>From: Lance Murdoch <lbotalk at lancemurdoch.org>
>
>Living in a city with a large number of Eastern Europeans, I have often
>witnessed the spectacle of someone describing Eastern Europe as some
>1984-like totalitarian nightmare, and then the Eastern European saying
>"No, wasn't really like that, it's a lot like here. Not much has changed
>since the early 1990's, except the economy is worse." Most Americans seem
>to disregard this first-hand account, and stick with the propaganda,
>thinking the person was "brainwashed" by the communists or something. I
>even worked with a far right Latvian who even had a picture of Pinochet
>over his desk, if you can believe that, who said basically the same thing,
>and again, he was disbelieved in his description by the Americans (except
>me).
>
Tell me about it. Take this ridiculous nonsense that rock music was banned in the Soviet Union. Mashina Vremeni is over 20 years old. The Beatles were on the state record label.
Or the "the KGB was watching everybody" trope. 95% of the population never came into closer contact with the KGB than seeing the outside of the building. I know precisely two people who ever had any direct contact with the KGB, and one of them was a positive experience (as a student during the 1980 Olympic Games, he was hired on account of his knowledge of English to work in a hotel where foreigners would be staying for the event and talk up the virtues of the Soviet system. Good money.). The other was a student who was called into the Moscow State University office around 1981 because they wanted to know about his relations with own of his fellow students, who was a foreigner (African) but had had a baby by a Russian father and had gained Soviet citizenship. He told the KGB guy that she was as much of a Soviet citizen as he was. The KGBchik looked through his papers and said "You're right. This is stupid. You can go."
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