The glorious Soviet Union

I was inoculated at a young age against communism. Even before I understood what capitalism was, I was taught that communism was great in theory, terrible in practice. As I got older and learned more history, I found this to be a surprisingly good heuristic. Everywhere that communism has been tried, it’s turned out terribly, and every country that’s turned away from communism has ultimately turned out better for it.

But, now, despite all this, I find myself strangely nostalgic for the Soviet Union. Not for the Soviet Union as it was, soaked in blood and inequities. That Soviet Union died before I was born. No, for the Soviet Union as it was supposed to be: a brotherhood of man, strong citizens united to bring about a great country, a place where the carpenter was as valued as the premier and compassionate political science would win the day over sophistry.

Not to mention the propaganda of the Soviet Union. Absolutely immaculate. I wish we weren’t too cynical to fall for propaganda like this now.

Part of this is because Russia’s been in the news a lot, ironically for doing exactly what it did during Soviet times, namely invading nearby countries and causing a lot of death on both sides. But it’s partly because I’ve been rereading Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize winning oral history of the heyday and fall of the Soviet Union. The book, if you’re unfamiliar, is presented as a series of lightly edited interviews and monologues by individual Russians on the subjects of what the Soviet Union was, what the new Russia is, and how they differ. Needless to say, these interviews are all intensely personal stories of death, betrayal, and frustrated dreams. If there is a Russian soul, it’s in this book.

The book’s subjects don’t shy away from what was wrong with the actual Soviet Union. It’s all there. Stalin’s secret police, the Holodomor, the pointlessly brutal war in Afghanistan, the inanity of the economic system with all its wastefulness and artificial scarcity: these people lived it. You can’t possibly walk away from this book and not be aware that the Soviet Union was irredeemably flawed.

And yet, you also can’t possibly read this book and not be affected by the tragedy of the failed dream of the Soviet Union. These people believed in the bullshit they were fed. They believed that their sacrifices were building a great nation. This is why they learned how to sacrifice. This is why Russian schoolchildren were (and are) taught to shoot AK 47s, why Russian mothers taught their sons to lay down their lives for their country, why they sometimes willingly laid down their lives to build railroads on the frozen taiga. They were building a Motherland.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the secrets of the Kremlin came rushing out onto the street. There was chaos, and currency devaluation, and a brutal dog-eat-dog capitalism that frequently turned into plain thuggery. Russians were told that this was their world now, that communism had been a lie and the highest virtues were acid washed blue jeans and supermarkets. For many of them, this was self-evidently true, especially after democratically elected Yeltsin strengthened his grip and became internationally recognized as the leader of the new, capitalist Russia.

But where did that leave the average Russian? Selling their old Soviet medals in the street to Swedish tourists, watching criminals expropriate state owned enterprises with the help of American economists. This was, somehow, what they were supposed to be happy about. They were supposed to believe that, despite the fact that they were starving, their streets were in chaos, and their former leader was appearing in Pizza Hut commercials, they were better off.

They weren’t. I mean, first of all, they literally weren’t better off for most of the 90s. America and the IMF were so desperate to make sure Russia would never be communist again that they did a terrible job forcing Russia on the capitalist path. The average Russian’s experience went from having only one type of salami to buy in the market in the 80s to one hundred different types in the 90s, none of which they could afford. Food insecurity was real.

But even when they were materially better off, as more of them became through the 90s and 2000s, they still missed the spiritual component of the Soviet Union, the belonging. The Soviet Union had been a great empire which required sacrifice and togetherness. The new Russia required neither, and only asked of you that you take care of yourself because nobody else was going to.

I’m really sympathetic to how barren that feels. After all, I grew up in America in the 90s. I was taught the American Dream right as it became a punchline, George Carlin’s “The reason it’s called the American Dream is you’d have to be asleep to believe in it”.

There’s a reason Fight Club struck such a cord with my generation. We knew what it was like to feel like all we were supposed to do was get more money so we could buy more stuff, sinking deeper into debt for necessities and luxuries both. And yes, having too much stupid stuff is a First World problem, but apparently Russians eventually found out it was a Second World problem, too.

So I find myself with Svetlana Alexievich’s interviewees, dreaming of my efforts and talents having a greater meaning for humanity than just my personal aggrandizement. I’m trying to manifest that world now, as I’ve been trying to do for years. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I thought I lived in that world already, and then found out it was all a lie. Pretty nostalgic, I suppose.