Growing Up in the USSR

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0:00:07.5 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Cathy Young, Cultural Studies fellow at the Cato Institute and contributing editor to Reason. Today we’ll be discussing her article from the December 2021 issue of Reason, “Yes, it was an evil empire.” Welcome to Free Thoughts, Cathy.

0:00:23.5 Cathy Young: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.

0:00:26.3 Trevor Burrus: Where were you born?

0:00:27.7 Cathy Young: I was born in Moscow. I actually wrote a book that came out in 1989 called Growing Up in Moscow.

0:00:34.6 Trevor Burrus: Brezhnev?

0:00:35.9 Cathy Young: Yes, that was… Well, yeah, I was born in 1963, which was right on the cusp of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era. Of course, I don’t remember anything of the Khrushchev era, but yeah, I grew up in the late 60s and 70s under Brezhnev. And it was the era of what later came to be known as the Great Stagnation when it seemed like nothing would ever change and things just kind of slogged on and on, gradually getting worse in many areas, but that was nothing really dramatic happening.

0:01:19.5 Trevor Burrus: Well, compared to, say, the 50s, so it was less oppressive than Stalin, correct?

0:01:25.7 Cathy Young: Oh yeah, no, it was definitely less oppressive than Stalin, and as a teenager, I got to know a little bit about the Stalin era, and not only from reading, my parents were among those people who, while they were not openly dissidents, they did have forbidden literature in the house sometimes including the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, which my dad borrowed from somebody for like three days, and which was very quickly devoured, and I read parts of that too. But also there were people who were family friends and relatives who had been in the Gulag during the Stalin era, and actually my own grandparents, my father’s parents were sent to the labor camps in the… I think it was in 1949, and when my father was 14 years old, and that was a pretty bad thing to happen, obviously for all sorts of reasons, but among other things, there were things like there were relatives who crossed the street when they saw him because it was dangerous to be associated with somebody who’s parents were in prison.

0:02:55.4 Cathy Young: And yeah, the only… The lucky thing so to speak, which saved them from going to an orphanage, which was generally a terrible place, was that his sister, his older sister was of age and therefore could be an official caretaker. The thing that was kind of ironic is that unlike the vast majority of people who went to the Gulag in the Stalin era, my dad’s parents had actually done what they were accused of doing, which is they belonged to a underground Zionist group that was planning to get out and emigrate to Israel, and there was apparently some kind of arrangement to smuggle them across the border, which apparently there was an informant in the group and everybody got arrested. And my grandparents, I think spent four years in the Gulag, they got out early because Stalin died and that was obviously lucky, but there were other people who I knew about by word of mouth.

0:04:07.7 Cathy Young: My mother had a colleague at work whose father I think spent something like 10 years in the camps, because during the war in 1941, when Stalin was giving a radio address, and like many other people at the time, they lived in a communal apartment where there were several families and there were people gathered around the radio listening to Stalin, and this was obviously in the middle of the German invasion, and this woman’s father made a remark along the lines of like, “My God, Stalin sounds so terribly depressed.” And which is not really that remarkable. He doesn’t say anything critical about Stalin, he was expressing fear and concern obviously, and somebody reported him for spreading the fetus propaganda and off to the Gulag he went and there were many, many other cases like that. So yeah, I heard all those stories. I certainly knew about the Stalin era and the… Compared to that, we certainly had a lot of freedom. There was much more cultural freedom in the sense of at least some degree of access to western culture, there were American movies that sometimes played in the theaters, actually more western European I think than American.

0:05:46.8 Cathy Young: But occasionally, it was American ones as well. There was… It was just in many, many ways, it was much freer than in the Stalin era, but even so, it was quite a repressive society. One of the things I can tell you is that as a child, when my parents started talking in front of me about the fact that they were very critical of the regime that we lived under, that in contrast to what they were telling me at school, we were not actually terribly lucky to have been born in the Soviet Union, that it wasn’t really the worker’s paradise. And when I was maybe 9 years old, my mother would tell me, “Just remember never to mention to anyone at school what we tell you at home.” And she would basically say, “Otherwise, we could go to jail.” And that was certainly something that I memorized when I was, again, 9 or 10 years old, that the things that we talk about at home, the books that my parents have, none of that could be mentioned to anyone at school, because otherwise we would be in a huge trouble.

0:07:07.5 Trevor Burrus: Well, it seems that that’s one of the under-​appreciated even definitely in the Stalin era, but even in the Khrushchev-​Brezhnev era, and after that, the regime gave individual people a ton of power to, say, rat on their neighbor if they didn’t like their neighbor for some reason.

0:07:25.6 Cathy Young: Oh, absolutely.

0:07:25.7 Trevor Burrus: Or if they did exist in some sort of a bureaucratic level, they had the ability to grant favors or take them away, and that was the kind of positions you were going for. So A, it empowered people to just lie and get rid of people they don’t like, but also to use those positions for their advantage, and that’s the form of corruption that kind of becomes just endemic to the whole society.

0:07:48.5 Cathy Young: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s kind of remarkable, that the power and the access to some special favors was not really limited, for instance, to ranking party members of whom, by the way, they were a great many because every city, every district inside every city had its own party structure, so that, for instance, if you were the head or the deputy head even of the local party committee, you certainly had a lot of power on that level. But even people who had access to rare goods, for instance, which could be anything, if you worked inside the trade system, which was controlled by the government, you had a lot of power by means of being able to sell things on the black market or just give them out as favors, so that was…

0:08:51.2 Cathy Young: And of course, you did run the risk occasionally of getting arrested for corruption when they wanted to make a show of fighting corruption and so on. But generally speaking, if you were working in the trade system and you had enough connections to protect you, you had it made. And it’s kind of interesting that money per se, wasn’t totally meaningless, like if you were one of the relatively few people who made a lot of money by Soviet standards, for instance, if you were a writer, whose books were selling well, or a scientist who was highly paid because that was one of the relatively few highly paid positions. It’s not that you couldn’t do anything with money, but what you could do with money, was very limited compared to what you could do with connections, so connections were really everything.

0:09:51.5 Trevor Burrus: Do you remember what you were taught about America? And two things in particular. One, what was the image of America? And then two, how did they explain seeming American abundance to you as a school child?

0:10:08.9 Cathy Young: Well, it wasn’t just American abundance, but Western abundance in general. I think generally, the way to explain it was that, well, the things that you may sometimes see, it’s really just a front, it’s covering the under-​belly of widespread poverty and so on and so forth. I remember that there was an amusing incident in when I was in fourth grade. There was a boy in my class whose father had gone on a business trip to, I forget which country, but it was some western country. And the father offered to come in and show the kids a slideshow of pictures that he had taken. And of course, everybody was really excited about that, and when we saw the slide show and it included things like supermarket shelves, and of course everybody was duly impressed.

0:11:21.4 Cathy Young: And then our teacher who was also… This was sort a special class meeting session that we had weekly, and everyone after primary school, ’cause in primary school year, you had one main teacher, once you went on to middle school, and you had a lot of different teachers for different subjects, you had one teacher who was also class guide, was the official name, who oversaw the political education. And our class guide, who was the geography teacher happened to be, he was basically a Stalinist. I remember him… ‘Cause we had those weekly meetings, and I remember him sort of ranting about Solzhenitsyn, and how they should have shot him instead of sending him abroad. So yeah, he was a pretty hardcore guy. And he decided that the slide show was politically incorrect, because it presented to attract a vision of life in whatever country it was, it may have been New Zealand. But it was definitely some capitalist country.

0:12:34.4 Cathy Young: So he went on a lengthy rant about how, “Don’t be deceived by these things you see, ’cause what it doesn’t tell you, is that medical care is incredibly expensive,” and he had some sort of booklet in which he rattled off, “This is how much you pay for a hospital bed.” And of course, it’s funny because when he said a hospital bed, I’m sure he envisioned the sort of Soviet style hospital ward like 12 beds in a single ward. And it really couldn’t occur to him that probably the money that he was… The amount of money that he was mentioning was referring to a private Romanov hospital. And of course, he doesn’t say anything about people having health insurance, sadly it was just this idea that it was incredibly expensive and unaffordable to get a hospital bed and stuff like that. So basically, he really felt that he had to neutralize this overly attractive vision of abundance. So yeah, I think that was one.

0:13:40.7 Trevor Burrus: So how did people like him, very firm believers, unlike your parents… And the party maybe, in official communications, how did they explain the deprivation that was obvious to everyone in terms of lines for food and not having say, sausages for a couple of weeks or something? How did they explain that as something, it couldn’t be communism, it had to be something different, right?

0:14:02.6 Cathy Young: Right. Well, it was basically that people were insufficiently conscientious and there was far too much irresponsibility everywhere, and there were… Some people unfortunately were still dishonest and selling stuff on the black market as if… Obviously, if there had been an adequate supply of goods, there wouldn’t have been a black market, but that doesn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind. But I think it’s more that… I don’t think there really was an acknowledgement per se that things weren’t working. I think it was one of those things that everyone knew on a personal level, but that was never… Again to the extent that it was acknowledged, it was always along the lines of, well, unfortunately, we still have people with irresponsible attitudes who either slack off or skim off the top to give stuff to their friends and relatives, and that’s why we unfortunately have these failures of the supply lines to the trade system. And this is why also periodically they would arrest and jail someone for…

0:15:22.4 Trevor Burrus: Skimming.

0:15:23.9 Cathy Young: Doing things that everyone else was doing [chuckle] But I think that was meant to show the people that, “Yes, we’re trying to take care of this problem.” But it’s interesting that on a sort of personal level, people blame… A lot of people didn’t really blame communism per se. It was always a matter of finding some culprit to blame, and communism was kind of abstract and too many people didn’t even occur to question the system itself. So, for instance, in Moscow, a lot of people came in from other towns, sometimes as far as four hours away by train. People would come in on weekends to shop for food because the supply in their towns was completely abysmal. You really had to line up outside the store at 7:00 AM if you wanted to buy anything because by nine it would all be gone. So people would come in, and there was a lot of resentment among people in Moscow towards these people from out of town, who came in to shop for food because, the idea was that apparently, that’s why there’s not enough left for us, because all those people from other towns come in and take everything.

0:16:49.0 Cathy Young: My mom had an experience where she was standing in line for… I think it was something like condensed milk or something, and there was a woman… An old woman who was shabbily dressed and obviously looked like somebody from out of town. You could sort of tell the Moscow look versus the out-​of-​town look. And this woman was buying what people decided was too many cans of condensed milk, and people actually started yelling at her. And going like, “There’s not gonna be enough left for us, and obviously you out-​of-​town people, you come in here and you rob us blind.” And my mom just felt really bad and said something like, “You really should be ashamed of yourselves. Here’s an old woman, and instead of offering her help carrying those cans of milk, you’re yelling at her.” And of course people started yelling at my mom. But that was the thing. People looked for culprits much closer to home than the system because again, the system was kind of abstract.

0:18:05.0 Trevor Burrus: Exactly.

0:18:07.0 Cathy Young: Yeah.

0:18:07.3 Trevor Burrus: So in your article on Reason, you addressed this sort of strange phenomenon… I mean, I was born in 1980, so I kind of remember communism from this side of the pond, but you kind of thought that this sort of demon was buried and it wouldn’t come back, which I guess was naive because at some point, everyone who actually remembers what it was like to live under communism will be dead and then it will come back again if nothing else.

0:18:32.0 Cathy Young: Yeah.

0:18:32.5 Trevor Burrus: But we’re seeing actual communists coming out and saying women’s… The Soviet Union was a women’s rights paradise.

0:18:39.4 Cathy Young: Oh yeah, that was… Yeah, and I remember… I think you remember too. There was this op-​ed in the New York Times by a woman… I forget where she’s a professor at.

0:18:55.5 Trevor Burrus: Women had better sex in the Soviet Union, that one?

0:18:57.7 Cathy Young: Women had better sex under communism, which I found really hilarious because even leaving aside the material problems of trying to have a sex life when you’re, let’s say newlyweds who are forced to share an apartment with your in-​laws, and you may not even have a private room. You may just have a part of a room that’s curtained off from your mother-​in-​law. Imagine how sexy that is. [chuckle] And so yeah, but even aside from that Soviet society, except maybe, for a brief period in the 1920s, immediately in the wake of the revolution, Soviet society was incredibly puritanical. And partly, it was just the general belief that everything that had to do with your private life was kind of inferior. And really, like your energies had to go into being a good builder of communism. And of course, there were, in the West, there were all this jokes about the Soviet romance novel, basically Boy Meets Tractor.

0:20:19.6 Cathy Young: But that was not so far away from reality. Because if you look at the socialist realist literature was officially approved literature, whatever romantic storyline, there was always had to be secondary to the dedication to ideology. And now again, it wasn’t, especially by the Brezhnev era, the control over culture really wasn’t nearly as rigid as it had been during the Stalin era. And there were a lot of cultural products. So even the movies and the TV movies that were made in the 70s, a lot of them were based on classics. There was a musical series of The Three Musketeers that was made in the 70s. And that was hugely popular. So you know obviously that really wasn’t very Soviet. But yeah, the ideology itself was incredibly puritanical.

0:21:26.5 Trevor Burrus: Well, One of the tropes, one of the Soviet, because it doesn’t seem like the five workers who are often lined up along Stalin, there’s the farmworker in the factory workers, the woman was always very much women’s work type of thing. There were women in factories, but the classic Soviet woman, it’s a pretty patriarchal society, even today, so you’re not going to overturn that with Soviet…

0:21:48.6 Cathy Young: Right. Yeah, no. Very much so. And again, there was initially there was an upsurge, there was a bit of a feminist, impulse in the 1920s, during the Revolutionary period, but especially after World War II, when obviously the Soviet Union had lost a lot of population during the war.

0:22:14.3 Trevor Burrus: 30 million people.

0:22:15.5 Cathy Young: And also as a result of the Gulag. So there was a very strong feeling that they wanted to encourage more motherhood and part of that was this encouragement of very patriarchal and really very traditionalist attitudes. And, of course, the real reason people were not having kids was not because they had the wrong attitudes towards sex roles, but because they didn’t have, for instance, enough living space. Because it was very, very difficult, just economically, to have more than one child. So, yeah, I would say by the way that all of the kids I knew at school, there were one or two who had a sibling, it was quite unusual. And the vast majority like myself were only children. And as part of encouraging more motherhood there was a very, very kind of sexist ethos. And at school, for instance, we had this very traditional division of… We had Home Economics for girls, and we had a shop for boys. So it was really, in that sense. Very, very traditionalist.

0:23:39.2 Trevor Burrus: Now, there are other people who have claimed, kind of stunningly that in terms of racial hierarchies that the Soviet Union also did better than the United States. Now Obviously, the United States has a horrible system of oppression of race that continued, and in many ways continues to this day. But you talk about this Robert Robinson person who I had not encountered in the story before. Yeah, it’s a fascinating story.

0:24:05.3 Cathy Young: Yeah, that was a fascinating story that I came across while I was researching the space. And actually it started with something that I saw on Twitter. Somebody had a screenshot from a book saying, “Look how advanced the Soviet Union was with regard to racism. And you know, no wonder the Western capitalists had to demonize it in every way they could.” And the screenshot was from a book which I laid the front down. And it was about a case in which a black American auto worker who went to the Soviet Union in the 30s, to take a job. Who was attacked in the cafeteria by two white Americans who didn’t like a black guy sitting next to them. And the white Americans were actualy put on trial for a racist incident and were expelled from the Soviet Union. They were again, they were Americans, and I think they were from Detroit. And this was also made into a huge case, apparently, in the Soviet press, where they were contrasting the ingrained racism of these Americans with the commitment to racial equality that existed in the Soviet Union. And this person was incredibly impressed by this story. Interestingly enough, I found the book, which was written by a Professor of education I forget his name, but from Indiana…

0:25:41.3 Trevor Burrus: Derek R. Ford. Yeah, Derek R. Ford, politics in pedagogy in the post-​truth era insurgent philosophy and practice.

0:25:48.5 Cathy Young: Yes.

0:25:48.5 Trevor Burrus: Practices. There’s a scintillating academic title for you.

0:25:51.5 Cathy Young: Oh, yeah, yeah. So yeah, and I haven’t read the entire book but judging from that excerpt that’s very pro-​communist and then I started trying to track down the story itself and I had a difficult time doing that because this guy managed to get the black person’s name wrong. [chuckle] Talk about the irony, right? You’re a white progressive academic telling this edifying story about Soviet anti-​racism and you get the black person’s name wrong because you can’t be bothered to read the story carefully enough. And yeah, so he got the name wrong, and I found the actual person whose name was Robert Robinson, not Robertson as the book claimed. [chuckle] But it turned out to be a fascinating story really, because this guy was a black American who did in fact go to the Soviet Union in, I think 1931, because he felt that maybe he would have a better life there. And yeah, of course, at the time, obviously, racial segregation and racism was a really, really terrible problem in America. And he did find a job. And of course, the Soviet Union at the time was clamoring for foreign specialists because they wanted to build up their industry and Lenin had originally imagined that illiterate peasants could be quickly trained to be good specialists in anything from…

0:27:39.9 Trevor Burrus: Machinists, factory workers, engineers.

0:27:42.3 Cathy Young: Sophisticated [0:27:42.5] ____ to engineering, right? It turned out that that wasn’t quite the case, even with communist ideology. So they had to fall back on recruiting foreign specialists, a lot of whom by the way later ended up in the Gulag but that’s another story. So this guy from Detroit did become a sort of highly qualified wood worker and achieved a position that he later said he would not have been able to achieve in the United States at the time, probably given the level of racial discrimination. But what this book didn’t really reveal, is that this person later spent pretty much… Well, thankfully, not the rest of his life, but like the next 40 years trying to get out of the Soviet Union because as Stalinism solidified and things became more and more repressive.

0:28:47.1 Cathy Young: And he saw other Americans around him getting arrested one by one, including some of the other black people who were working in the Soviet Union and he realized that things were getting really bad, and he was sort of in additional jeopardy because he was a practicing Christian, and that was something that was very much frowned upon. And when he tried to get permission to return to the United States, they wouldn’t let him. And well, not only that, but he also, he ended up by the way, he did eventually manage to return to the United States in the ’70s. So he basically spent 40 years living in the Soviet Union and the vast majority of that time, unwillingly, and a lot of the time fearing that he was going to be arrested and sent to Siberia.

0:29:52.6 Trevor Burrus: Now, all this makes sense, I mean…

0:29:54.3 Cathy Young: Yeah, and he also wrote, he wrote a book after he returned and…

0:29:57.8 Trevor Burrus: Yes, Black On Red, 1988.

0:30:00.6 Cathy Young: Black On Red, yeah. And he talks among other things about experiencing a great deal of sort of everyday racism, including incidents where people would move away from him on the bus and some woman called him a black devil and things like that. And it just generally more very condescending and very kind of objectifying in a sense attitudes where he was useful only as a symbol of the black people struggle against capitalism, but no one was really interested in treating him as an individual.

0:30:41.0 Trevor Burrus: Well, so we have this strange communist nostalgia coming from Westerners and academics, of course, but it seems we also have an increasing amount of communist nostalgia coming from Vladimir Putin himself and possibly average Russian citizens, sorry.

0:31:00.7 Cathy Young: Yeah.

0:31:00.8 Trevor Burrus: That seems resurgent to kinda move it up to present day in terms of maybe Putin changing his mind or lack… He has said that the fall of Soviet Union was the biggest human rights catastrophe of the 20th century or something. I can’t remember his exact words but…

0:31:15.4 Cathy Young: Geo-​political.

0:31:15.9 Trevor Burrus: Geo-​political that was it, yeah.

0:31:16.9 Cathy Young: Yeah.

0:31:17.0 Trevor Burrus: And he has reasons maybe to be nostalgic given his position during the Soviet times.

0:31:23.0 Cathy Young: Yeah, well. I’ll tell you though, Putin is a complicated case in that sense, because I think his nostalgia… It’s always difficult for me, like when I look at these statements that Putin makes, this sort of ideological statements. It’s always hard to tell how much of that is what he personally believes and how much of that is for public consumption, because I think to a very large extent if you look at his career, his post-​Soviet career, I think a lot of it is just really the pursuit of personal enrichment and power, and I think the ideology in many ways is really just a cover for that. And the ideology is an attempt to find this ideological organizing principle or to build this new authoritarian society around. I think he knows that an authoritarian society needs some sort of [0:32:27.6] ____ beyond just the people at the top having power and wealth and handing that out to their cronies. So from his standpoint, the best way to justify his regime is with appeals to… And it’s interesting because it’s a really kind of schizophrenic mix of appeals to this nostalgic vision of the Soviet past and appeals to Imperial Russian greatness. So it’s…

0:33:05.8 Trevor Burrus: And even the Orthodox Church. So it’s three things that often don’t fit very well together.

0:33:10.5 Cathy Young: Right. So it’s not really straightforward Soviet nostalgia. It actually it’s interesting that you will find, if you look at his rhetoric around Ukraine for instance, one of his arguments for why Ukraine is not a real country, so to speak is that it was first granted independence by Lenin. And he basically, part of his argument is, look, it’s just this part of the scheme that the Bolsheviks cooked up as part of their revolution, which involved the destruction of the Russian empire. So he is really in that sense, he’s appealing more to empire than he is to the Soviet era. But I think the unifying kind of principle is this national greatness idea, whether it’s Soviet national greatness, the victory over Nazism, where it’s Imperial… The Russian Imperial state. And it’s also this sort of not even really anti capitalist, but anti individualist kind of ethos because the demonization of liberalism as a belief system based on personal autonomy, sort of combines appeals to, again, to the Soviet past when there were these supposedly altruistic ideals of collectivism and a distribution of equitable distribution of wealth supposedly, and this sort of communal vision of Russian orthodoxy and Anzasm. So again, like the common principle is anti-​liberalism…

0:35:09.5 Trevor Burrus: Well, is that… Interesting, now you’re saying this, and I’m thinking that there is a lack, maybe he’s struggling to find a connective ideology because 100 years from now, or 500 years from now, the historians will look at the space between the fall of the Soviet Union, and let’s say now 30 years as a blink of an eye. And they will construct… They’ll say when the Soviet Union fell, you had all these, the corruption that we discussed all the people who had achieved party status by trading favors, and they all became the oligarchs, and they just sort of continued this stratified Russian society. They chose Putin as the one to keep this going, as long as they could continue to suck the country dry, but they didn’t have anything to give the people like the false ideology of communism to say, this is what we’re doing. And so maybe Putin. Is looking for that. What is the idea of Russian greatness or something, because they know that this is an oligarch society, right? I mean, the Russians know this.

0:36:07.7 Cathy Young: Oh yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting because partly, Putin’s appeal to the people is actually sort of, well, not really capitalist, but I mean, part of his appeal is that he was able to, as they see it, to restore normality after the very chaotic Yeltsin years. And under Putin actually the Russian middle class did achieve a kind of modicum of a quasi capitalist existence. And a lot of it, of course, was based on oil wealth. So there really… There was very little in the way of really growing Russian capitalism and entrepreneurship partly because the system of bribery continued, there’s still very little reliable Rule of Law. And of course under Putin the consolidation of the authoritarian state really means that property owners have no assurance that they will not have everything taken away and will not be sent to jail if they cross the wrong people in government.

0:37:37.0 Cathy Young: So to that extent, what’s really missing is still is the rights based order in which the average citizen, including the entrepreneur and the property owner knows that his or her rights will be protected. And that I think is a huge, huge problem. And yeah, but it’s interesting that at least in maybe the first 10 years of the Putin regime, a big, big part of his appeal was this sort of, now we have a normal life, we can enjoy all those consumer goods, you can travel abroad, you have enough money to go on vacation to Paris and Rome and that sort of thing. And I think that was a big part of his appeal to the, sort of to the Russian middle class, which did support him.

0:38:42.7 Trevor Burrus: Do we have any idea how popular he… I mean, you having more connections there ’cause it’s hard to tell with the polls, but I hear from many of my Russian friends that he actually is very popular.

0:38:54.1 Cathy Young: Yeah. Well, his popularity, I think has kind of waxed and waned at different times. I think he was genuinely popular at least in the first decade, where maybe the first eight or nine years of his role, and I think at the time the polls were still more compared to today, I think the polls were often an accurate indication of public opinion. Today… Especially now, it’s really, really hard to tell what’s going on from the polls. I have seen stories about people just not wanting to talk to pollsters anymore. Especially when they’re asked about the war in Ukraine. Because people have very explicitly said, “What? Am I crazy?” Like, “You know my phone number. Obviously you know who I am and I am going to tell you what I think about the special operation in Ukraine? No, thanks. I am not crazy”.

0:39:57.5 Cathy Young: And then they hang up. So a lot of people… And I think from those comments, you can sort of gauge that at least some people obviously have an opinion that they consider politically unacceptable. Which is kind of interesting, and other people don’t even bother to say that. They just hang up and they basically say, “You know, I don’t do polls.” or sometimes they curse at the person who is calling. So there is definitely the fear of saying the wrong thing, is definitely back and it’s back for a good reason, because now they have this law where they can punish…

0:40:35.1 Trevor Burrus: Put you in prison for 15 years. Yeah.

0:40:38.2 Cathy Young: Up to 15 years for discrediting the prestige of the Russian armed forces.

0:40:44.6 Trevor Burrus: The special operation, yes.

0:40:45.3 Cathy Young: Yeah, and the special operation. And there was already a case in which a teacher got arrested because she said something in a class in opposition to the war. And one of the students recorded her on his phone and reported her to the authorities and now she’s facing, you know, at least, theoretically…

0:41:11.7 Trevor Burrus: Seems like old times, right? It seems like old times.

0:41:12.9 Cathy Young: Yeah, except… It seems like old times except with smartphones. [chuckle] Because back in my day, even a tape recorder was a kind of unthinkable luxury. My uncle had one of those very old fashioned cassette recorders where they have these…

0:41:30.5 Trevor Burrus: The real old ones, yeah.

0:41:32.5 Cathy Young: Yeah, the big bobbins with tape and that was… Even that was considered a luxury. I think, I was still in the Soviet Union when I saw my first small audio cassette recorder. And not many or anything, just sort of the size that you could hold in your hand. And I was like, “Wow, that’s amazing.”

[laughter]

0:41:57.0 Cathy Young: They actually have that abroad. But yeah, but of course now everybody has a smartphone and you can easily record somebody’s undesirable comment and report them to the police. Yeah, so today it’s very, very difficult to say what public opinion is, to what extent people buy this Russian greatness vision. But there has been a lot of just really kind of deranged ideological stuff that’s been circulating in Russia for the last 10 or 15 years. It’s actually an article that I am working on, there’s a whole [0:42:45.1] ____ of sort of speculative fiction that could be summed up as, “World War III happens.” And then, “Russia rules the world”. [laughter] It’s that sort of stuff and it’s been encouraged by the government. It’s going around and there’s a whole school of pop philosophy, like Aleksandr Dugin who you may have heard of.

0:43:16.4 Trevor Burrus: He is quite terrifying. He is explicit in his Nazi root, so he has said that he started that way.

0:43:23.6 Cathy Young: Yeah. This is a guy who very openly says that he’s… I think he has actually said that the problem was… The only problem is like, “Real fascism has never been properly tried.” I mean, people used to say that about Communism. But this is a new thing like the… And I think he has also explicitly said that the key to his vision is sort of the fusion of the best of Communism and Fascism. So this is great. And this is… I don’t know how accurate it is, because some people have claimed that he is like Putin’s guru. I am not sure how true that is. I don’t know of any personal connections between him and Putin. At one point he was quite close to a guy named Sergey Glazyev, who was then the Chairman of the Duma. So he definitely has had connections to the government. And even if it isn’t Putin personally, that’s still pretty scary. This is a guy who is quite influential, so because of that, it’s always kind of ironic to hear Putin and other pundits in Russia talk about, “De-​Nazifying Ukraine.” Maybe it sort of helped. [laughter] It’s because there are certainly…

0:44:49.8 Trevor Burrus: Some people to take care of there. In this last… In the last minute or so, I don’t know if you want to do any predictions. We have seen… In the last few days, we’ve seen Russians at least pulling back from the Kyiv area. And maybe they’re just going to end up occupying the further east parts of Ukraine and pretend that they won a victory rather than fight it insurgency for the next five years.

0:45:15.0 Cathy Young: That’s a possibility. I think at this point, it may even be difficult for them to hold on to Eastern Ukraine. It depends on one dilemma I think that Putin has, and I think people… I’m not saying anything original here, people have pointed this out, that in order to call up the manpower that he would need to get any kind of victory in Ukraine, he would really have to say, “Yes, we’re at war and we’re gonna have a draft.” Because otherwise, he’s pretty much exhausted what manpower he has. And by the way there is a Spring draft coming up. I mean, I think we’re gonna probably see a lot of draft dodging because people know despite the talk of special operation, and they sort of try to maintain those pretense that they’re not using any draftees in this “Special operation,” than there have been cases of you know draftees actually ending up dead in Ukraine.

0:46:23.9 Cathy Young: So, they’re trying to bring in people from Syria, which is kind of insane because they’re not gonna be fighting on familiar terrain. This is not going very well for Russia obviously. And on the other hand, Ukraine is pretty close to activating, like I think they’ve been training reservists obviously very intensively because they’re in an emergency situation. And I think why… I’ve seen the foreign cast out by May, or maybe by June. They’re gonna be ready to activate another 300,000 people. And this is where Putin is really gonna make the decision. Does he openly declare that this is a war and institute an actual universal draft where they’re gonna call up the reservists. And that’s not gonna be popular because, one thing that I have seen, and I actually find that convincing that in spite of these polls which supposedly show a high level of support for the war, there are not very many spontaneous expressions of support for it.

0:47:40.8 Cathy Young: Like I’ve seen people say that in 2014, when they took over Crimea to which a lot of people in Russia really do have an emotional attachment, a lot of them have spend their vacations there, ’cause that was pretty much like the one decent place in the Soviet Union where you could go on vacation. And at the time there were apparently a huge number of cars were supporting Crimea’s hours, bumper stickers and stuff like that. And there are not many of those, like the bumper stickers with the Z which symbolizes this campaign has really not been showing up a lot. I mean, I’ve seen people say that they’ve seen more antiwar graffiti than they have Z bumper stickers.

0:48:27.3 Cathy Young: I’ve also seen interestingly enough, there was a video that somebody compiled of Russians on TikTok and Instagram complaining about their cars being vandalised when they… After putting on a pro-​war Z bumper stickers. I think there is a lot of kind of under current of antiwar sentiment, and certainly, I don’t think any one is particularly gonna be purportedly anxious to go to fight in Ukraine. So I think the draft in this situation is gonna have a lot of problems, especially if there isn’t some kind of guarantee that you know we’re not gonna send you to Ukraine. So I don’t know in terms of predictions, I’ve seen people predict that this could be like the beginning of the end of the Putin regime. But, I mean, I think it’s so uncertain at this point that I really don’t wanna predict anything.

[music]

0:49:52.1 Trevor Burrus: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.