Liberty Lost
by Effie Deans, The New Conservative:
You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone
I remember growing up and being told that we had fought two world wars to protect our freedom and that the difference between us and Russia during the Cold War was that we had freedom, and they did not. It turns out that I was duped; it was all just a lot of lies and nonsense to make the masses fight.
When I went to Russia, I discovered something rather different. Ordinary life was in many respects just as free as here. You could go for a barbecue in the woods with loads of vodka and cigarettes, and you could do just what you pleased. There were limits when you got back to your job or your university, but if you played the game, they weren’t that onerous.
The real difference was in the freedom to say what you wanted and read what you wanted. You could whisper to your friends in private without much risk of anything going wrong so long as you were careful, but the books you could read and the news printed in the newspapers or broadcast on the TV was controlled by the State.
The problem with this is that ordinary people have no other source of information, and after a few generations of selective truth and lies, most people knew no better. I had to teach my teachers Russian history.
There is a museum in Moscow dedicated to the Second World War that only has exhibits about Soviet victories. The defeats are unmentioned and largely unknown. The truth about how Soviet soldiers behaved when they raped and pillaged while conquering Berlin is still unknown in Russia, or dismissed as Western propaganda. When I first mentioned the murder of Polish officers at Katyn I was met with blank looks from educated people.
When communism ended, people found that everything they had been told was lies; the God they had worshipped was merely decaying in a tomb outside the Kremlin, and their whole belief system was built on sand.
When you cease to believe in Lenin it isn’t that you believe nothing, it’s that you believe anything.
This is what followed. In Russia people rediscovered Orthodoxy, but didn’t know who the icons represented. Thus, weird beliefs began to take hold. There were cults involving strange men preaching the end of times. There were imported cults of Hare Krishna, Scientology and Mormonism. Finally, there was the cult of Putin, and we were back where we started with the falsification of history and ordinary Russians not quite knowing what was true anymore.
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