Thread by @SlavaMalamud

Oh... Let me ask the teenager on my avatar. I think he might have a take or two. Maybe a whole thread of them...

(thread)

https://twitter.com/girlziplocked/status/1371856717806497796

Here is how it started: with the realization that SOME of the things they taught us in school were lies. This came circa 1986-87, when we were in what Americans would call middle school. We came to realize that not EVERYTHING the USSR was about was great and perfect...

For example, we were told that Soviet bureaucracy is terrible. This was the first thing that was allowed to be criticized: the bureaucracy. Which is normal for Russia, in any historical era: the belief that the system is great, it's just the lowly functionaries who implement it..

So, this was not really a revelation. We all knew how bad it was. But the ability to voice it was new. Bureaucracy could be openly criticized on TV. In comedy shows! That was like legalizing political jokes! A big deal.
But not as big as what came next...

What came next was a segment on a political news show called "International Panorama", a weekly digest of news from abroad, whose main purpose was convincing us of how horrible the West was, and how badly working people and racial minorities were suffering in America...

The segment was about McDonald's, of all things. It showed us what the "fast food" industry was about (speed, low cost, accessibility), there were interviews with American McD's customers, the food was described in detail... I sat there and waited for the horror reveal...

"Is the food poison? Does this McDonald's horribly exploit the workers? What is the punchline?!"
The "punchline" was a smiling black dude with an afro telling the interviewer, "I think you should have a McDonald's in Russia." That was it. That was the segment. My mind was blown.

There was no horror reveal. It was a POSITIVE segment about an AMERICAN corporation. It ended with a suggestion we should invite it to OUR COUNTRY!
Nothing like this ever happened before. I had no idea how to react.
My teenage mind wasn't the only one blown that evening...

The next week, "International Panorama" ran a segment answering irate mail from the viewers who couldn't digest positive coverage of America.
"America has many sides", the anchor said. "Some are bad, some are good. Our job is to show you as many of them as we can."
Mind. Blown.

So, now this was another thing that they taught us in school that wasn't true. Wow.
Next, came Stalin. Here, we are talking circa 1988-89, when Gorbachev OK'd the condemnation of Stalin's regime. The revelations of mass repressions, mass killings, horrible camps came pouring out.

Our country, our beloved heaven for the working class, was executing and imprisoning people en masse? OK, yes, it was just one horrible mad man of a ruler who was kinda already denounced when mom was young, but still - the scale! The carnage! The horror! THIS WAS US?
Mind. Blown.

This was the point at which we realized that MANY of the things they told us in school were lies.
The country wasn't that great. It could really learn from - gasp! - America. We have done terrible, horrible things to ourselves. But hey, at least Lenin was a genius, right?

Then, came ethnic strife. First, in far-away, exotic lands like Georgia, Azerbaijan and Central Asia. Turns out, Armenians hated Azeris and vice versa. Turns out, Georgians are not happy campers. Turns out, the Balts are calling us "occupants", turns out Ukrainians - wait, WHAT?

By the time Lithuania pulled its basketball team out of the Soviet League and Georgia did the same with its quirky, attack-minded footballers, Russians and Moldovans were already at each other throats over which alphabet to use, and even Tatarstan explored sovereignty...

This was about the time we realized that MOST of the things they taught us in school were lies. Lenin was not a genius. Soviet socialism was a fraud. Our workers' paradise was cobbled up from randomly drawn mutually resentful ethnic enclaves and held together with blood and tanks

Our economy was insolvent, our system favored the elites, our nation was feared and hated all over the world, and our soccer was shit.
This was the time food shortages began, by which point we lost any ability to believe that ANY of the things they taught us in school were true.

This, to me, was the biggest, the worst, the most life-shattering feeling: that I was lied to. Lied to incessantly, maliciously, comprehensively by the people I was supposed to trust. Teachers, the TV, state leaders, adults, everyone. This is what I remember most vividly...

But, having lost faith in everything (EVERYTHING) that formed the foundational basis of my self-awareness, I, like the rest of my peers, needed to latch onto something new. And that something was the West. America. Hollywood. The shit that was forbidden before...

Loud Western music (my friend, who studied piano as a lad, became a howling Dee Snyder fan practically overnight), loud fashions ("banana-style" jeans became an object of obsession with many), films with Schwarzenegger and Stallone, porn, English slang words. Fucking McDonalnd's.

Nobody, ever, in the history of the world, loved America as much as Soviet teenagers circa 1989-91 did. Compared to us, your flag-waving patriots are cosmopolitan beatniks. Compared to us, Reagan was Hanoi Ron. We idolized EVERYTHING. We loved America more than you ever could.

As much as we loved you, we hated Russia. Everything became a vehicle for this hatred. Listen to Russian rock of the late 80s, by DDT and Kino. It's angry, moody, often raging. It's awesome, in other words. The country was dying around us and we couldn't wait to piss on its grave

The teen on my avatar is 16. It's 1991, the last year of Soviet history. He is angry, he is extremely, laughably poor (two pairs of shoes to his name), he has little to look forward to in a region being torn apart by ethnic strife. But he feels free and he never, ever wants back.

He knows that his adulthood will not resemble his parents' (boy, is his soon-to-be-refugee ass right on that score!), that everything mom told him he must strive for is no longer relevant. Also, he's probably thinking of a girl named Oxana who's just allowed him to walk her home.

You might think of our experience as tragic, and for many it was, but I wouldn't trade mine for anyone's. The fact that my maturation as an adult male coincided with the country's awakening from decades of blood-soaked lies made me who I am today.

It gave me a life-long allergy to institutional lying. It made me resentful and horrified by mandated patriotism. It inoculated me against mindless cultism.
And, unlike many of my compatriots who emigrated before me, it laid a foundation of my liberal politics.

So, what was it like in a nutshell?
I don't think I have ever felt as free as I did back then, food lines, ethnic slurs and all. Freedom, like many things, is best felt in contrast.
I was not nearly as free in a suburban high school in Western New York, for example...

And I know that for adults around me, those times were sheer horror. The uncertainty, the ruination, the alienation of everything and everyone... But I was not an adult yet. And for me, this is how it was.
My fingers are tired. I am done now.