In the summer of 1995 our family moved to Minsk. Roman started going to a new school. We lived on the outskirts and the school was in the city centre, but this inconvenience was compensated by the quality of education and the children that Roman met. Everyone had different interests: music, art, literature, film, the history of the city and the country, architecture. In seventh grade they started publishing their own magazine. It was called Artishock. It had articles in three languages: Belarusian, Russian and English. Those were their first published texts and some of them were reprinted in international magazines. Victoria had a big copying machine at work which she used to print Artishock’s entire circulation. In ninth grade Roman began taking part in political actions. They probably didn’t understand many things yet, but they could feel that something was wrong with the country. Soon there were problems with local police, but the school’s management were understanding. The headmaster spoke to parents but didn’t invite students. In those conversations he said: “My school is difficult to run. The kids are smart, that is why half of the school is political”. We understood that politics wasn’t something for Roman. We tried to convince him, but we could not forbid. Together with the new problems, there were new acquaintances. The kids started meeting famous journalists, writers and artists. Pavel Shermet worked in the Belorussiaon office of NTV together with Dimitry Zavadsky and they filmed various events that the children took part in. Along with other parents we hoped in high school this activity would go down because of increased academic pressure, which partially happened.
This section has family photos from Minsk, our country house, holidays in Bulgaria and Turkey. It also has photos of the kids in school and places they visited.
