In MAY 1974, Andrey Vadimov, a 15-year-old schoolboy from Dnepropetrovsk, described in his diary a tourist trip of his class to the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv:
We had a great trip! For all of us, it was a trip to the real West. Unlike our city, Lviv is open to foreigners. For example, on the streets of Lviv, we even met American and Canadian tourists who speak English. For the first time in my life, I met foreigners who spoke real English, my favorite language, the language of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Deep Purple. The best moment of our entire trip was the visit of our entire class (secretly from the teachers) to the Lviv black market, where seven members of our tour group, including me and Natasha, a Komsomol ideologist, bought new British records with the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar from Polish tourists. This is a great success for all of us, as Ian Gilan, a vocalist from Deep Purple, sings in this opera. The Poles also advised us to buy crosses, because we are fans of Gilan, and Gilan plays the role of Christ in opera 1.
A month later, on his return to Dnepropetrovsk, Andrey wrote in his summer diary that neither he nor his friends could find a way out of the city.-
1. Andrey Vadimov's summer diary, Dnepropetrovsk, May 20, 1974 He kept his diary in Russian from May 1970 to September 1977. The main events of the diaries take place during the school holidays.
page 349write a description of events in opera. They translated all the texts of the arias into Russian and tried to find some information about Jesus Christ in the Soviet atheist literature. In July 1974, Andrey added a new entry to his diary: "Today is an important day for us! Our neighbor Vasya brought an old pre-Revolutionary Bible that he found in his grandmother's room, and we all read the gospels together and compared the bible text with the text of the opera." Andrey's friends spent the whole of August 1974 reading religious texts and listening to their favorite rock opera. Driven ...
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