Year 1973 {1973}

Alexandra Mitlyanskaya

I was fifteen in 1973, and as is well known, a teenager’s perception of reality is especially keen. That’s why for me it was natural to show the year 1973 from my personal point of view. 1973 was during the time of stagnation. On television and radio we listened to endless reports about the achievements of the Soviet people in all branches of life. Only by listening to the so called “enemy voices” -the BBC and Voice of America- could we get a real picture of the events taking place in the world. My visual impressions of the time: school, girls in dark brown uniforms with white collars, pupils on duty with red arm bands, ten minutes of political information in our English lessons every Monday and lines of texts printed by a typewriter for a wall newspaper. In my video, the monotonous process of ironing white collars and red arm bands and the lines of texts with current events accompanied by a speech by Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party which he made in 1973 at The World Peace Congress, provide the atmosphere of that time.
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