The Last Bell in the USSR, in Tashkent nearly 50 years ago — in the photograph taken in the courtyard of Secondary School No. 183, the one located in the Eighth Quarter of Chilanzar. Class 10-A with their homeroom teacher Maria Isakovna. I am standing in the photo too.
Maria Isakovna taught us mathematics. Later she moved to Israel, like many other teachers from our school — Inna Efimovna (literature and Russian language), Roza Borisovna (physics), Larisa Petrovna (geography), Nellya Osipovna (mathematics), Anna Yakovlevna (history or mathematics). Many Jews and Greeks both studied and taught at the school. As they grew older, the Greeks left for Greece, while the Jews emigrated to Israel, Germany and the United States.
The others moved to Russia or scattered across former Soviet republics. Very few remained in Tashkent, but I eventually returned.
I am very grateful to the late Roza Pavlovna, who taught us English in the first year. Today I would probably call her methods harsh, but at the time that endless memorization worked and gave us the foundations of the language. In all the following years English was taught terribly — or rather, not taught at all.
Inna Efimovna also deserves mention. Although she never really taught us how to write essays or compositions properly, she spoke brilliantly about writers and literature.
For a long time I felt that our school had not given me a good education (and honestly, I still think so, despite graduating with excellent marks and a gold medal). Compared to other Tashkent schools it was rather weak, and for subjects needed for university entrance we had to hire tutors, which was expensive even then. Sometimes the tutors were the same teachers who taught us at school — for money, of course (the era of developed socialism, or Soviet stagnation). Sometimes they referred students to “their own” teachers, often from the same school.
Now, however, when I meet present-day graduates who do not know the multiplication table, claim that Manchester is the capital of London, or have no idea that the United States is in America and Egypt is in Africa, I think perhaps things were not entirely bad back then. At least every subject at our school was actually taught — nobody could even imagine classes being cancelled because there was no teacher available. Of course teachers sometimes missed lessons due to illness, and we were always delighted when that happened.
There was bullying at school. There was also an unhealthy interest shown by male PE teachers toward older schoolgirls. And in my final year the schoolyard was surrounded by an ugly concrete wall.
And yet those years were wonderful. Some of my classmates have already passed away, and some names I have forgotten, but in the photograph taken on May 25, 1979, we are all still 17 years old (or even younger), with our whole lives ahead of us. It feels as if it were only yesterday.
At my Last Bell they are forever young to me — Viktor Chintsov, Maria Isakovna, Andrei Krivokhizhin (front row from left to right, then upward also from left to right), Valentina Motina, Nellya Musheeva, Kula Kariafili, Inna Zaltsman, Mila Mamedova, Zoya Li, Marina Kozlova, Zhanna Grinman, Natasha Gorbushina, Natasha Kuznetsova, Larisa, Vladimir Kalikin, Prishchep, Larisa Prizimenter (Inna Efimovna’s daughter), Olya Urmanova, Boris, Marina Zhidkova, Aybek Insabaev, Igor Danilin, then I no longer remember the boy’s name, Glukhov, Karen Arutyunov, Felix Lyakhovich, again I do not remember the boy’s name, Igor Burtsev. Before ninth grade four classes were merged into two, mixing everyone together, so I remember some classmates better than others. For some reason Marina Lavrova, who later worked as a hairdresser in Moscow, is not in the photo.
If anyone remembers the classmates whose names I missed, please correct me in the comments.
Do you remember your own Last Bell? Is there anyone here who graduated from school in the USSR? Or from School No. 183 in Tashkent?