Solvitur ambulando, a Latin phrase ascribed to either St Augistine or the Greek philospopher Diogenes, means "it is solved by walking", or "it is solved by walking around".

World War II has left a long-lasting trace on the lives of the people all over the world, a trace that continues to be felt now, almost 75 years after it ended, and still will be for years to come.

Some people call the post-war generations boomers, lost, millenials, zed. In this story, let us call them, children of the war, children of war survivors, and those who arrived in the world later still.

Children of the war, those who were born in the late 1930s and 1940s, like my parents, had their childhood and youth largely stolen from them. They may or may not remember the perils and deprivations of those long six years and the restoration that followed, which was, in many places, almost as hard, but from a too early age, a lot of them were thrust into positions of authority and responsibility, when their parents and grandparents, who had fought in the war, either perished in it or shortly after, or could no longer support them like parents do their children in times of peace.

On the one hand, there was that early responsibility and few or none being there to cut them any slack, and on the other, the "do or die" mentality of the surviving elders. My elder colleagues still remember how the old soldiers chose people into positions of authority. "Would you let him have your back on reconnaissance duty?" they asked themselves and the others, and meant it life-and-death seriously.

The children of war survivors, born in the late 1940s and 1950s, hold a similar mindset, if maybe not quite as rigid.

And then there are the current 30- and 40-years-old, the people of my generation, children and grandchildren of the two previous age groups, people whose "time" has already come to front the same positions of authority.

Do not get me wrong, a lot of us do. Another lot of us though—

The war babies, after having done their best to ensure that we have had the safe and secure, even pampered, childhood that they were denied see us as soft, weak-willed and unreliable. And so they cling to their, once well-earned positions of authority, not trusting us with it until they cannot help it anymore, until the situation becomes as dire as delegate-or-die-from-strain.

And yet the bitter irony in this vicious circle is this: like some things cannot be learned from books, some qualities cannot be seen in people who are not practicing them. You have to speak a foreign language however you can at first to speak it well, you will continue to write badly if you do not write a lot unless you are a born genius, and unless you are a born leader, you will only learn to carry responsibilities if you are trusted to carry them, if it falls to you, and only you, to resolve certain kinds of situations.

One such name, which was popular in Russia in the XIX and early XX century, is "provincial", a noun derived from the word "province", the official small territorial unit of the Russian empire. In 1719, Peter the Great divided the Russian territory into governorates, which, in turn, consisted of smaller provinces. Over time, the word "provincial", the inhabitant of a province, took on a deprecating meaning.

One of those provincials was my mother's grandfather Samson, an honorary citizen of the Georgian town Ozurgety. Another was my father's mother Anna, a peasant girl from the Orel governance who went from her home village to Orel town to middle school in the 1920s and from Orel to Moscow to a railway college in the 1930s all on her own courage and hard work.

As time goes on, language changes. The territory of the Soviet Union was not divided into governances, but into Republics and those, into regions. Another popular way to divide the country was into centres (regional and republican) and "periphery". In theory, the more advanced centres supply innovations to the periphery, which provides the resources needed.

In practice, "periphery" became a new deprecating word to describe the stagnant backwater undereducated places, together with a new word coined to describe young people born there who were sent to the centres to study: "limita", with the stress falling on the last vowel "a" pronounced the same as the one in the word "tar".

"Limita" (plural) were people who were guaranteed a "limit" or quota of the places in colleges and universities, and who often had lower grades and inferior knowledge to those who entered the same institutions on their own merit, causing tension.

While my father Vladimir, Anna's son, was not using one of the "limited" places at the Moscow college where he studied in the 1960s, he definitely came from the semi-periphery, the regional centre Vladimir, the town after which he was named and where Anna had settled with her husband and two sons after living and working in many "provincial" towns where they were sent by the railway they both worked for.

Today, the friction continues. People say that "Moscow isn't the whole of Russia" and mean that we lead better, more comfortable and prosperous and, presumably, happier lives here, while the "periphery" suffers, starves and dies out. That the centre robs them blind and gives back nothing but more and more inhuman laws.

This stereotype is as exaggerated as the once about provincial louts. The larger cities are more diverse and tolerant of differences, richer in opportunity, provide higher salaries. The life there is also faster paced and more brutal; they are overpopulated, have higher prices and make people grow tougher skins and become less sensitive to the suffering of others. Large cities are strong people magnets, but their streets are not paved with gold, merely better-kept asphalt, and what grass grows in their parks and squares is not greener, it is covered in dust from the endless traffic in the surrounding streets.


If you want to get a glimpse of life in the Russian "periphery" today, take a look at the Instagram pictures of Ann Big Dipper, who lives in Degtyarsk in Sverdlovsk region of the Ural district, especially those taken several months ago.

These days, our higher education is divided into the Bachelors and Masters programs, the same as in the West, but these degrees are looked down upon by old-school scientists.

In 1979, my mother, who was then 37 years old, entered a PhD (Candidate) program. My favourite story about her time there is the one where in her study group, there was a girl whose surname was the same as my mother's maiden name. At the time, my mother had been married for two years, but because she'd not expected to marry or change her surname at all (she only did the latter because it was important to my future father), she often tried to answer in class both when she herself and that other girl were called upon by their professors.

I entered my PhD program in 2015, when I was 34. The most important non-PhD-related change in my life since then was becoming the scientific secretary of our department at work two years later. When my thesis advisor, who is also my colleague, heard that I'd agreed to take on that extra job, she asked if I was sure I could manage the workload, because in a position such as this, sometimes you have to put everything on hold and do something importantly irrelevant for the higher-ups as urgently as yesterday. (On one notable occasion, I had to gather 30 signatures in less than two days.)—I answered, "Yes", and never regretted it.

Entering a Candidate program in your late thirties is, well, late. Most people who wish to do it finish their first degree before turning 30. A few rare ones, lucky sods who know what they want, or unlucky old souls who remember too much, already have their second, Doctor of Sciences, degree before turning 35.

My mother entered her program because she needed a big project to fill her life after my elder brother Sergey, whom I never met, died of a childhood illness before he turned two. She finished the course but did not get the degree, because just as her research was completed in late 1980, the State decided that the field she'd been working in was no longer important, and her topic was closed. She could have obtained the degree still, by jumping beaurocratic hoops and altering and expanding her work to suit another topic, but she got pregnant with me and decided against it.

I entered my second Master's program and following it, the Candidate one because I needed the challenge of brainwork to beat the remnants of my years-long simmering depression, which was triggered by the stagnation I felt at work. I have already mostly achieved my goal of 'rebooting' my brain, which I never again intend to allow to grow as rusty and cobwebbed as it did a decade ago.

In living memory, the only person in our family with a scientific degree, that of a Doctor of Technical Sciences, was my mother's uncle, who paid for it by growing estranged from his two sisters, one who whom was my grandmother, and their mum, but this is a sad story for another day.