hang themselves. Or they ran and froze in the desert because they couldn't get anywhere. And we played almost every week. That's where you really realize everything about your life. And you wonder what kind of country it is. What's the point of it all? You wonder what the Soviet Union is and what kind of a command can support something like that. And if, for example, somebody didn't hold out and maybe pulled a gun on the NCO who was torturing him and went to jail and did five, seven, or ten years, he was still coming back to serve the rest of his time."

"Nobody looked behind the Iron Curtain much. And that's why, for example, we perceived language study as a complete uselessness in our time, because you couldn't use the language anywhere. You couldn't meet foreigners. They probably won't let you out, or only once. And if anybody did go out, they usually had communist scouts at their backs and didn't have a chance to look around individually. So our world was closed inside the Soviet Union. We used to travel inside the Soviet Union for our artistic or traveling tastes. And when I went to the Caucasus, we traveled by train all the way across Ukraine to the Donbas. Up to where the biggest fighting is now, that's where we drove through. And when I see a small town on the news, I remember, 'Jesus, I went there by train, and my grandmother sold us tomatoes that tasted delicious.' And now I read that there is practically nothing there anymore."