I was in the Soviet Union in 1987. I was there as a US delegate to the International Women's Congress on Peace and Justice--an international gathering of woman that was hosted by the Soviet Women's Committee. I was a mascot, really, invited because of the work I'd done for an Academy Award winning, anti-nuclear documentary called
Women for America, For the World (1987's
Fahrenheit 911.) I'd been an administrative support person for the filmmaker, Vivienne Verdon-Roe and she'd seen to it that I was invited along with her as a thank you for countless hours of hard, underpaid work. I was young and out of my league amongst some of the most powerful women in the world, (a subject for another diary at another time.) What I want to talk about in this diary is my impressions of the Soviet Union and the "feel" I got for a state emerging out of totalitarian rule.
I say emerging out, because Gorbachav was in power. In fact, I had the pleasure of hearing him address the Congress. I cried all the way through his speech. He was truly inspiring, and the Soviet Union was changing. The grip of fear that had for so long dominated the country was beginning to loosen. Nevertheless, most of the "average" people I met, taxi drivers, women working in the hotels, that kind of thing, were still desperately afraid of doing ANYTHING that might get them into trouble.
The first thing that happened to me, when I got off the plane and went through Customs, was a confrontation with my stereotyped assumptions about the Soviet Union. I was hesitant to walk from Customs out the door to the waiting bus that was taking arriving women from the Moscow airport to the several big hotels that were housing the Congress. Women were arriving from all over the world on all sorts of different flights and translators were stationed at the airport to guide delegates from the airport to waiting buses for transportation. I'd made the contact, and was aware of a young Russian woman waiting for me and several others, but as I cleared Customs and didn't see her, I was literally afraid to walk through the open door she had already pointed out to me. I was convinced that in a totalitarian regime people didn't walk around freely, going about their business, especially foreigners from the West. So I waited until I found the translator again and asked her if it was REALLY okay to just walk out the door. She looked at me like I was nuts. Of course it was.
The next big revelation came at the window of my hotel room an hour or so later. I was looking down from the top of a very tall, very Soviet-looking sky-scrapper into the green of a city park. I could see people below, jogging, walking their dogs, doing the very same things that one expect to see people doing in an urban environment in the United States. I was so amazed I said to my roommate, "Look! Dogs!" It had never occurred to me that the Soviets allowed dogs!
It's ridiculous, I know. But, there's an important point in my ignorance: I had been brainwashed to believe that the "police state" or "totalitarian system" that characterized the Soviet Union was somehow OBVIOUSLY repressive, and that wasn't the case. On the surface, people were going about their business just like people do everywhere. It wasn't until I had been there awhile, and started to pick up the subtleties of restriction and fear, that I begin to get a sense of what political oppression does to people, how it changes the way they operate, how it limits their freedom by stealth. Mostly people self-censor and self-regulate--for fear of the consequences.
Little things became increasingly clear: for example, it was almost impossible to find addresses and phone numbers. There were no phone books. Information that would allow people to connect with each other was very difficult to come by. (You couldn't make photocopies either--couldn't publish things without approval, so no copy machines.) Information was guarded; everything had to pass the "national security" litmus test. And, forgive me for saying the obvious, but this is what the Right Wing is about right now, right here in the US, declaring all sorts of things breaches of national security--like photographs in the travel section of the NY Times. This is EXACTLY the kind of thing that reached into the everyday life of people in the Soviet Union, making them afraid to do things FOR FEAR they might turn out to be WRONG in the eyes of THE PARTY. Retaliation was quick; individuals who transgressed the moving and invisible line of appropriate Party behavior were publicly chastised. (And not so differently than with the recent publication of street addresses and phone numbers of people that The Right wants to attack.) If the "crime" was serious enough, they would lose their job, or their ability to find housing and live a normal life.... if the transgression was really bad, they ended up on a no fly list (not able to leave the country ever), or in prison with no hope of a trial, or just plain dead.
The Soviet Union was a one-party system. There was only one official party in the Soviet Union, the Communist Party. If you were a member you received perks; if you weren't a member you were fucked. Anyone who didn't visibly support The Party was suspect and vulnerable. Consequently, the "common" people, the one's who lacked political protection because of connections to The Party were afraid to have their personal information out in the world for fear of retaliatory sweeps or other punitive measures. Meanwhile, the people in The Party and in the government and in the power structure were hidden from the rest of the population. Their personal information, addresses, phone numbers, etc. were off-limits, secret, and the higher up the power structure, the more secret the secret.
I remember this because we wanted to speak with one of the dissidents, and the difficulty we had in arranging a meeting was monumental. Most of the translators were afraid to be involved with our efforts; they either could not or would not even tell us how to find a phone number. They were afraid. And the taxi driver who drove us there was afraid too. And it wasn't because of an economic system called Communism; it was because of political system called Totalitarianism, a one party, authoritarian (often vicious) rule that allowed no tolerance for diversity of political opinion. In fact, that's why Gorbachev was thrown out; he was too liberal, too open to political diversity, and to world peace. Fortunately for the world, the coup that threw him out mostly failed, and the Soviet Union collapsed.
One more story: After the Moscow Congress, we were invited to spend time with the Soviet Women's committee in several locations. Those of us staying picked the "tourist trips" we wanted to take. I chose Leningrad (St. Petersburg). There was probably a busload of women who decided on that destination. We had to take a night train, and we were traveling as a group. The Soviet Women's Committee was making all the arrangements for us. When it came time to check out of the hotel, for some reason the supervisor of the section where I was staying had been called away from her desk. She was the authority who had to sign off on my checkout from the hotel and approve the return of my passport. The young girl who was working the desk when I came down to check out was afraid to return my passport to me because her supervisor was not there. She was afraid that if she did, she might get in some kind of trouble and lose her job. My translator got into a lengthy discussion that accomplished nothing. The group was getting ready to head for the train station and the front desk would not release several passports (There were two or three of us in this predicament, not all Westerners.) The girl behind the counter told me, through the translator that I should travel to Leningrad without my passport, that I would be fine.
Fortunately, another of the translators rescued me. He was a kind of renegade who had for a time been prevented from leaving the country altogether. He'd been kept from accepting a scholarship in France because he was too vocal politically. He intervened in the situation, and literally signed the form where the supervisor should have, assuming responsibility for releasing my passport. I don't know what the outcome of his behavior was for him, whether it threw him back into disrepute or not, but my point is simple--EVERYTHING becomes increasingly politicized in a totalitarian state, and EVERYONE has to watch their back. It takes an act of courage to do even the smallest thing that is not bureaucratically in line with the way The Party wants things done. The top-down, authoritarian, retaliatory structures strangle people's ability to live "normal" lives even if they can jog and walk their dogs in the park.
This diary grows from comments made in response to PLHeart's diary, Is This What We Are, asking if the US isn't becoming a mirror of the old Soviet State. I shared a bit of reflection about my experience in the comment section and someone suggested I diary it in more detail. There's a lot more detail that could be shared, including my meeting of Petra Kelley, one of the founding members of Germany's Green Party. (Petra was on that train to Leningrad with me. We stayed up all night talking. She was murdered in Germany in the 1990s and that night she talked a lot about her fear of being a political target; she was afraid she was going to be murdered.)
It's important, I think, to realize that police states and repression are, if not exactly subtle, then perhaps different than we might expect. Freedoms get taken away bit by bit, with time in between to get accustomed to the loss. The voices of attack in the US, the voices calling for editors to be sent to gas chambers and charged with treason, are voices of Totalitarianism... they are the attack dogs who believe they can control where the suppression will be imposed. And at first, they will be able to point it at us instead of themselves, but ultimately, when it's too late and even common things are dangerous, when the checkpoints are invasive, they will be shocked to discover that they've been used, that they're "nobodys," and that the prisons they've been promoting are entrapping them as well.
So, here's wishing everyone a genuine celebration of America's Independence, with the hope that American democracy can survive the current assault upon it and many more 4th of Julys will follow.