Chapter 1. The Birth

So, I am Shchebenkin Fyodor Aleksandrovich. Date of birth: February 29, 1967. Place of birth: Georgievsk, Georgievsky district, Stavropol Territory[i].

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If someone says that 1967 was not a leap year, and it could not have February 29, then I want to warn you in advance that there will be a lot more in this book that has not happened to anyone and could not have happened.

I was born in the family of employees Shchebyonkin Alexander Petrovich and Nina Fyodorovna. They named me Fyodor in honour of my mother's father, who did not return from the front of the Great Patriotic War.

My parents worked at a local food processing kombinat[ii]. Dad arrived at the plant by distribution after graduating from the Pyatigorsk Polytechnic School, and mom was a graduate of the local branch of the Economic University in Kislovodsk. Mom arrived at the plant a couple of years before dad. Young cadres at that time were fresh donor blood poured into the body of the war-wounded economy of the USSR. For the enterprises being restored after the war, the youth was both a salvation and a drug. Salvation, because the post-war generation was all on the shoulder. And with a drug, because with a boom in the birth rate, it was possible to support the plans of the party and government with numbers, and not with skill. Mom, despite her university education, upon arrival at the kombinat was temporarily appointed as an accountant in the bottling shop, where later her future husband was appointed first as a foreman, and then as a shift foreman. There they met. They married in 1965 and were in line for separate housing.

The next year, on the eve of Victory Day on May 9, dad and mom moved into a brand new two-room apartment in a city new building. The apartment was half a one-story "cottage" house with a palisade, a small plot of land and outbuildings behind the house.

To understand the specifics of my date of birth, one must remember (or know) that in November 1967 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.

Until 1967, the working week in the USSR was six days with one day off on Sunday. Signed by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU) L.I. Brezhnev, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR A.N. Kosygin and Chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (AUCCTU) V.V. Grishin On March 7, 1967, a resolution was issued on the establishment in the USSR of a five-day working week with two days off. After that, the duration of the working week was supposed to be limited to 42 hours. All newspapers and radio and TV reported about it[iii].

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Few people know about another resolution, about the introduction in the USSR of one additional calendar and working day between February 28 and March 1, 1967, and no one remembers. According to this decree, all citizens, as well as the entire leadership of the country and the Communist Party, worked that day for free. It was a gift from the Soviet people to Lenin's cause in building Communism. All the events of that day were recorded as having occurred on February 28, as if this day did not last 24, but 48 hours. On this day, record milk yields, threshing, steel smelting and other labour achievements in the entire history of the USSR were recorded. Similarly, during February 28, 1967, twice the average daily average number of citizens were born and died.

On the calendars of 1967, printed before the adoption of this resolution, it was necessary to manually keep track of the days of the week and dates until the restoration of compliance with the print and the international calendar[iv].

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To enforce this ruling, the holiday Sunday November 5 was moved to the working day Monday November 6, followed by public holidays on November 7 and 8, and the flow of the 1967 calendar was restored. Thus, the workers worked for free one day at the junction of February and March, plus they lost one day off on Sunday, November 5th. Such were the times and such orders.

I was "fortunate" to be born on that longest day in history. Under normal circumstances, the entry in my metric would have been dated March 1, 1967. On the other hand, I was born on the day after February 28, and the formal record from this date would also not correspond to the fact. I don’t know how other natives of this longest day, but I personally, my closest relatives and friends celebrate my Jam Day on February 28 in ordinary years, and on the 29th in leap years.

February is a special month of the year. The famous German philosopher Emmanuel Kant, who left this world in February 1804[v], devoted his only poem to the brevity of February. If you believe astrology, then a person born on such a special day, his fate simply could not be ordinary. In the USSR, astrology was considered a bourgeois pseudoscience, and its adherents were called nothing more than charlatans and henchmen of the capitalists, and were oppressed by the authorities. My parents, like all Soviet citizens, worked to rebuild the post-war country and build communism. They had no time for astrology. To me, too, until the very last days, my life did not seem any unusual. Of course, not so much that there was absolutely nothing to tell, but not to such an extent as to write a book.