Welcome to the World of “Soviet” Feelings

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What are responsible American parents supposed to say to their children about Trump?Photograph by Saul Loeb / Pool / Getty

This is how it was back in the late Soviet Union: parents, at least in intelligentsia families, would never discuss the country’s rulers with their children. It was understood by default that the country was ruled by bad people, presumably in the service of some crazy ideology that no one but the really old Party members and downright dotards (yes, indeed) happened to believe even remotely. At night, parents listened—or, rather, attempted to listen, in big cities, through the howling and ululating of radio-signal-jamming installations set up by the K.G.B.—to the “enemy” voices on their portable VEF-Spidolas: the Voice of America, the BBC, the German Wave. Their kids, in turn, were normal children, same as anyplace else in the world, ordinary high-school students keenly interested in fun and games and, above all else, love and sex (or, at least, the latter’s theoretical possibility).

These teens were almost all Komsomol (Young Communist League) members, because without that nominal membership it was exponentially more difficult to be admitted to an institution of higher learning (and not enrolling in college by the age of eighteen carried, for boys, the unlovely certainty of being conscripted into the Army). But they didn’t give any great thought to all that Komsomol stuff. The teen-age Soviet children knew that the country was ruled, not to mince words, by a bunch of old degenerates. But that’s how it always had been in their country—at least, since 1917, which meant forever in the context of their lives. Thinking about all that pointless, depressing stuff was a waste of time. Things were the way they were because that’s how they were.

Parents wouldn’t speak to their children about the kind of country that they lived in because, for one thing, they didn’t want to complicate or darken the cast of their children’s young lives, and also, importantly, because the children, as a result of listening too intently to their parents’ talk, out of young and innocent lack of caution, were liable to let these opinions slip in the presence of a high-school teacher or some other authority. That wouldn’t be good for anyone. Silence, silence. Everything was understood tacitly, by implication. Similarly, the high-school teachers only mouthed the ideologically correct platitudes and expressed their (yawn) boundless love for the country’s rulers and all that stuff out of the sheer sense of strict ideological obligation, without an iota of conviction behind the words.

There was nothing to be done about it: you were born where you were born, at the time you were born, and there was no changing anything about the life that you were going to live as a child . . . or as an adult, in most instances. It snowed heavily in winter in Leningrad—what was one supposed to do about that? Just dress warmly, layer up. There hardly was any daylight there between mid-December and mid-March—well, so what, deal with it. You were born where you were born, and not someplace else, where the days are light and the breeze from the ocean is soothing and refreshing. Some people were able (lower your voice) to emigrate from the country, which was pretty unimaginable, but we were not among those people, for a variety of reasons. The country was the way it was. You could never leave it. That was just a fact of life. Deal with it. Pay the leaders no mind, and keep your mouth shut as much as possible.

The same is taking place in Russia now, too—at least, in intelligentsia families: What’s the point of discussing Putin? Putin is as Putin does. The majority of the country’s populace supports him, that’s a fact of life, but they also supported the Soviet Politburo, and all the rest of them, all the rest of it all. It seems, on dark days, that they’ll support anyone who’s above them. Putin is making normal Russian people ashamed, once again, of being Russian citizens, the way that Soviet people used to be vaguely ashamed, deep down, of being citizens and, by dint of that circumstance, virtual prisoners of the U.S.S.R.—well, what’s to be done about it now? Some people—lots of them, but still very few, in terms of their over-all percentage—are leaving the country for good, emigrating, and great for them, but not everyone can do something so decisive and bold, or put together the kind of money that one would need to make that happen, not by a long shot. The gravitational pull of Russian mundanity is real, and it is extremely hard to overcome.

Silence. Silence.

And what about the U.S. these days? American children, en masse, have been taught to look up to the country’s Presidents, even if in many instances those children’s parents had nothing good to say about a given President, considering him (not incorrectly, perhaps, but that’s not the point) a misguided idiot or a shill for corporate interests. Still, that was within the normal scope of societal discourse, no matter how heated and vitriolic it got at times. It was understood, generally, or at least grudgingly accepted and admitted, that the U.S. President, whether he was right or wrong, smart or stupid, had the country’s best interests at heart, to the best of his—frequently warped as all hell—understanding of the country’s good.

But Trump? Trump is a distinctly ugly thread in the narrative of the American Presidency, a human disaster unto itself. What are responsible American parents supposed to say to their children about Trump? “Sorry, kids, America has screwed up bigly this time around”? This sort of national calamity wasn’t supposed to happen in America. This is the Soviet kind of narrative, if you will: the rulership of the worst sort of people—the reckless, the ignorant, the avaricious, the lethally indifferent. That danger presented by Trump, the precariousness of U.S. democracy—that’s something, possibly, to tell one’s children. And to tell them, also, that it might be best not to talk about any of that with strangers. This is the end of American-bound innocence for the new generation of America’s children—and for their parents, too. Welcome to the world of “Soviet” feelings.