I remember, back in Moscow, around that time, in ’81 or so, a classmate showed me, covertly, this paperback unmistakenly printed abroad. This was the famed (among those of us who were quietly listening to jammed by Soviet stations dispatches of Voice of America, or Radio Liberty at night) Хроника Текущих Событий, Chronicle of Current Events, the Samizdat bulletin of dissident movement, assembled and disseminated with enormous effort of a few brave and dedicated opponents of the all-mighty state.
My friend was risking a lot. Possessing this little booklet was a crime in Brezhnev’s time. Showing it to others was an exacerbating circumstance, adding extra time to the potential punishment. The people talked about dissidents only to the trusted friends, never in the open, always furtively glancing around: who is listening?
Most people in the West then understood the nature of the late Soviet regime. It was authoritarian, deeply immoral and blatantly lying. Its very survival depended on lies.
For some time Putin’s regime put up a different facade. They kept the borders open, funded lavish spectacles, spent freely in the West, buying estates, sport franchises, politicians. People were telling me how insane it is to view the Russian state under Putin as a criminal kleptocracy. The facade looked great, the hipsters in Moscow were content and spoke good English. The opposition looked weak.
These very people express shock today at what is happening in Ukraine.
But just ask yourself: how long would it take in a democratic, – half democratic, quarter democratic society, – to slide to a dictatorship? In the midst of the world economic crises, it took several years, multiple elections, and a lot of political maneuvering to overthrow the Weimar Republic. It took almost a decade for Stalin to squeeze the (relative) freedom during the NEP time, to establish his absolute rule.
Ukrainians, closer to us, managed to balance for 20 years without giving away its democratic foundations: the country saw contested election, a lot of protests, and even street fighting, but the political process was working, press remained blissfully aggressive, and the state withstood all internal upheavals.
In Russia, the complete reset to the 81′ level of oppression, – and then some! – took one week.
The cudgel the KGB used to prosecute the dissidents was the infamous Article 190-1 of the penal code. It punished the slander and libel of Soviet system with prison or camp terms. All the way, up to three years.
If you open these archived green issues of the Chronicle, you’ll see that almost all of the famed dissidents: Gen. Gregorovich, Marchenko, Golansky, you name them, – were convicted under that article, 190-1. The state could have used a heavier one, the dreaded article 70 (anti-Soviet propaganda), but even that would put you into the camp for just seven years (10 for the repeated offenders).
Now, merely a week into his “special military operation,” Putin signed a law that will get you behind bars for up to fifteen years (if your actions led to “grave consequences”) for defaming Russian armed forced.
And this is not your grandfather’s old good defamation. The state censoring organization explained that to refer to the war in Ukraine as war, not the “special military operation” is slanderous. (Of course in Brezhnev’s time the invasion in Afghanistan was also referred to as the “operation of the limited contingent of Soviet troops in Afghanistan,” and no deviations were allowed in the official press: the desire to control people by controlling dictionary is universal. However, I do not remember threats to put someone in jail for calling that war a war.)
Totalitarian nature of Putin’s regime was never far from surface. The mechanisms of oppression and injustice were there, idling but ready. We just didn’t care. Now they are revving, and we notice. Way too late.