«Город Брежнев»
Novel
164 800 words in Russian
First published: Saint Peterburg, «Azbuka Atticus» Publishing, 2017, 3000 copies
In 1983, the trade union committees started to compile lists of workers who want to buy a “Moskvich” car on credit and without waiting, the oil prices fell dropped by half during the fourth year of the Afghan military campaign, the United States imposed the economic sanctions against the USSR and moved the cruise missiles to Soviet borders and temporarily invaded Grenada, the Soviet air defense forces shot down the Korean Boeing.
Thirteen-year-old boy Arthur lives in the world’s best country, the Soviet Union, and in the world’s best city, Brezhnev. His life is a full life of a happy Soviet teen: he yawns during the classes and the pioneer meetings, he sings loudly with a guitar in the stairwells, he enjoys himself on a dance floor, he wants to take the prohibited karate training. He really does not want to go to a boring summer camp. But in this camp Arthur will fulfill his dream, meeting his first love and his first mentor. These meetings will forever change the lives of Arthur, his parents, his friends, and the world’s best city in the world’s best country which have already cracked in invisible for itself and everyone way and began to crumble into pieces and dust.
Shamil Idiatullin is the author of variety of different genre books: a mystical thriller “Ubyr”, a sad utopia “USSR™”, high adventures tale “This is just a game”. As he said he waited a long time for someone to write a book about Soviet childhood at a critical juncture: “About the Andropov’s crackdown, the ration stamps for oil and meat, the juvenile gangs, the “Lenin’s exam”, the bad photo of album covers, the first love, the shaved heads, the nunchacku hidden in sleeve…”. Then he realized he could wait forever for that to happen and then went and had written this book himself.
