This overwhelming victory of the Red Army over the Nazis would not have existed, of course, without the 1917 Revolution. So say the characters in the novel “Never-Ending Youth”, which recounts the ardent youth against the Brazilian dictatorship. In Recife, in Brazil, they reflect the heroism of the worldwide, Soviet resistance to Nazism:

“The revolution of 1917 owes a lot to the practical leadership of Lenin. Doesn’t it?” Alberto is at the wheel. As contradictory as Mao Tse Tung himself, he moves from one point to another like mercury in a thermometer, first cold, then hot.

Zacarelli tries to keep up with these oscillations on the Celsius scale: “Of course. Without Lenin, there would have been no 1917.”

“Damn! You mean to say everything depended on one guy? That’s not how it should be, but that’s how it was. Lenin was absolutely fundamental!” Alberto’s volume now rivals the Wurlitzer’s. “Without him, there would have been no 1917.”

“That’s it—.” Zacarelli takes one step forward and two steps back. “It is not that without him there would have been no revolution. The essential thing is that, without him, the revolution would not have had the leader, the historical countenace that personified its success.”

So, the resistance for all the young socialists in Brazil was the memory passed down from the older communists, in a more clandestine way in conversations with a low voice and hidden pamphlets. We received our inheritance as a DNA of culture and history. Nobody had stories like Svetlana Aleksiévitch’s, ”The Unwomanly Face of War” for example:

The war took my love from me…My only love… The city was being bombed. My sister Nina came running to say goodbye. We thought we weren’t going to see each other again. She said to me, “I’ll join the medical volunteers, if only I can find them.” I remember looking at her. It was summertime, she was wearing a light dress, and I saw a small birthmark on her left shoulder, here, by the neck. She was my sister, but it was the first time I noticed it. I looked and thought, “I’ll recognize you anywhere.” And such a keen feeling…Such love…Heartrending…

I was already on the seashore, resting, and I happened to tell someone at the table in the dining room that, in preparing to come here, I took along my army card. I said it without any ulterior motive or wish to show off. But a man at our table got all excited: “No, only a Russian woman can take her army card with her as she leaves for a resort, and think that if anything happens she’ll go straight to the recruiting office.” I remember the man’s ecstasy. His admiration. He looked at me the way my husband used to. With the same eyes… Forgive me the long introduction…I don’t know how to tell it in good order. My thoughts always jump, my feelings burst out… My husband and I went to the front. The two of us together. There’s a lot I’ve forgotten. Though I think about it every day… The end of a battle…It was so quiet, we could hardly believe it. He caressed the grass with his hands, it was so soft…and he looked at me. Looked…With those eyes… He left with a reconnaissance team. We waited two days for them…I didn’t sleep for two days…I dozed off. I woke up because he was sitting next to me and looking at me. “Go to sleep.” “It’s a pity to sleep.” And such a keen feeling…Such love…Heartrending…

Efrosinya Grigoryevna Breus, Captain, Doctor

But in 1970 the most beautiful youth that this narrator knew were militants with ardor, poverty and persecution from the terrorist state. As in this page from the novel Never-Ending Youth:

“Companion Célio has nowhere to sleep.”

“I know,” I say, nodding at the three militant musketeers, Célio, Selene and Luiz do Carmo, standing before me. They return my acknowledgement. I am their savior of choice. I stutter in response, “Look, there—there is only one bed in my room.” Silence. Their eyes still fixed on mine. “And—and it is hot—hot like hell. We sweat buckets.”

Selene does not budge. “It beats sleeping in the street. This companion is clandestine and will be jailed if he’s caught.”

“I know. But how can he sleep there if I only pay for one space?”

I did not understand yet that, in the underground movement, you dribbled and feinted your way around difficulties. The question of whether something was “legal” or “illegal” was a “bourgeois concern,” resolved by any means necessary. That was revolutionary ethics in a nutshell. Robbery and theft were mollified as “expropriation.” And if the theft were personal? No matter. Under revolutionary circumstances, theft was unappealable. Militants were pardoned in advance. They required tools for clandestine existence: books, a car, identity papers, clothes, food. All “third person” possessions, things belonging to people outside the movement, were up for grabs. The survival of the militant was paramount. And there I was, claiming only one person could sleep in my sauna because I only paid for one space.

“Companheiro—.” The precocious revolutionary speaks to me tenderly, dialectically from her wealth of experience as a daughter of the people and a fearless combatant: “There is no need to worry, Célio will climb the stairs in step with you, like a soldier. If the landlady asks, he is your friend, spending one night with you. More than likely he will be gone long before she awakes. Does that ease your mind?”

“Okay,” is all I can say. Clandestine survival has its own set of laws, as I would soon”

But on May 9, 2025, we arrived with Lula, a progressive president, for his visit to Moscow. We have arrived. So ask not for whom the bell tolls. Never ask if it was worth it.

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