There was such a TV show in blessed Soviet times.
Oh.
Sorry!
During the years of “Brezhnev’s stagnation” - did he say it correctly, did he make a mistake anywhere?
Come on, girls! Come on, beauties!
Let the country sing about us!
And let them be famous with a ringing song
Our names are among the heroes!
The refrain and melody of that program.
First issue - January 24, 1970.
The last one was April 16, 1987.
This is understandable: in Gorbachev’s accelerator-perestroika years, everything Brezhnev was scrapped.
The new broom sweeps cleanly, it’s just a pity that the handle at the base soon broke...
The song, by the way, is from the famous black-and-white film by the great Ivan Pyryev “The Rich Bride” (1937).
This is all true, historical remarks.
About the program: Margarita Eskina (in those years, the head of the youth editorial office of the All-Union Central Television) supported the idea of a “Soviet competition for the most beautiful girls”, gave it life and the main ideological goal - “a sports and intellectual competition for the most beautiful girls of the Soviet Union.”
Do you understand?!
It's also intellectual!
Well, stagnation, naturally!.. What about Brezhnev’s stagnation you ask?
Especially now.
The water has flown under the bridge... And the meanings have been washed away by that water...
Now let's turn to history.
Already in a serious way.
On May 8, 1965, the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR declaring International Women's Day on March 8 a non-working holiday was published in the central Soviet press.
Why would this happen all of a sudden?
And what is this strangeness?
Why not announce the same thing, say, on March 7, 1965?
Bureaucracy?
Delays?
Lack of local initiative?
To answer this question, you need to understand at least a little about the realities of that time.
The USSR has a six-day working week (only on March 7, 1967, a decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions was issued on the introduction of a five-day working week and two days off).
Every holiday and day off literally counts—even though the war ended 20 years ago, the Soviet Union still feels its dire consequences.
This is the last year of the seven-year plan (the only seven-year plan in the history of the USSR, adopted as a necessary extension of the sixth five-year plan - too much had to be restored, raised from the ashes and built anew).
The first fruits of the “Kosygin reforms” are being felt; on the horizon is the eighth five-year plan (1966-1970), which will later be called “golden” - it will be so successful.
The First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Leonid Brezhnev, is in power (the post of General Secretary - General Secretary will be introduced a year later).
Officially (after the “Khrushchev tricks”), a return to the Leninist principles of collective leadership was proclaimed, and a course was set for the construction of developed socialism (the concept would be fully formulated in 1967) as an inevitable step before the onset of communism.
The Soviet Union is at the zenith of its power - the Great Victory, a breakthrough into space, the restoration of a national economy destroyed by the war, the Warsaw Bloc, a powerful army, economic growth due to the reforms launched, geopolitical gain in peaceful competition with the West, a significant increase in the well-being of citizens - and that’s all almost after half a century of the most difficult trials, of which the history of the world’s first state of workers and peasants consisted entirely.
Brezhnev, at the helm of power, is a front-line soldier.
Severe concussion, injury, multiple landings on Malaya Zemlya - these are all facts, from which it follows: Brezhnev knew the war firsthand and understood who and what the war years cost at the front and in the rear.
And especially women...
“Dear” Leonid Ilyich had quite sincere respect for the female sex, and it was he who came up with the idea of the weekend on March 8, and it was he who, especially and for the first time, said at the ceremonial report on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Victory (May 8, 1965) : “If we could put the feat of men in war on one side of the scale, and the work of women at the front and in the rear on the other, then these scales would be balanced.
Without Soviet women, without their exceptional dedication, our Victory would have been impossible.”
Now this is hard to believe, but at that time there was a phenomenon - the role of winners, of course, was assigned to men, and not due to gender inequality - due to internal beliefs, concepts formed over centuries about both the defense of the Motherland and the preservation of one’s home.
The man goes to battle, the woman remains on the farm, with children and the elderly.
Brezhnev's words sounded like a bolt from the blue.
But the obvious was just stated.
Everything that happened during those days of celebration - a military parade on Red Square (for the first time in 20 years), the declaration of Victory Day as a non-working holiday (and before that it was a working day, starting in 1948), the declaration of March 8 as a non-working and holiday day - shook up society.
The moment has truly come for a meaningful return to the history of the war years.
At the same time, all the phantom pains came to life...
People with some new incredible power were looking for lost relatives, missing fathers and husbands.
Newspapers and magazines talked about forgotten heroes, about newly recognized exploits, and the stories of women who bore the brunt of the war on their shoulders occupied a huge and more than deserved place in all publications...
Wait for me and I will come back,
All deaths are out of spite.
Whoever didn't wait for me, let him
He will say: “Lucky.”
They don’t understand, those who didn’t expect them,
Like in the middle of fire
By your expectation
You saved me.
Now try to imagine the women’s share of those years outside of poetry - during and after the war, when many of the men did not return home.
Could this be possible for those who were called from the beginning of time to give new life, but not to pull the burden under strain - for two, three... For all those who are not around?
One of the Soviet icons of that time was Faina Vasilyevna Sharunova, a girl who was not at all of a heroic physique - the world's first female forge worker (be curious about the description of the profession), an employee of the Nizhny Tagil Metallurgical Plant named after.
V.V.
Kuibysheva.
Having heard Stalin’s call to master difficult male professions, she went to work in the blast furnace shop, first as a forge assistant, and from 1943 as a senior forge.
Her photograph in overalls at the blast furnace was published by Komsomolskaya Pravda, and since then the flow of letters from the front from soldiers who saw her in the newspaper was such that postmen carried them in bags.
Another story - the first female driller in the USSR, Raisa Terentyevna Nikitina - in the fall of 1941 at the mine named after O.Yu.
Schmidt assembled and led a team of drillers who replaced their husbands who had gone to the front.
The girls exceeded the norm by two or even three times - sparing neither health nor strength.
Where else in the world, in what other country have you seen such examples of incomparable female heroism?
Raisa Nikitina's husband died in March 1945 in Hungary... He died, but his entire work quota for all the years of the war, and moreover, was fulfilled by his wife, who raised two daughters.
War is contrary to female nature.
War... If not for it, damned.
We won.
Nobody knows the true price of Victory.
To our women - love.
To our women - glory and honor.
And may it always be so.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editors.