Nikolai Ostrovsky

I was surprised and amused when I found out last week that THE most influential foreign role model for 2 generations of indoctrinated Chinese youths (including yours) was a Ukrainian - Nikolai Ostrovsky.

My ignorance.

Let me tell you how popular he was in the PRC. 

His novel How the Steel Was Tempered, claimed as an autobiography, was ranked #1 among the 50 most influential books selected by the public in 1999, beating books by Mao, Shakespeare,  Lu Xun, Hemingway, Sholokhov, Hugo...

If I remember it correctly, we were required to recite his quote: “Man's dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world──the fight for the Liberation of Mankind”

Another surprise: the propaganda department of the CCP's Shenzhen committee sponsored the 20-episode TV series How the Steel Was Tempered by hiring the top Ukrainian film studio Dovzhenko Film Studios and top Ukrainian actors in 1999.

This may also help explain why Moscow KGB thugs cannot get over Ukraine not being a part of their empire anymore. So many influential figures were from Ukraine. The list includes the 2nd longest-serving USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev.

From my understanding, Ostrovsky was a fraud. The so-called autobiography novel How the Steel Was Tempered has lots of lies.

However, I still want to visit Rivne that produced the person with such a big influence on my childhood.

My train stopped there briefly in March.


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