Parade

15.06.2026 0 By Myhajlenko Max

In our youth, when the "May" holidays were approaching, having already become well-rested, we in our company, in warm company, often quoted the shameful poem. Such was our drunken fun, when any sober conversation stumbled over the drunkenness.

"A young commissar approached Aunt Nadea at the Parade.
Silently, he approached from behind, looked intently into the sky.
The layer is huge, the air layer in the sky...
Tete Nade became stifling in warm bib shorts.

And the cavalry goes along the Manezh
And an armored train pulls on the tire.
And Aunt Nadia, Aunt Nadia does not give
And the commissar unfastens his belt..."

Usually we didn't recite further because we started laughing at the words "Zorko looked up at the sky."

And it's not that we took the holiday lightly. We were driven to hysterical laughter by the dissonance between the formal festivities, in which we all took part, and the travesty of everyday inspiration, into which everything turned in the end.

Those sentiments are long gone. There used to be years when the falseness of state coercion disappeared and the holiday acquired a sincere meaning.

That's why I forgot that poem for many years. It never even occurred to me that I would ever remember those lines.

Well, now I remembered him.

The parade of cancellation of parades in Russia once again demonstrated with all the obviousness that the truth is behind the “commissioner and Aunt Nadezhda.” The grand fiction deflated like a balloon in the sky.

I never thought that the contrived and imposed phantasmagoria about the inheritance of the feat of the past and the justification of the crimes of the present would become so blatant that I would recall this old poem, and not for fun, but as a response to the status quo.