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Il compagno Rabinovic - Author's notes Who is Comrade Rabinovich?Let's hear it in one of his famous answers: - "Comrade Rabinovich, are you a member of the Party?" - "No! I am its brain!". Comrade (tovarisch) Rabinovich or Citizen (grajdanìn) Rabinovich is the best known character in Jewish-Soviet humorism. Thanks to his wit and adventures, we may travel through the iniquities and absurdities, but also through the paradoxes and many human contradictions of the Soviet system, and, "sympathetically", through the whole system of what is known as "Real Rocialism". This liberticide system was founded on police, bureaucracy, repression and a rhetorical propaganda which was incredibly pervasive. However, the Soviet era was not only a time peopled by automatons and robots, by cruel tyrants and obsequious police agents as a certain relentless and perverse counter-propaganda would have us believe. At that time and in that space, men, women, children and old folks, managed to live, love, laugh, rejoice and even to feel a part of a great dream of international brotherhood. During the revolutionary years in the Soviet Union, there existed an extraordinary culture, first of support and then of opposition to the regime. There were political Springs in which it seemed that the ice of the police state and of bureaucracy might melt; times of great technical and scientific conquests, and also social and political ones. It is this humanity, with its glories and pains, with its weaknesses and miseries, which we want to observe through the impertinent inventiveness of our Jewish Comrade Rabinovich and his humorous stories. We want to sing of the dramas, the horrors, but also of the joys and hopes of that time. We shall do this through songs, poems and anecdotes, so that this humanity may be salvaged from the plastic trash can of revisionistic TV garbage. And we will do this in order to render justice to the victims, who were used or ignored, and to the dreamers and the glorious defeated who sacrificed themselves so that we might live in a better world. |