What do the nostalgic for the USSR forget?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The author is amused by people's nostalgia for the USSR. In their fantasies, this is a country-paradise. They firmly believe that science and art were guarded by the state in the USSR. They talk about how they used to be able to afford more than they do now. It looks so cute if you close your eyes to the real situation in the USSR.

So what do they yearn for?

I am always amused by people's nostalgia for the USSR. In their fantasies, it was a paradise country. They firmly believe that science and art were something like a cult in the USSR and were guarded by the state. They talk about how they could afford more than they do now, and they always end their tirades with words about 2, 20 sausages and some incredible ice cream taste. It looks so cute if you close your eyes to the real situation in the USSR. In their minds, the scoop looks like what they were sorry to lose. So what do they yearn for?

Take science, for example. Science was appreciated under the Soviets. Very. For example, Nikolai Vavilov, a genius geneticist and botanist, was repressed and killed. Do you know how? The communists starved him to death in prison.

Boris Gessen, whose report on the Socioeconomic Roots of Newtonian Mechanics at the II International Congress on the History of Science and Technology in London (1931) served as an important impetus for the development of an externalist approach to writing the history of science, was simply shot.

Physicist Lev Landau was arrested, tortured, and only Kapitsa's intervention saved him from being shot.

Korolyov went through the camps. There is a version that his jaw was broken during torture and because of this, they could not save him later - during the operation, they could not correctly insert the breathing tube into the trachea due to an incorrectly fused jaw. And he died. Together with him, the USSR's program for the exploration of the moon died.

Historian Nikolai Bauer was arrested in besieged Leningrad at the stage of severe dystrophy, accused of anti-Soviet views and defeatist sentiments, and shot. Yakov Afanasyev, a soil scientist and founder of the doctrine of the biological and mineral origin of swampy soils and the need for their various reclamation, was seized by the NKVD, accused of nationalist, counter-revolutionary and terrorist activities, was tortured, then sentenced to death and executed.

By the way, his friend, Valerian Bazhenov, the man who founded Soviet radio navigation and radio direction finding, also went through torture and was shot. Iosif Grigoriev, one of the founders of metal research, a prominent specialist in the geology of ore deposits, developed a classification of ore structures, was arrested on March 31, 1949 in the Krasnoyarsk case. The investigation, it is not clear from what fright, accused a group of prominent geologists (about 30 people) of allegedly "hiding uranium deposits in the south of the Krasnoyarsk Territory with a sabotage purpose." During interrogations in prison, despite all the efforts of the executioners, he did not slander anyone. He died in a cell after another interrogation.

And what happened to Sakharov, remind you? Continue listing names? After all, you can name a huge number of scientists who went through repression, through psychiatric hospitals and camps because of far-fetched accusations or because they were adherents of freedom of speech and democracy. Yes, science and culture have evolved. Especially through repression …

By the way, about culture. There was literature. But rather in spite of than with support. Babel was tortured after his arrest and then shot. And the burial place is still not known.

Daniil Kharms was imprisoned and then killed in the psychiatry department of the Kresty prison hospital.

Axelrod was arrested, tortured, and after being accused of involvement in the "writers' nationalist organization" he was shot.

In November 1933, Osip Mandelstam wrote the anti-Stalinist epigram "We live without feeling the country", which he read to fifteen people. As a result, several people wrote a denunciation and the poet was arrested. A special meeting at the NKVD of the USSR sentenced Mandelstam to five years in a camp. On December 27, 1938, not having lived quite a bit before his 48th birthday, Osip Mandelstam died in a transit camp from typhus.

The ingenious Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested in 1939. After three weeks of intense interrogation, accompanied by torture, Meyerhold signed the testimony required by the investigation: he was charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code - counter-revolutionary activity.

In his letter he wrote: “They beat me here - a sick sixty-six-year-old man, they laid me face down on the floor, they beat me on the heels and on the back with a rubber band, when I was sitting on a chair, they beat me on my legs with the same rubber […] the pain was such that it seemed, boiling water was poured on sore sensitive parts of the legs … ". They shot him. He was buried in a common grave with other victims of the regime.

Writers Sinyavsky and Daniel were repressed in 1966. Daniel was sentenced to 5 years in camps under Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." And Sinyavsky was sentenced to 7 years in camps for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."

In 1958 Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for his novel Doctor Zhivago. The awarding of the prize led to the persecution of Pasternak in the Soviet press, his expulsion from the Union of Writers of the USSR, insults against him from the pages of Soviet newspapers, at meetings of the "workers". The Moscow organization of the Union of Writers of the USSR, following the rule of the Union of Writers, demanded the expulsion of Pasternak from the Soviet Union and the deprivation of his Soviet citizenship.

It was then that the poet's persecution led to the emergence of the saying: "I have not read, but I condemn!" Pasternak was expelled from the Writers' Union of the USSR. And because of the poem "Nobel Prize" published in the West, in February 1959 Pasternak was summoned to the USSR Prosecutor General RA Rudenko, where he was threatened with charges under Article 1 "Treason to the Motherland." We didn’t have time to bring it to the landing. Pasternak was diagnosed with lung cancer, left alone, and he died a year later.

Solzhenitsyn, Aksyonov, Brodsky and many others were forcibly expelled or forced to emigrate. The poet Vasily Stus was arrested twice for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" and sent to the camps. The USSR killed him in the camp. The official version is that he died on September 4, 1985 after a hunger strike announced on August 27 in a punishment cell.

The books of Orwell, Bulgakov, Zamyatin, Groisman, Babel, Pasternak, Kizzy, Berdyaev, Yuris, Nabokov and many others were banned. But yes, there were literature and art. In the zone, in exile, in the grave, or in the special security guards, it is prohibited. And then there was Virgin Soil Upturned and a lot of unnecessary slag with the prizes of Lenin and Stalin. There were good authors. But the regime systematically reduced their number by repression and executions. And the way they were totally persecuted shows the inhumanity of the Soviet regime.

But it is not only science and culture that man lives

Soviet people wanted to eat, wanted to get dressed and wanted certain benefits. And with all this it was not easy. After all, the USSR is a time of total deficit. And people were looking for how to get furniture, jeans, a car or banal toilet paper. The sausage was 2, 20. From paper. True, even this sausage was not always on the counter. And the ice cream was. Sometimes with water. And you can also remember about meat, which was with bones and meat was less bones. Or about the smell of rotten vegetables in specialized stores.

It is strange that nostalgic people do not like to remember this. How much they do not like to remember that the collective farmers and villagers in the USSR were even without passports. So that they could not escape anywhere. In fact, serfs. Peasants, who made up almost 40 percent of the Sovok population, were first allowed to issue passports only on August 28, 1974.

Which country did you lose, huh? A queue for many years for a car, for furniture, for books, for everything. And nostalgic people forget about how they fought with freedom of speech and freedom of religion under the Soviets. True, most often, it is forgotten by those who, under the USSR, hesitated exclusively with the party line, and today frantically beats obeisances in churches. By the way, have you already forgotten the vodka in the queues? Or just do not want to remember, so as not to destroy their own fantasies? Yes, the USSR is a country of evergreen tomatoes and a total deficit. And do not forget this and all of the above.

Sometimes people are nostalgic for their feelings. Miss youth or childhood. By the ease they experienced then. But this is definitely not a reason for longing for a misanthropic and disgusting regime that destroyed millions of destinies and destroyed millions of lives. The USSR is dead! So far, only legally. But sooner or later he will die in the brain. And then it will be the final farewell to slavery and self-deception. And it is easier for those who are free and really looking at the world. Try it. You'll like it.