#sovietopia

One of the small amazing discoveries in the process of a tireless framing of my project: my younger colleagues (25-30 years old) do not know the term “bipolar world,” invariably they suspect it to be my own invention and demand clarification.

Soviet soldiers who were captured by Nazis, returned to the motherland only to be sent to concentration camps. The Soviet soldier should not had given the opportunity for the enemy to take him captive in the first place. Having allowed that, and did not survive the Nazi camp, he was a traitor, the unknown had happened to him, and perhaps he was enlisted in Germany to spy, harm, and work against the Soviet project.

Someone among the emigrants--a weak bunch--was suggesting in a low-key horror that, if Putin acquires a Stalin-like paranoia in his elderly years, citizens of the Russian Federation, returning from abroad, would be quickly profiled and send straight to prisons.

In one of the memoirs of the early Soviet period--Ivan Solonevitch's Rossia v kontslagere (Russia in Concentration Camp)--the author, a survivor of camps, one of the "enemies of the people," a translator, employed briefly for dealing with foreigners, shared an episode which stuck with me. At the time, excited romantics from all over the world went to USSR to build Communism and bring a better future for the world. As a rule, they were immediately apprehended upon arrival and sent to forced labor camps, because they were either, in the eyes of the Soviet government, spies, or, they could, upon returning to their countries, disseminate the information which would shed unfavorable light on what is going on in the country. Spread lies. The narrator remarks that those people, who oftentimes did not speak Russian very well or at all, and had just had high hopes brutally smashed by reality, were figures most jarring for him to see in that whirlpool and grind where everyone, unbeknownst to oneself, found oneself and others, as well as history, economy, politics, spinning. A vortex of titanic forces. The narrator recollects Finns, already caught in a commotion, already on their way to the approaching abyss, sitting in a truck, asking soldiers for bread and bacon (salo). Their ask, he writes, was met with laughter, that's how naive it was. One of the Finns asked the narrator the last question before their departure: "So, what bourgeois newspapers wrote, is all true?" And the narrator gently answers: "You will see everything for yourself." (Sami uvidite). Indeed, there was no point in saying anything at this point.