I grew up in the 1970s, in the USSR, the only child of two Soviet engineers. We lived in a two-room apartment on the outskirts of Moscow only a 15-minute walk away from a similar two-room apartment, this one belonging to my grandparents. While the adults worked to build the great socialist paradise promised by the Communist Party, I attended a state-run kindergarten where a typical lunch consisted of mashed potatoes with herring, where bad-tempered teachers were commonplace, and where we learned, through songs and poetry, that our Soviet childhood was the happiest childhood on Earth. At no other time was this truth so evident as during the last few days of December.
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