There Was Such a Long Line Around the Theater When Star Wars Came to Town

The Autobiography of Cold War Victor

There was such a long line around the theater when Star Wars came to town. 

It’s a strange and beautiful feeling knowing that this day would not be possible without my choice. I can imagine all the people waving and cheering, “Victor! Victor! Thank you for saving us!” Of course it is better that they are only waiting for a fantasy, while I alone carry the burden of the view from the brink. What matters is I chose life, finally, and I live now with gratitude and honor. 

That divine moment where my past flashed before me and I came to clarity, it returns only in times like these, witnessing small joys. In that fateful instant on the water I knew exactly how I became who I was, and my true purpose, what I had to do, why and for whom. Yet the quaking vision that followed, my faltering self who obeyed Victor of Mother Russia over Mother Earth — seeing the damning fate of following my orders — it is ever-present. 

A constant murmur, as if offering a casual threat to be enacted when God only knows. I am afraid we need more Victors.

[This zine is a dramatized reenactment of the true story of Vasili Arkhipov, an unsung and outcast Soviet submarine officer who disobeyed orders thereby averting global nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.]