Since the inception of Vladimir Lenin’s brand of communism, Bolsheviks always reserved their most acute hated for liberal democracy. In this they were similar to the Nazis in Germany. Communists could live with right-wing extremists, but Lenin and Stalin couldn’t stand liberals and consistently attacked human rights, live-and-let-live tolerance and “bourgeois” freedoms as a huge swindle.
You’d expect Soviet Jews, who were among the very first Soviets to be allowed to leave the country in the 1970s, to embrace liberalism as a humane, economically successful alternative to the hatred-filled communist ideology.
And yet, exactly the opposite happened. The moment we set foot in the United States, Israel and elsewhere in the Western world, most of us unerringly opted once again for authoritarianism, intolerance and hatred – i.e., for the same dear old Bolshevism with a minus sign – or plus, as the case may be.
I recall starting as a freshman at a US university in the fall of 1976, and trying to convince my fellow students that Jimmy Carter, if elected, would take America on an inexorable one-way path to communism, that the civilrRights movement was a special operation by the Soviet KGB to create a traitorous fifth column for a future communist takeover and that in general America was mollycoddling its various minorities and underestimating the threat they presented to the American way of life.
Like most of my compatriots, I simply had no idea that the principle of protecting the rights of minorities was, in fact, a fundamental principle of the American way of life.
The leaders and ideologues of the Soviet emigre community were no better. I remember how horrified students and professors at Harvard were by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address in 1978. They found it hard to believe that a man who had become a worldwide symbol of a fight against tyranny would advocate authoritarian measures and berate America for too much freedom.
By then, three generations of Soviet citizens had grown up behind the iron curtain. They had been systematically deprived of information about the rest of the world, kept from reading modern philosophers and political scientists outside the communist mainstream and filled to the gills with lies and propaganda. Yet, they felt superior to those naive Americans by virtue of their supposedly deep understanding of the evils of communism.
Dissident writer Vasily Aksenov, who spent some time in the United States, once called Americans “callow idiots” who were brave because unlike the Soviets, they had never had the fear of god put into them.
To this day, our ex-Soviet compatriots keep voting for right-wingers, for authoritarian populists and hate-mongers – anyone but a liberal. Some 80% of Russians in Brooklyn voted against Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. And yet, it is thanks to the achievements of liberal democracy that they were welcomed to the new country, given full citizenship and provided a variety of benefits because they were poor and disadvantaged.
It should also be kept in mind that the first wave of refugees from the Bolsheviks, the Whites, who fled to Europe before the advent of liberal democracy, remained stateless and homeless for decades, living in abject poverty. If they were allowed into France, for instance, they could only worked as cab drivers and house cleaners.
Attitudes haven’t changed much. The otherwise brilliant chess grandmaster and Russian human rights activist Garry Kasparov recently penned an attack on US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his supporters that went viral on Facebook. It was couched in the same familiar terms – I know socialism at first hand, I’ve been there, you guys are callow American idiots who can afford talk about social equality because unbridled capitalism has been so successful. Like so many former Soviet citizens before him, he’s confusing social democracy with communism and mistaking the Third World fascist regime under which we had had the misfortune of being born with a socialist state.
The reality is, of course, that prosperity goes hand in hand with liberalism and social democracy. It may be called New Deal in the United States, and, unlike Western Europe where Labor and Social Democratic parties openly talk about it, socialism had been a dirty word for most Americans until Sanders’ presidential run made it more legitimate. But in truth the postwar economic prosperity in the West was largely built on the same principles that Kasparov, in the tradition of an anti-communist Soviet emigres, is so enthusiastically spearing.
Anti-liberal regimes, on the other hand, tend to produce economic disasters to complement political misery they inflict on their citizens – even when they follow free-market economics. As a friend pointed out in a commentary to Kasparov’s post, if he hates socialism so much, he should try libertarian paradise like Honduras.
With such ingrained prejudice against liberalism even among its more open-minded representatives, it is no surprise that Russia quickly abandoned its half-baked experiment in democracy in the 1990s. While Vladimir Putin’s autocratic government robs them blind and deprives them and their children of any hope for a bright economic future, the average Russian is full of genuine resentment against liberalism, multiculturalism, tolerance and democracy.
Other former communist countries have gone through similar experiences and are also prone to falling into the same trap. Hungary and Poland are prime example of the anti-liberal backlash and it is something that Ukraine, too, needs to watch out for.
Moreover, now there has been a sharp turn against liberalism in the West, as well. Nationalist, proto-fascist parties are on the rise across Europe, from France and Germany to, literally, the end of the world (Finland), and even the looming Brexit referendum in the UK is part of the same trend.
The most troubling developments are currently occurring in the United States, where two anti-liberal candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, are vying to be the presidential candidate from one of the two major political parties. This is a culmination of a thirty-five year-old process, begun by Ronald Reagan with his reference to liberalism as an “L-word”. In retrospect, compared to Trump and Cruz, Reagan looks like an enlightened democrat and a staunch defender of liberalism. Needless to say, the Russian emigre community in New York is squarely behind Trump.
Russian speakers in New York hardly matter. They are not numerous and poorly organized politically. No representative from the community has ever been elected to a national office. New York is a liberal town and it will overwhelmingly reject Trump at the polls. And, more broadly, the United States has a system of checks and balances which, hopefully, will hold even if an autocratic buffoon like Trump is elected president.
Ukraine, along with other post-communist states, won’t have this luxury. After winning its second chance at liberal democracy the hard way, Ukraine should watch out against being swept into the same anti-liberal madness and follow Russia yet again down the path of autocracy.
