Dancing bears

The main task of Vitold Shablovsky’s book is to collect, summarize and analyze all the incredible experience that humanity has taken out of a clash in the 20th century with a communist ideology. This is a collection of amazing and very different stories of those who have experienced a socialist state or live in it. As, for example, an elderly Cuban dancer, who claims that there were only two true love in her life: “Revolution and Salsa”, or the Albanian builder, who demolishes the bunkers who were once called to save the Albanian people from enemy nuclear attacks, but could not withstand the change of ideology or the Ukrainian priest, convinced by the author that the European Union is Satan, or the employees of the Museum of Joseph Stalin in the Georgian Gori, who are still sure that Stalin was slandered. Symbolically, for the author, all this is united by the story about “dancing bears”, pronounced by gypsies for performing at fairs, and now undergoing rehabilitation in special reservations. Here these bears are prepared for life at large. But they still continue to dance out of habit.