Those young adults of 1976 are in their mid to late 60s now. Did some ever believe they'd see a day when they'd live in a nation called Russia, instead of the Soviet Union? (And yet find themselves under the oppressive rule of Vladimir Putin.) Other former citizens of the USSR found themselves in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Armenia and other "new" republics — not that I'm any kind of expert on the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Today, wherever they are, they find themselves in a world of big-screen televisions (perhaps as large as the sci-fi screen on this postcard), worldwide internet, VKontakte and Instagram, ongoing military interventions, Pussy Riot, figure skaters Anna Shcherbakova and Evgeni Semenenko, and much more.
And, like the rest of us, they have seen life derailed by COVID-19 for the past year. The pandemic has affected them in different ways, though. The Russian people are among the most hesistant in the world to take or trust COVID-19 vaccines. (Not that the United States doesn't have its own challenges in that regard.) That distrust is seemingly rooted in years of being fed lies by the government and frustration with an oft-ineffective state health care system. It doesn't put them in a good spot, at this moment, to successfully navigate this health crisis. The same goes for many of the former Soviet republics.
All in all, if you had told the 22-year-olds of Moscow or Minsk in 1976 what 2020 and 2021 would look like, I'm not sure how cheery they would have been about the whole deal. They might have preferred the big scary eyebrows.
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