PARADISE LOST

It may be different for someone else, but I was impressed with one feature of that epoch, now retrospectively: the all-embracing ideological and informational environment that surrounded us like the air we breath, and only few clear heads (I was not one of them) had the strength to overcome its influence. It is hard to imagine a better conceived, stronger, and more perfect system that would not only shut millions of people off from the world but also convince them of their absolute superiority. Now much is heard about various psychotropic tools of "destructive sects" and the "seal" of identification numbers can be heard. But they are toys compared to how we were made zombies behind the Iron Curtain. Every slightest detail of our lives was traced, and everyone was a little cog in the great machine. There were no small things. The whole System was the creation of a collective Communist genius that is worth mentioning in Guinness' Book of Records. To illustrate the thickness of the sieve through which everything that happened at any level was screened, I want to give two absolutely non-dramatic examples from my own life.

The research institute where I worked was visited by American scientists (such things happened, albeit quite seldom). The institute had been preparing for such an event for a long time - repairs, cleaning, new lab coats; even some of our ancient equipment was replaced. Our director, a full member of the academy, himself guided the guests through the institute, and the crowd of experts did their best to deceive the Americans. The latter were attentive, interested, smiling. Later I read something in an American magazine that by some miracle found its way into our institute. It was the article written by one of our guests about their visit. As it turned out, the guests noticed everything - our ancient equipment for experiments, the disparity between the number of employees and the results they produced, the low level of results - and our lies were described by the author in a very ironic way. I showed the magazine to my chief - as a good joke. But he did not see it as a joke. He suddenly reddened, grabbed the magazine and rushed to the director's office. I do not know what happened there; the magazine was promptly withdrawn from the library and put into the safes of the First Department. I, too, was summoned to that very same department and had to give written undertaking "not to spread information discrediting Soviet science." Of course, the System did its best to reduce any opportunity for its people to read the foreign press and other literature. Perhaps, poor methods of teaching foreign languages in schools and colleges were a part of this Iron Curtain as well.

Or take another, quite different scene. My friends and I were on vacation in the Caucasus. And one night, high in the mountains, sitting by the campfire under stars as big as apples, my two friends and I were talking the night away about "global problems." We talked about everything and said anything we thought - there was no one to fear there. Later, when we came back, one of those two friends told me (some time passed before I understood how hard it was for him to start the conversation) that after we returned from vacation he was summoned to the appropriate office and asked "to confirm the fact" of some ideas that I had shared under Caucasian stars. So he graciously warned me just in time. Unfortunately, it was very easy to know who, for there were only three of us there.

That was how we lived then - inside a perfect information-proof system where even snow-covered mountains could eavesdrop. Does anyone remember it with pleasure?