I really like the Soviet things and especially architecture. Being born in the Soviet Union and witnessing a lot of changes (which I still remember) as a kid in Kiev, it really makes me value a lot of Soviet concepts, in particularly the architecture. I always liked the Soviet architecture from 50s-70s because it just felt so solid in its aesthetics. A lot of Soviet architectural things were misused and under-maintained, especially in the late 80s and in the 90s.

One of my grandfathers was a real hardcore Soviet type of a person. The kind of person that hardcore patriotic Americans would consider "The Classic Soviet Enemy". He was a Communist Party member and used to work as a plumber but then rose up through the Soviet ranks to engineer at the Arsenal plant , then to senior engineer and his last position that my grandma told me was the chief at one of the departments at the Arsenal plant. The grandfather was divorced from my grandmother and he had a new family, but grandma and grandpa were really good friends and I was often brought to the grandpa's apartment for babysitting or just to visit, like 2-3 times every month. I always like visiting grandpa because he had a lot of cool stuff in his place and he always had a lot of interesting things to say. Most of the times that I spent in his apartment I was drawing and grandpa was checking on my progress and would often make corrections and give me tips on how to draw properly.

The things that I remember about grandpa is that he rarely used to smile, had a drafting board in the apartment that he also used to painting, he love to paint and has made a lot of paintings, he smoked a lot, and preferred to smoke the filter-less cigarettes that were called papirosii in red cardboard box and he liked to make tea from a samovar that he had in which he then placed mint leaved the he used to grow in the apartment. The "grandpa smell" was associated with the smell of cigarette smoke. Grandpa also like to listen to the radio that seemed to be always on, especially the political broadcastings of the Soviet Union communist party congress in which they would vote for things, I still remember how often there used to be the countdown timer and the beeping of the votes on the radio.

Grandpa was a real Soviet character.