Coming Home

Abstract

I recount the hardship of returning from evacuation to a Riga ravaged by war—and of citizens who were the victim of a constant, inner duality, i.e. of the contradiction between the external conventions of Soviet reality and the inner falsity of Bolshevik ideology. I describe how difficult it was for young people to overcome the nagging moral deterioration of the regime and then the complex process of spiritual liberation in the wake of destalinization.