Every week we celebrate something. This time it’s the birthday of Queen Victoria, state holiday, by the way, on Lulu Island. This is official start of summer season. And we celebrated it in this place:

The summer flowers, lupins, are in blossom:

And my story is very close to be finished. Missilemen 58
Our compulsory military service was going to its finish. The time to think about civil career stated. Many of two-year officers used a chance to become a member of Communist Party, being in the rows of the Soviet Army. In that time the career success depended on the fact of your party membership. It was not easy to enter Communist Party being engineer: even lines of those who would like to be a member existed. But every officer has to be a communist, and, as a result, the entrance line problem doesn’t exist in the Soviet Army.
“Have you written application?” – Kuzya asked me in one of those days.
“Why? Where? To whom?” – I do not understand him.
“To the party”.
“No. For what?”
“Are you fooling? There will be no such chance else”.
“You are fooling. Application to the shit. I am crazy about all these political training here. Hope to survive without all this stuff in the future”.
“Will see” – Kuzya sounded with some treat.
We never had conversation with Valerka on the subject after this. He started to behave a strange way, cut links with our team and didn’t discuss his plans for the near civil future. As it became clear later in that time he linked his life to the KGB and started to build his own career as the knight of cloak and dagger. I didn’t understand why his mother, very clever woman, professor, head of the chair in the university, supported him in this decision. After return to Kuibyshev, Kuzya worked several months in her university as a chair of the Young Communist League Committee for several months before going to Minsk into KGB school.
I made my decision too. It was a junior research worker position in the aircraft design chair at Kuibyshev Aviation Institute. I didn’t know all details of my future work but it was obvious that it will be interesting for me.
We continue our military life in Lebedin waiting demobilization order. There were many friends between local population including girls. One of them, Zoika Kolughnaya, was very helpful. She worked on the local telephone station and had possibility to connect me to telephone numbers everywhere in the Soviet Union. It was possible to have telephone conversations with my friends in other cities being inside battalion. Once Zoika connected me with Vovka Utking who served in 8K64 complex at Drovyanay, in Siberia.
“How you managed to find me here?” – Vovka was very surprised.
“I can. How are you doing?”
“Bad. There are only pebble hills, wind, frost and Nerchinsk vodka that is worse than hydrolyze alcohol. The frost is below forty and now snow disappeared because wind blues it away”.
Vovka told me that he plans to work in Moscow and added, joking, that plans to marry general’s daughter. It’s strange but all his plans became reality and in several years he moved to Moscow downtown and married Natalia, general’s daughter.