How the collapse of the USSR felt from the inside.

Posted: Jan 1, 2017

still in office, and so was Saddam Hussein. The European Union didn't exist and neither did China's economic powerhouse. The Berlin wall had just come down and Germany had finally reunited. Hillary Clinton was a little-known mouthy First Lady of Arkansas and the media gleefully predicted that Donald Trump would never climb back to the top after his Atlantic City fiasco. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Eastern bloc was in shambles, but the USSR was still standing with Mikhail Gorbachev at the helm. Vladimir Putin dabbled in minor corruption working for the Mayor of Saint Petersburg, which had just been renamed from Leningrad. The KGB meddled in other countries' affairs as usual, spreading "fake news" and helping leftist politicians to win elections with no objections from the Western mainstream media... The textbook date of the end of the USSR is December 26, 1991, but for us, Soviet citizens, the dissolution began a few months earlier and happened in stages. Very few people feared or believed the Communists any longer, ridiculing their institutions and their lying media. A typical political joke at the time was about a man who always complained that Communists had run out of everything - food, toilet paper, consumer goods, and so on. So the KGB brought him to their office and tried to explain that the country was going through historic changes and we all needed to be patient. "You should be thankful this isn't the old days when you could be shot," the KGB officer said, pointing a finger to his head. To which the man responded, "Ah, so you've also run out of bullets." The Soviets continued to obey the old establishment mostly out of habit and because there was no functioning alternative. We knew something was bound to happen; we just didn't know when. To understand the reasons of the breakup, one must remember that the USSR was a union of fifteen ethnic republics that had little in common except for the common misfortune of being absorbed into a messianic empire and subjected to absurd social experiments. Though they were all touted as "equal," everyone knew that Russia was "more equal" than others. But the real point of no return was crossed a week later, on December 8, when leaders of the three Slavic republics of the union - Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine - gathered behind Gorbachev's back at a mansion deep in the Belorussian woods and signed a declaration proclaiming that "the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics no longer exists as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality." The declaration, known as the Belavezha Accords, announced the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, or the C.I.S., and welcomed other formerly Soviet republics to join. Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk called it a model for the European Community, based on "horizontal relationships" as opposed to the "vertical relationship" with the central government in the form of a pyramid with Gorbachev at the top. He, a Soviet refugee in the U.S., was entitled to welfare benefits. We, Soviet refugees in the C.I.S, weren't. There wasn't a plane nor a train or a ship that could take us back. No amnesty would grant us a return. It was a different form of emigration. The new country looked exactly like the old one: the climate, the buildings, the language, the people and their problems. And yet something was different, something in the air, something that pioneers must feel in new territories: a chance to start a new life. In 1994 I emigrated to America, hoping to raise a family in a country ruled by reason and common sense. But lately I've been noticing a shortage of these commodities in the U.S. as well. While the ratio of reasonable people in this country may still be greater than elsewhere in the world, the ignorant passion for Soviet-style politics is very alarming. Just as it was in the USSR, American media now publishes articles that read like Pravda's updates on this week's current truth. American entertainers and moviemakers are consistently pushing the politically correct party line. Social media giants are seriously considering political censorship. Indoctrination in American schools and colleges is worse than what I've seen in the Soviet Union, where getting a real education was actually important. And finally, just as it was in the USSR, more and more people begin to resent the "progressive" establishment and mock the lying media. The way I see it, the proliferation of socialist ideas is largely a consequence of the decades-long Soviet meddling in American affairs, aimed at demoralizing the public and promoting the "correct" people and opinions in places where it mattered most. According to KGB defectors, only about 15% of Soviet intelligence activities here focused on actual espionage; the rest were influence operations. Their seeds have now blossomed, long after the "gardeners" have left this earth. Today's left-wing radicals in the Democratic Party owe Russia a large debt of gratitude for their unearned power. Seeing Russia turn against them in the last election must have felt excruciatingly scary and painful; they still seem to be in shock. History is still being written. In this country, where a citizen's voice still means something, we are a part of this writing process. Trump's victory and the movement it started makes me feel "historically optimistic" again. This winter it is America's turn to be a blank page. It is up to us what will be written on it. ;