I remember perfectly well the evening of the thirtieth of April two thousand and fourteenth. The beginning of the “Russian Spring”. The year that changed my life and the life of Russia.
Dad came from work. We communicate emotionally. Dad's about to ride his bike to Europe. A trip on two wheels across the continent. That's so cool! My father wants me to go with him next year. He asks where we're going. I said, ‘I want to tour the Balkans, I want to go to Serbia.’ And now a picture is drawn in my head: my father and I, as in the “Easy Rider”, with the breeze, cut through the Balkan highways, stop in roadside motels and breathe in the free air ... of the southern Balkans.
Southern Balkans... Books from childhood teach us to protect the weak. With my love of Russian history, this morality has also turned into sympathy for the Balkan countries, oppressed for hundreds of years by the Ottoman Empire and liberated including by the force of Russian weapons. I was also influenced by Valentin Pikul’s book “I Have Honour”, in which members of the pan-Serbian organization “Black Hand” seemed to me heroes fighting against the anti-people power of the pro-Austrian monarch, a book that shows the suffering of Serbs and Montenegrins in the First World War. This sympathy was also influenced by my interest in the era of Boris Yeltsin, the era of the throw on Pristina and the U-turn over the Atlantic, the era when the Serbs stood on bridges by the hundreds to shield them from NATO bombers. And these banners full of unconditional love of Serbian fans “Russians and Serbs are brothers forever”? All these events have given a special place to the southern Balkans in my soul. Where to go if not there?
Back to the evening of the thirtieth of April. My father wanted to go to the country this evening, but changed his mind - it was raining. The roads are wet, dangerous. And so on a sunny day on the first of May, when my father had already left long ago, and I, full of youthful spring bliss, was spending time with my girlfriend, a call rang in the apartment, and a stranger asked: “Bardin Oleg Albertovich lives here?” "Yes, now I have to go to the country" - realizing that the irreparable happened, cheerful (apparently from anticipation of adrenaline) voice I answered. “There has been an accident. “The pilot is dead,” he said at the end. So the dream did not come true, and one of the greatest losses occurred
Now, at two thousand and twenty-thirds, I live in Montenegro, I often visit Serbia. And the pathos of the post pushes me to sum up a beautiful result, to say that now, in no less significant years for history, when the “Russian spring” turns into a Russian autumn, I really drive along those highways that were imagined for me, and breathe, not ironically, the free air of the southern Balkans, I closed the gestalt, realized a teenage dream like a nail hammered into the soul of a personal tragedy. Of course there is a shade of that feeling. But far more, I admire the symbolism of life, the joy of making plans and carrying them out. Beautiful is this synthesis of destiny, which gives you opportunities, and the human will with which you realize these opportunities