A Flashback to My Soviet Childhood

A Flashback to My Soviet Childhood
Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The gas masks given to me and other Soviet first graders in 1987 were hand-me-downs from World War II, made of stiff rubber and too big for our faces. They trapped moisture and reduced the world to two blurry circles bouncing in front of my face. Our teacher didn’t tell us about the gas mask drill ahead of time — she simply handed out the masks, and we blindly paraded around the school before going back to our lessons. None of us bothered to ask why we were training. There was no need.

By the time my classmates and I entered first grade, we already knew that the United States and its Western allies were planning to harm us, the children of School No. 3 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. The only thing left to do was to put on the gas masks.

The impending Capitalist attack was just one of countless threats a Soviet child had to be prepared for, even in the waning years of the Soviet Union. There were the standard rules for surviving a dictatorship: Don’t trust anyone but family, never attract the attention of the police, always be patriotic. There were rules that applied only to Jews: Don’t utter words like “synagogue” in public, don’t share family stories with non-Jewish neighbors. Anti-Semitism waxed in accord with overall social anxiety; by 1989, it led my family and thousands of others to flee.

Myriad don’ts permeated Soviet life. There was little difference between dangers visible and invisible, real and superstitious. Play with a knife and you’ll get cut; hand a friend a knife instead of placing it down on the table for him to pick up, and your friendship will wither. You were exposed and vulnerable in public, in your apartment, in your head. The evils, the omens, the Americans working on secret weapons and the K.G.B. looking for traitors were all part of the same malevolent atmosphere.

The only relief came in the form of scathing, cynical satire called anekdoty, or anecdotes — anonymous jokes that arose with baffling speed, often in response to current events, much like memes today. What’s the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? A pessimist believes life will get worse; an optimist knows it will. “Obe khuzhe” (both are worse) was a typical reply when asked to choose between two things; the answer could be sincere or sarcastic, or both. It was a dark coping mechanism, but it helped.

I’ve always found this fatalism hard to explain to Americans, at least until 2016.

Twenty-five years ago this month, the Soviet Union, where unquestioning first graders dutifully ran in gas masks and censors scrambled to protect citizens from themselves, collapsed. Scholars are still debating the precise cause of death, but surely unsustainable communal anxiety played a role.

Today, I’m stunned to see signs of similar neuroses tainting the United States, the country to which my family fled. It’s not in the legitimate discussion over real national security threats, but in the relentless onslaught of helplessness being blared across the news and social media. I see it in groups calling for sanctions on vaguely defined pro-Russian media and peddling apps that block websites that allegedly benefit the Kremlin, like 21-century talismans to protect American minds from infection. I read it in columns that warn of Moscow’s unstoppable information war, the unraveling of democracy and the demise of truth. I see it in the constant assurance that we’re losing. Just as in the Soviet Union, it doesn’t matter how we’re losing or why, or to whom.

It is particularly jarring to witness this defeatism in America, a country whose optimism reaches across continents. My family came here with many stereotypical visions of America. Most turned out to be wrong, but the one about the United States being built on optimism was true. Perhaps it takes an outsider to notice, but when you’re in the land of solutions, reading column after column offering nothing but paranoia leaves a disturbing un-American vacuum.

“Hope is necessary — it is a necessary concept,” Michelle Obama reflected in a postelection interview. “What do you give your kids if you can’t give them hope?”

The first lady knows her country well. Certain cultures rely on hope more than others. The Russian people’s greatest advantage is their ability to endure today despite the deep-seated, often prescient suspicion that tomorrow life will be worse.

But American society draws its power from the ability to envision a better tomorrow, no matter what horrors are rising today: better than a nation monitoring its movements and mouths, better than brainwashed children in gas masks.

Lev Golinkin is the author of the memoir A Backpack, a Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka.

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