[b]Masha Gessen
It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.[/b]
Of course it’s always their own damn fault.
The people who came were not always the ones who most needed to escape: they were the ones most capable of escaping.
And not just from Dannemora.
In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history – political history and art history – is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites – in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad – and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do.
Think Stalin and Hitler and [now] Putin.
And, sure, someday, maybe Trump.
Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art – something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reexamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts – a great work of art is always a miracle.
No miracles here, are there?
The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also of the ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how.
Of course that can never happen here.
You know, if it hasn’t already started.
At the time of the October Revolution, the Russian intellectual elite had been both a part and a partner to the European conversation about God, power, and human life. After fifty years of purges, arrests, and, most damaging, unrelenting pressure on what had become an isolated thought universe, the Russian intellectual landscape was populated by barely articulated ghosts of once vibrant ideas. Even Communist ideology was a shadow of its former self, a set of ritually repeated words that had lost all meaning.
One possible explanation: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296