No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That's the only way to keep the roads clear.

(Greg Kincaid)

Every morning starts the same way:

An unbreakable union of free republics,

The Great Rus' has sealed forever.

Long live the creation by the people's will,

The united, mighty Soviet Union! …

The kitchen radio first crackles, revving up like the engine of my dad’s old Izh Jupiter motorcycle1, and then insistently begins to play the anthem of the USSR, filling the room with a polyphonic musical surge.

I wake up to this powerful sound, which, every morning at six sharp like clockwork, persistently seeps through the walls of our multi-apartment concrete panel building, reminding its residents that it’s time to start a new day.

I squint, pull the blanket over my head, and don’t want to wake up, but the radio crackles so loudly that falling back asleep is simply impossible. I desperately want to finish watching my feature-length dream, in which I’m flying over the city in a winged ship, exactly like in my favorite cartoon I saw on TV a few days ago. I see cities, buildings, and tiny people below. People-dots. So funny, they are bustling down there like little ants!

But then Mom comes in, throws off the quilt, picks me up in her arms, and I, still sleepy, snuggle my nose into her warm shoulder. She smells of lavender soap and, it seems, of the perm she got yesterday at the household service center2 named “Aliya.” I need to urgently check if her curls are still there, and, with my eyes still closed, I run my hand over her hair, feeling the soft waves move with her every step.

Mom carries me to the bathroom, helps me wash up, then quietly dresses me and brings me to the kitchen, sitting me down on a wooden chair—all the while, I don’t open my eyes, staying immersed in my dream, like a little Buddha in his private world.

While she prepares some tea, I gradually wake up, catching the sweet smell of millet porridge in the bowl on the table. Outside, I hear the early work buses passing by—our town is slowly waking up.

I still don’t want to eat—the nylon bows braided into my pigtails itch uncomfortably and tug at my hair. I mentally grumble about them being my least favorite color, brown. That’s how it had to be on weekdays. White bows were only for special occasions: for example, joining the Pioneers or the solemn school assembly for October Revolution Day, which we somehow celebrated in November3.

Bows were an inseparable part of the Soviet school uniform for girls, just like the apron (mine was lace—the height of school fashion) or the starched collars and cuffs, which my mother boiled every Sunday in an old enamel pot on the gas stove, carefully stirring them with a wooden ladle with a chip.

We were Soviet schoolchildren who only had the chance to wear the Pioneer neckerchiefs for a year. We would iron them every morning until all the satin wrinkles were gone. Under the hot iron, the bright scarlet fabric would change color slightly, taking on the hue of ripe persimmon.

We tied the scarves with a simple knot, grabbed our backpacks, and ran off to school, where Tradescantia vines hung from the wide windowsills of spacious classrooms, and mischievous classmates playing—tossing dusty chalkboard erasers at each other while waiting for the teacher—were sternly watched by Anton Pavlovich (Chekhov) and Lev Nikolaevich (Tolstoy), hanging on the portrait’s walls.

One day in August 1991, I ran cheerfully up the stairs of our building, opened the door, and saw my parents literally glued to the TV—the screen flickered with footage of tanks and a massive crowd somewhere in faraway Moscow. My parents were seriously worried—I had never seen them like that before. Something strange was happening, and I, a ten-year-old, couldn’t make sense of it. Yet, a deep unease lingered in the air. We were going through a profound and unsettling change in our lives.

In the Soviet Union, there was an attempted coup d'état known as the August Putsch4. The State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP)—a group of conservative high-ranking officials—tried to remove President Mikhail Gorbachev and seize control of the country.

The attempt failed, resulting in Gorbachev losing power and influence and the weakening of the central government. The Central Committee of the Communist Party and the USSR Cabinet of Ministers were dissolved. The Communist Party as an institution ceased to exist. Yeltsin and the RSFSR government took control of law enforcement and state enterprises on Russian territory. Other Soviet republics, having condemned the coup, began declaring independence. This ended in the so-called "parade of sovereignties" and the signing of the Belovezh Accords5 in December 1991, which formalized the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Thus, with the collapse of the country, the foundation of millions who believed in the bright socialist future crumbled overnight. A seventy-year-old regime, which had passionately instilled in its citizens the ideal of the moral superiority of Soviet society over the "decaying" West, finally fell. Soviet writers and journalists once colorfully listed the Pigalle district in Paris6, the red-light district in Amsterdam, and Black homeless people living in cardboard boxes under the Brooklyn Bridge as symptoms of a hopelessly sick capitalist world. And now, 15 ex-USSR republics had to find their path towards this new capitalist reality.

Suddenly, Soviet citizens faced a new and heavy challenge: to survive the collapse of their country and adapt to a new reality. People accustomed to clear life paths found themselves at complicated crossroads where the road signs stopped working.

After the USSR collapsed, the economies of the former republics were thrown into chaos. Hyperinflation flooded the markets, and money lost its value within months. Savings evaporated. Prices for basic goods skyrocketed. Endless queues, empty store shelves, and grumpy shopkeepers became the new normal.

Countless factories and enterprises operating under old Soviet standards closed. Massive job losses followed, and those who remained employed saw their way of life disintegrate.

A sweeping privatization began, which tore through the old economic structures and birthed new, often financial rather than productive ones. A new world had arrived—and no one was ready for it. None of us.

Wikipedia states that psychological resilience (or resiliency, from English resilience—elasticity, flexibility) is an innate dynamic personality trait underlying the ability to constructively overcome stress and difficult periods. Although this trait is innate, it can be developed. The concept came to psychology from physics, where it denotes the ability of elastic bodies to return to their shape after mechanical pressure.

Adaptive mechanisms, resource-based strategies, and resilience—these psychological terms became widespread only in recent years. But in the 1990s, people born in the USSR had no idea about them. They developed coping skills out of necessity, driven by harsh social and economic pressures—for example, by farming summer plots and vegetable gardens, which helped many families survive the food shortages.

Few of us vacationed at the seaside. Dachas7 were our version of “all-inclusive” summer holidays. There, in the best traditions of labor education, we swung hoes, weeded endless rows of potatoes, tied up tomatoes, and ruthlessly battled weeds. The harvest—sacks of potatoes—was often shared with relatives and friends.

American psychologist Salvatore Maddi, across the ocean, likely had no concrete knowledge of the hardships almost every Soviet person faced. But his formula perfectly matched the fate of millions. He defined hardiness as an inner strength helping people endure crises, preserve themselves, and keep going. Maddi identified three pillars of this strength: commitment, control, and challenge acceptance.

Commitment means staying afloat in life, even when it no longer resembles what you knew. Like a philosophy associate professor with numerous academic publications who travels to China to buy cheap nylon stockings for later selling at a local market and then returns to lecture students on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. She could have quit and given up, but she continues to teach the young, who still believe things will get better.

Commitment is when two provincial pediatricians go to the capital to receive mandatory professional training for medical staff, taking with them a sack of potatoes and pasta to save on meals. Residence was provided, but meals were not included.

Commitment is also in my teenage memory when our classmates swore, “We would arrange a disco, electricity or not!”

So, in the middle of winter, the boys literally dragged a huge truck battery on a snow sleigh to our classroom—the disco lights and music enlightened our teens’ souls. The promise was kept. We danced to the Eurodance rhythm of La Bouche's “Sweet Dreams” and “Be My Lover.” Who does not want to have some fun being 15 years old?

Control is believing your actions matter, even if the results seem tiny, like doctors and teachers who haven’t been paid in months, buying clothes at a nearby secondhand store, where everything was sold by weight. The clothes clearly come from humanitarian aid, likely from the German Red Cross, but somebody made a business of it. The jackets and blazers smell of other people’s lives and chemical scents, but with no other options or money, they serve their new owners faithfully. All those people didn’t govern the country or decide the fate of the system. But they controlled what they could: they treated patients and educated children. Day after day.

I myself still remember that red cotton jacket that today would be considered a trendy oversized must-have—I wore red lipstick to match it, which irritated our school Vice-principal so much when she used to see me in the long corridors of School No. 15.

Challenge acceptance is not heroism. It’s simply the decision not to give up.

It’s when the elders (like my grandpa) wait in multiple lines for food in the early morning while their adult children go to jobs that either pay late or with barter—in TVs, cassette players, or VCRs. Precisely thanks to the barter, new Daewoo TVs with modern remote controls became a source of pride in many post-Soviet homes.

Resilience is when you instinctively reach for the miner’s lamp when the electricity is suddenly cut off—your only source of light during scheduled blackouts, but you need to deliver this homework tomorrow at school by all means.

Today’s trendy terms like “ergonomics” or “sustainable living” back then meant economical grandmothers washing disposable plastic bags and hanging them on clothespins to dry. Younger siblings wore everything handed down—from sweaters to schoolbags, long faded and shapeless. Families canned their own produce for winter.

Ingenuity was off the charts, triggered by need. At 9, I won a school costume contest—the night before, Mom spent hours sewing me a magical multi-layered DIY dress made from gauze, later dyed with ink in the aluminum pot and starched. Then, decorated with cigarette foil and golden paper, which my parents had carefully cut out all night long before this competition.

No city malls, no shopping centers, no Amazon, no Temu—none of us had ever heard of a store-bought costume. Just my mom’s clever idea of making a miracle out of nothing and her tireless hands.

But I was the happiest Queen of the Night who ever existed, who won the first prize then.

And most of these people were members of generations who had survived Stalin’s repressions or World War II or were their descendants, who had no room to reflect on past traumas or wallow in drama. Their resilience was born from having no choice—you either accept the reality without illusions and act to survive or face the fate of a vanished country, whose anthem once blared from every kitchen radio.

As Maddi wrote, resilience is not an inborn gift. It’s a skill. It’s developed where there are no ready answers, where everything familiar collapses.

Generations of the Soviet and Perestroika era developed this skill unknowingly—in endless food lines, in cold commuter trains with sacks of potatoes, in markets with checkered Chinese bags, and in tiny kitchens, where zakrutki8 were prepared and collars were boiled.

Without theories. Without illusions. Without unnecessary words.

Yes, today can rightfully be called resilience. I am so sure about it.

References

1 The Izh Jupiter was a classic Soviet motorcycle series produced by the Izhevsk Mechanical Works in Russia.
2 Household center was a Soviet-era household service center offering everyday consumer services such as tailoring, shoe repair, dry cleaning, key duplication, photo studios, and hairdressing.
3 October Revolution Day was a major public holiday in the Soviet Union, celebrated annually on November 7 to commemorate the Bolshevik Revolution of October 25, 1917 (Old Style calendar), which led to the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the establishment of Soviet power.
4 August Putsch was a failed attempt by hardline members of the Soviet government to seize control from President Mikhail Gorbachev between August 19–21.
5 Belovezh Accords is an agreement signed on December 8, 1991, by the leaders of Russia (Boris Yeltsin), Ukraine (Leonid Kravchuk), and Belarus (Stanislav Shushkevich) in the Belovezh Forest (in Belarus).
6 Place Pigalle is a public square in Paris, France, located between the 9th and 18th arrondissements, at the foot of Montmartre. Historically known for its vibrant nightlife, it became associated with cabarets, erotic theaters, and the sex industry, especially during the late 19th and 20th centuries.
7 A dacha is a modest countryside or suburban seasonal home in former Soviet states, traditionally used for gardening, relaxation, and as a retreat from city life.
8 Zakrutki are homemade preserved vegetables, fruits, and berries canned in glass jars with lids, traditionally prepared by Soviet families to store food for the winter.