The ad begins with a poor Russian peon, bundled up for the harsh winter, cautiously asking a stern sentry about what he is guarding.
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“Is toilet paper.”
“Is good?”
“Is cheap,” replies the soldier.
The word spreads down the ranks of the people standing in line at the store. “Cheap toilet paper!” they say in astonished turn. One gets his hands on some: it bends and folds, as if it’s not toilet “paper” at all but lengths of semi-raw wood pulp.
For some reason that television commercial from the mid-’80s has come to mind quite a lot lately. It was played for laughs. But it was based in a very tragic reality, one that most people in the free world readily grasped. The Soviet citizenry, for all of the power that their government boasted of having, were utterly miserable. Toilet paper and nearly every comfort enjoyed by their Western counterparts were in dire shortage. Including food in its usually sumptuous variety.
How we laughed at the sight of all those people, in lines stretching out the building and down the block, waiting to get inside GUM—Moscow’s biggest department store—because rumor had hit the street that a shipment of canned potatoes or new stockings had come in.
For all of the fear of World War III that many of us in America harbored, we also understood fully well that “they” were in fact quite a pathetic lot. The Soviet people wanted for canned goods and toilet paper, but it was an open secret that their leadership abounded in such luxuries and more. They were a people who nobody in their right mind would ever dare dream of emulating. How did the Russians get into such dire straits to begin with, anyway?
Senior year of high school had barely begun for me, thirty-five years ago this month, when the communist hardliners staged their coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. It was the last roll of the dice for a faction desperate to cling to its power. Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika had roiled the adherents of the regime: those ancient men in their furry hats who came to Red Square whenever another premier passed away.
The world changed for us, before Labor Day of 1991. The long-prophesied war with “the Russkies” suddenly vanished from our expectations. The hardliners failed, and the Russian people got their first whiff of real freedom in more than seventy years. Overnight the statues of Lenin and Stalin were toppled down. The constituent states broke away from Mother Russia. The Soviet Union was thrown upon the trash heap of fallen empires.
It wasn’t very long afterward that the Russian people started getting real toilet paper. Without having to wait in line for it, even. Along with things like potatoes and beans in vast quantities. Beef enough to feed a family. Blue jeans imported from Western Europe and America. Unfettered access to rock music. The TASS news agency came unmoored from government control. Losing all fear of the KGB…
Eastern Europe’s abandonment of communism had been going on for two years already before it came to Russia. And the people were absolutely happy about it. They were overcome with joy that freedom had at last arrived.
I dare say that not one person in Eastern Europe today, who was alive at the start of the ’90s, would lament the “old days” enough to want to go back to that time. Liberty is intoxicating, and those people… especially their youth … could not quaff enough draughts of it.
Maybe “you had to have been there.” We in America in large part watched the fall of the Iron Curtain from afar. We understood what was transpiring, but we couldn’t truly appreciate what those people were now experiencing, or what they had come through.
Perhaps if we could, the lesson would still be ingrained into our bones enough, than to entertain any notion at all that communism, in however slight a shade, is something we should accommodate.
Those who have come after Generation X—the last generation to really experience the Cold War—have come to increasingly be drawn to the allure of socialism, with too many openly advocating full-bore communism. These younger people cannot understand the world that existed before, when the suffering of communism was on display for all to see.
To those who came after the days of the Eastern Bloc, the threat of communism is ancient history. It is not something to be wary of. It is something that their elders had to worry about, not them. “We know better,” it can practically be heard.
I knew that the situation in America was coming to be a dire one when Zohran Mamdani was elected. Thirty years ago, the thought of a committed socialist becoming mayor of New York City was an absurd one. Yet there is Mamdani implementing policies that anyone who has watched Doctor Zhivago would have understood the evil of.
Mamdani, and many other socialists such as the ones in charge of Portland, Oregon, are even trying to bring the glories of GUM’s Soviet days to the United States with their government-run grocery stores. It should not come as a surprise that such markets quickly run out of goods. And now the Democratic Socialists of America are hell-bent on bringing big-C Communism to all of the American people, with a platform that could have been scribed by the Comintern.
“But it will be different this time! It hasn’t been tried correctly!” That’s been the rationale for bringing about socialism since the beginning. And the Millennials, the Alphas, whoever the youngsters are, they simply don’t understand that it has been tried. Many times. It has never succeeded. More than a hundred million dead people can attest that communism … all socialism really … is a monstrous failure.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is absolutely right to implement teaching the truth of communism to schoolchildren. It should have been done a long time ago already. Who knows, but maybe there is still time to stem the avalanche.
A word of caution from my generation—those of us who came of age in the ’80s and early ’90s—to the younger people of today. There are those who into itching ears preach the soothing music of socialism. Who even advocate for full-blown communism.
Do not simply reject them. You must crush and humiliate them. Give them no quarter whatsoever. Do not give them the slightest toehold on conscience, be it public or private. Be on your guard with them. What they want is more dangerous than anything you are prepared for.
There are plenty of us who lived with the threat of what communism could do to the entire world. And the last thing we want is for those who come after us to live under that threat.
Kids, don’t play around with communism. It sucks. More than you know.
Christopher Knight is the author of Keeping the Tryst: A Generation Xer’s Tale of Pop Culture, Faith, Madness, and Love. He blogs often at theknightshift.com.
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