The Soviet Union may have been dismantled over two decades ago providing sovereignty to its satellite states such as Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and others under direct control from Moscow. Communism International or Socialism in USSR failed in its ideals leading to nothing more than widespread poverty, catastrophic compromises in health and safety such as Chernobyl and an emergence of an elite inside and outside the pork-barreled politics. This kind of government originally intended or stated by Marx, Trotsky and Lenin did nothing to bring parity to the people. As Orwell described in his Animal Farm, the Russian revolution of 1917 was about one group of animals being replaced violently by another group of animals while its successors began to resemble its predecessors. Oink, oink – like a pig.
Soviet assets were transferred to the cronies of the former Soviet Tsars or anyone who had a good relationship with Yelstin or the ex-KGB Putin. The fact that you can go from secret police to head of state suggests how nothing changed from USSR to Russia. It’s not all borsch and Lada’s, ‘you can have your breakfast at McDonald’s’ said Mikhail, the director of my language school. While I get drilled by my Ukrainian teacher in Russian Grammar – she laments the loss of so many words in the Russian dictionary and the almost total extinction of the Ukrainian language. However, she does indeed get quite coy when I ask about her experiences in Cuba. I find myself learning a Newspeak, but fortunately, the Thought Police couldn’t wipe out Bulgakov, Tolstoy and Pushkin entirely. We know they tried – alas, the language can be preserved to its former glory.
Today we’re bombarded with a different form of blatant propaganda on RT news telling us stories about Ukrainians ‘eating children’ and ‘shooting planes down’. While the country remains in a state of war in the East, Ukraine’s capital remains unusually sanguine with most people enjoying life with only a few inconvenient truths peppered around, such as the influx of refugees into the city and the ramshackle memorials made from broken helmets and fragments of road block used in the protests this year. Nobody talks about the protests – it’s all about the war now and it has become so multi-dimensional and skewed by so many different parties. It’s difficult to get the facts when a country turns to fight. Nowadays, wars are asymmetric, populated with blood-thirsty mercenaries, resentful after their last fire-fight in another continent – wars are fought with proxies and drones, the latter, sounds like a very boring alternative as the dictionary describes to drone as ‘to speak tediously in a dull monotonous tone’. The reaction to droning has been a new wave of internet-savvy British Jihadis, also known as the Beatles. They tweet with all the trendy SMS acronyms such as LOL and LMAO standing next to severed heads, they boast about all the luxuries of a Jihadi such as ‘Red Bull’ and ‘junk food’ – these are extremely stupid people who send unilateral threats to the West by beheading journalists and humanitarian workers in their duty to assist in the plight of the local population. While trying to protect, Journalists are killed by a bunch of self-styled Islamists who took the Jihadi Express from Manchester, London or Leeds. When a land becomes a ‘war zone’, it could be an alternative to Butlins for aspiring Jihadis or life as usual in Kiev – as long as we allow journalists to report clearly and impartially with freedom to move and feel safe, we should know what’s going on to some extent. Freedom of speech is a value I appreciate the most – I don’t want to be convicted of a thought crime.
Tamar Lane 