Swastikas in My Life

Part 1

Among my earliest experiences with the swastika was the embarrassment I felt from failing to draw it correctly.

This was at the age when many kids still forget whether it’s И or N, and the swastika is more complicated than that.

I would draw something like this:

and immediately know something’s wrong. The symbol stared back disapprovingly.

It was a challenge for all boys my age. But we all figured it out sooner or later.

We needed the swastikas to mark evil in the battle scenes that made up a big part of every boy’s drawings. Enemy tanks and helicopters carried swastikas on their sides.

I don’t remember “our” tanks having symbols on them. The Russian flag would have required colored pencils or markers, and not everybody had them. The hammer-and-sickle’s era had already ended, and anyway it was even harder to draw. We must have used stars, but it is the swastikas that I remember.

This was at the age when many of us assumed that the birthmark on Gorbachev’s head was a map of the Soviet Uni…