"If you know nothing else, you live and live... There's nothing to do, there just isn't, maybe there will be tomorrow. And all the communists were saying how everything will be great tomorrow, how everything will be, how people have to endure for a while. And the communists themselves had a completely different life, they had special deals. The communists were fat... And it was always: 'You have to do this! You mustn't do this!' It's ridiculous now, but that was life. And when people didn't know anything else, they just lived like that."
"I was in the Red Army for a year on compulsory military service." - "Tell me." - "So I know what the Red Army is." - "Tell me." - "I don't even want to tell, it's disgusting, disgusting. And that was in 1986, 1987, and everything had been stolen by then, it was still Gorbachev. And especially the relations between people - terrible, terrible. There was nothing human about those relationships."
"I was in the Novosibirsk Philharmonic Choir for several years. We used to go on tours to Moscow or St. Petersburg and it was like a foreign country for us. There was a metro there from six in the morning, and we had rehearsals at ten. We had rehearsals, concerts in the evening. At six in the morning we were at the metro to take the first train to some shop. There was a Yugoslavian Jadran, a Polish, a Czech shop, and every day they were selling something. For example, shoes, towels, sheets - we didn't care. What they sold, we bought. Someone bought more of the same things and then sold it in Novosibirsk or exchanged it on the market for something else."
Serguei Nikitine was born in Novosibirsk, Russia, on February 4, 1961, the only son to a family of an economics college teacher and a business executive. Because of the bans in Russia, he did not know his own family history for a long time. It was only in the early 1990s, at the time of Boris Yeltsin’s accession to the presidency, that his father spoke for the first time about his grandfather’s Ukrainian-Jewish origins and his exile to Siberia after the “dismemberment” and confiscation of all his property. From a young age, the witness was powerfully attracted to music, and his mother supported him in his passion. He attended a choir school, studied conducting at the music conservatory and opera singing at the academy in Novosibirsk. In his final year at the music academy, he was already a member of the local Novosibirsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, where he performed as an opera singer for 11 seasons. In 1991 he married, and six years later emigrated to Israel with his wife and young son. Despite the tense security situation in Israel, he felt free as he had never felt before. He began performing abroad, traveling to New York for three years to study opera singing. In 2003 his daughter was born, and a year later he settled with his family in Proboštov, Teplice, where he still lives today (2023). He is a member of the opera choir of the North Bohemian Theatre in Ústí nad Labem.
Author team meeting: Václav Prokeš, Jakub Št'astný, Dominik Židlický with journalist Gabriela Hauptvogelová, Stories of Our Neighbours, Proboštov, 2021
Author team meeting: Václav Prokeš, Jakub Št'astný, Dominik Židlický with journalist Gabriela Hauptvogelová, Stories of Our Neighbours, Proboštov, 2021
