Letter from a former citizen of the USSR

A blogger in San Francisco has a friend who immigrated to the U.S from the former USSR many years ago.  The former Russian has been watching the sad arc of our increasingly authoritarian and socialist government and wrote the following letter:

In the USSR, we had state-controlled media which shaped every narrative completely.

In America if you want some special food or clever item you can buy it at the corner store. But in the Soviet Union the word "deficit" was commonly used in everyday language.

"This and this product are in deficit." This meant that you couldn't buy them. Maybe for the next three months or maybe forever, unless someone was bribed or the product was obtained via the black market, friends, or contraband.

People were herded into collective farms--the Soviet antithesis of family-owned farms. Under cheerful banners of "accomplishing a five-year plan in four," they usually underperformed and the bureaucrats responsible faked the numbers--which allowed them to move up the chain of command.

"Deficit." I heard this term a lot as I stood in long lines for bread and milk in stores with cheerfully generic names like "Progress" or "Sunrise." The lines resembled those formed by hipsters in America lining up for the sale of the next iPhone model -- except we stood in them every day.

In the local clinic needles were resterilized and reused. Ambulances took three hours to arrive, if they came at all. That was our "free" healthcare.

We also lived in a "free" apartment, which was suffocatingly small by American standards, and it took years, if not decades, for an average couple to obtain such a place. Usually, several generations of a family lived under one roof until the government bestowed upon its citizens another gray five- to sixteen-story building that looked just like its gray neighbor and had the same exact green-painted swings in the yard.

The walls in Soviet apartments were poorly insulated from noise and cold. Therefore, wall carpets were dominant in Soviet culture. They all looked similar, usually colored red with abstract, curving patterns.

Soviet factories were state-controlled. Variety was not a concept. The color red was all over the place -- it garnished the banners hanging off the sides of gray five-story buildings, with profiles of Lenin, Marx, and Engels fluttering lightly in the wind, proclaiming that "Marxism-Leninism is the symbol of our times." Others stated, "Forward toward Communism!"

Red was splattered on our classroom walls and our school uniforms.

Most of us had no concept of "brands." Bread in stores was "the bread." Milk was "the milk." Improvements in design and the manufacturing process did not exist.

When I came to America and laid down on an American bed it was more comfortable than any I'd ever experienced. It was the result of evolving design oriented toward customer satisfaction -- a concept alien to my former homeland. There was no such thing as customer demand because people were poor, the state-controlled prices were very high and product evolution crawled at snail's pace.

The very concept of "customer convenience" did not exist. Cashiers were rude because they were under no obligation to please anyone -- they worked for the state, which never fired anyone.

Our television received three channels--all State-owned. On our evening news program the announcement of the Chernobyl disaster lasted 15 seconds. Our state papers, such as Pravda and Izvestia, weren't read but were as invaluable sources of free toilet paper. This is not a joke.

Soviet propaganda constantly praised the noble working class, and emphasized the nobility of simple working man. Certainly there is something to that. But when the janitor receives roughly the same salary as a teacher, who is paid roughly the same as a surgeon, who is paid roughly the same as a programmer, all of them surrounded by peers who get paid the same no matter how well or poorly they perform, some people end up doing most of the work, and then they just give up. In the end everyone performs poorly.

It was painfully obvious to everyone just how low the desire of the average person is to work hard to produce goods for other people. Without competition or opportunity to get ahead, with the state controlling production and paying equal salaries to workers regardless of their contributions, there was never enough of what people needed.

The first time I entered an American supermarket at the age of seventeen, I froze.

Former Soviet citizens who only visited American stores for the first time after they were much older got hit harder: All the lies they'd been taught all the decades of their lives--until that last moment they expected them to be at least partially true.

Sure, they'd heard tales of unbelievable abundance, but come on, those were just the Potemkin villages, mirages created to make the Soviets jealous. It was unimaginable that they could be true.

"They told us in Odessa that in San Francisco it's hard to find milk."

This is what they were constantly told, and they bought into it. And then they entered that American supermarket and saw the row after row of milk of different brands and kinds and fat percentages.

It's said that some former Soviet citizens actually cried, as they realized that their lives had been stolen from them by the regime. A realization of what could've been, if they had been lucky enough to be born in this place--which, from everything they knew, could not possibly exist.

And yet the poison of Soviet propaganda seeps through college dorms here in California just as it did in Soviet classrooms.

Stop a random youth on the street and you'll find out what he thinks about capitalism (bad!) and communism/socialism (good!). Their favorite news programs are the "Daily Show" and the "Colbert Report," where comedians reinforce their brainwashing via short, catchy clips.

Walk through Berkeley and you will see wall graffiti of the same hammer and sickle that adorned the big red flags of the Soviet era.

This doesn't extend to just youths. People of all ages, even acquaintances that I otherwise respect and admire, are like this. They support the "progressive" leader Barack Obama, worship the nanny state, and believe in equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.

They badmouth capitalism and complain that only one percent of the American population has the "American dream." They buy into the class warfare rhetoric hook, line, and sinker. They want artificially raised minimum wage, government handouts, and believe that Obamacare is the greatest thing since the invention of pockets.

There are "academic" speakers now who advocate that having too many choices is "bad for you." Too stressful to choose, you see.

Living in the Soviet Union, being bombarded with similar nonsense, we had nothing to contradict it. When we walked outside the school, the everyday reality had no traces of the wealth afforded by capitalism. We lived in the grayness and that grayness was all there was.

Americans leave school to go home and they drop by a mall to buy something from an incredible selection of wealth and choice afforded by capitalism. They drop by a small corner store, which could probably feed a savvy Soviet village for a month (dog food is food, too, you know), and they pick up some "entertainment food" that did not exist in the USSR, in quantities that weren't affordable for an average Soviet family.

Then they go home and write essays on their expensive iPads about how they don't have the American Dream.

Today most American news sources are no different than Pravda and Izvestia. Today the government uses the IRS to stifle political opposition. ObamaCare is a wealth redistribution platform disguised as a common good. Obama is being portrayed in academia and the media alike as a charismatic, messianic, "progressive" figure, fighting for the "underdog." He would feel right at home as the General Secretary of the Communist Party. Now, Obama Youths are me, from decades ago. Leninist academia has had its way with them. Now, just like Soviet leaders, American leaders give lip-service to "social justice" while stocking up on personal wealth for their families.

There's nothing new under the sun. I'm hardly the only ex-Soviet to point out the parallels. But some things matter enough to bear repeating.

Thanks for writing that, Alexsei. I fear your advice is too late, but thanks.