We simply expected our children to inherit our own abhorrence toward socialism. We did not know that trusting children to American system of education we were throwing them into the pit flaming with the same mass psychosis of communist atheistic religion we were suffering from in the Soviet Union. We did not know that socialist anti-American agenda has already been occupying not only American college campuses, but even elementary schools.
Socialist anti-Americanism for decades under disguise of legitimate criticism was aggressively destroying the image of the best country in the world. While the whole world sang “I want to be an American!” our children’s teachers flushed them with contempt and aversion to the kindest and generous country, which took us on its bosom as refugees. O, it was CAPITALIST country! O, it was so unjust to: the poor, the blacks, the minorities, the women, the LGTBQ, the transgendered! It was unjust to anyone, whom socialists could get under their banners, promising ridiculous unachievable equality, justice, and the share of the other people’s money.
One of the reasons people ran from the Soviet Union was surrealistic double life in the ocean of communist propaganda. The biggest building in Moscow was Department of Propaganda of the Communist Party on the Staraya Square. Propaganda injected everything, disfigured everything, and lied about everything. No book, no children’s play, no movie, no newspaper article was allowed to be produced without stamp of the censorship. Art could exist only as propaganda. Cinema, as Lenin taught, was the most important from all the arts because it was the most powerful propaganda tool. Journalism was pure propaganda. Literature was propaganda barely diluted. Artists were painting Lenin’s portraits during the day and doing underground art at night.
I was just a young tour guide in the most Western city of Russia – Saint Petersburg (Leningrad), but we were called propagandists. Sightseeing tour was called ‘The City of the Great Lenin”. City, which was built by Peter the I, the capital of Russia for 200 years, city of fascinating history, was renamed after mentally ill murderous communist, who did spend there just a few years.
Ideological spies were attending incognito our tours and my friend, single mother, was publicly shamed on the meeting and fired because of her not enough politically correct excursion. Sounds familiar? (I lost my engagement as a tour guide in JCC San Francisco for quoting Bible (Levit 28) “You shall not lie with mankind as with a womankind…”)
In Russia propaganda was everywhere and in a total informational vacuum people would start to feel schizophrenic, due to surrealistic split between reality and parallel reality created by media. Radio and newspapers were telling every day that Soviet people had the best life in the world, while it was forbidden to cross the border to compare. People were busy searching for food, staying in long lines for everything: toilet paper, wall paper, winter boots, pantyhose, furniture. My mother, chemical engineer, was on the waiting list to have her house phone for 18 years. Once she rushed home with happy face and proudly placed on the table a pair of warm underwear. “In what capitalist country person can be so happy just purchasing the warm pants!” She hated socialism and always repeated (only to me) that the slave labor is the least productive.
Educated, hardworking people, like doctors and engineers, lived in the same big communal apartments with illiterate drunkards and cheap prostitutes, sharing with them only one dirty bathroom and overcrowded kitchen. Soviet communal apartment was a real symbol of socialist equality and justice!
The moment we turned on the radio or TV we had marvelous life! We were told that agricultural farms had an immense harvest! They fulfilled the plan of meat and milk with 10% extra production. While as a tour guide I saw blood dripping from the shelves of my tour bus – people were coming to Leningrad not for my propaganda tours, but to buy meat not in existence in their cities.
In propaganda we had the best medicine in the world! In reality abortions were only contraceptives available, dentists had no anesthesia. Overworked, underpaid nurses, without high school diplomas were rude like the prison guards, and doctors were stealing medications for their private clients from children in the hospitals. Main success of the communist government was creation through propaganda of parallel reality, which was more believable than reality people lived in.
First who lost faith in communism was KGB. They were allowed to travel abroad and access ALL sources of information. They first realized that they were also duped by communist utopia promising paradise. They realized that poor people in the West live better than them, privileged people in the Soviet Union. They first learned the TRUTH.
When the Soviet agriculture collapsed and the danger of national famine was lurking, the agonizing existence of the Soviet Union was prolonged as strange as it sounds by America and Canada. They sold to the Soviets millions of tons of ridiculously cheap grain with just the small amendment (Jackson-Vanick 1974) – to allow Jewish emigration. Jews were bought out of Soviet slavery for grain, as it was commanded by Torah to buy your people out of slavery.
Some of those Jews, raised and educated in atmosphere of Soviet militant atheism, even did not know what Shabbat meant, but they immediately realized the hystоrical, once in a life time chance to escape to freedom from the prison camp of “socialism, peace, happiness” and forced labor. Their ethnicity was their pass out of gigantic multinational Gulag called USSR. They immediately jumped on this train with only $90 per person allowed to take with you, leaving friends and relatives behind with no chance to see them again. How the old people hated their life there, if they would give official permission to grown children and small grandchildren to leave the country (permission from parents was demanded to apply for an exit visa) knowing, that they will never see them. How torn were their hearts! Let at least our children live in freedom.
So when parents of 8-year old future Google founder Sergey Brin pried him out from multinational prison camp aka Soviet paradise, they were sure, like me and all my émigré friends, that they NEVER will live at this surrealistic hell of communist propaganda double reality again.
Surviving in a new country, which is almost half-century ahead technologically, with no proper English and often no useful profession was a humongous test.
We never drove automobiles. In 1980 only 2% of Soviet population had cars. The price of a car was 14 years salary of an engineer and waiting list for cars lasted for many years. So, émigré women were walking on the high heels on the freeways for their first job interviews. I knew women-doctors, who were cleaning skyscrapers for years, while their husbands were preparing for doctor’s exams. I saw experienced surgeons and psychiatrists, who became wardens in the hospitals and started new careers at the age over 40 or 50. They still managed.
All my friends could boast that they made it. For them the main source of their pride was universities their children graduated from. Cornell, USC, Stanford, Yale, Princeton – most expensive, most prestigious. We gave everything we had to our children and borrowed a lot for that also. Unfortunately we did not have time to attend our children’s schools and check their curriculums.
Something terrible happened to our children in America. Something terrible happened between us and them.
During Passover celebration our children in late 20, sitting on the other side of the table stood up and left to protest against our too conservative, too Republican conversations.
I was the only one who was not amazed. I was the only one of all my émigré friends, who at the age of 50 decided to receive real American education. My diploma of professor of Marxist-Leninist philosophy from Leningrad University (other philosophies were allowed by Soviets only as subject of critique) was not very applicable to American reality. I felt uneducated, speechless, deprived of language. I was happy to learn Shakespeare plays, but was horrified to realize that this university was a full functioning powerful Marxist-socialist propaganda joint. My first article in English was called “My Second Marxist Indoctrination”.
After building a successful tour business and creating jobs for many people I found myself in the gigantic, subsidized by taxpayer kindergarten, full of aged, grey haired children, vicious and full of hatred. They hated America. At those times, instead of President Trump, they hated President Bush. They were starting their lectures with contemptuous smirks “In th—i—i—s country…” and the story of American sins followed. I am talking about faculty teaching Humanities. Unfortunately even computer scientists were supposed to spend semesters of general education in this poisonous den.
I met there socialist and communist, who were still fascinated with the Soviet Union, even it already collapsed 10 years ago. They were not aware that their atheistic co-religionists, who went to build socialism from America to Russia in 1930 had been executed, their property confiscated and their wives sent to die in Siberia.
In 70s and 80s SFSU teachers were still committing pilgrimages to Russia (like Bernie Sanders), where they were receiving full meal of the Soviet propaganda from trained by KGB English speaking tour guides. They did not know that interpreters worked for KGB and reported to them at the end of each tour. Totally seduced by vacation happiness and Potemkin villages they with bigger enthusiasm were spreading communist propaganda around in university classes.
Those were the same people, whom we trusted our children to educate. To those teachers Sergey Brin’s parents and parents of hundreds of thousands émigré parents gave precious young souls to defile 10-20-30 years ago. American conservative parents got into the same trap. I saw as education was beginning with imperative order to forget everything parents taught them, especially any religion and any morals.
Now you understand why Google founder Sergey Brin, as other tech guys in Silicon Valley today in their late 30-s and 40-s are donating money to Demoсrats. Unfortunately their well-wishing parents 15-25 years ago worked like horses and deprived themselves of everything to pay for their children’s Marxist indoctrination instead of education. I was lucky at least with one of my sons. He was champion tennis player and all university years had spent on the tennis court. Therefore I have one communist less in the family.
It is painful, but we still need to talk to our next generation. Make our thinking loud, use humor. Remember Soviet Union in their presence. Send them to Cuba, Venezuela. It is tremendously cheap and super educational. Trump needs to lift ban and make vacation to Cuba mandatory. It is the best inoculation from the socialist delusion. Laugh at Bernie Sanders’ visit to Russia for honeymoon and how he was duped by Soviets. Fight.
We brought our children to America not to lose them to the same juggernaut of communist lunacy our parents lost their lives to. Fight.
By Tatiana Menaker
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