A Soviet Immigrant Reminds Americans What They’ve Forgotten

This article is part of the Why America? series exploring the idea of American moral authority through the perspectives of recent immigrants.

In 1979, my parents and maternal grandparents came to New York as refugees from communism from the former Soviet Union, from that ever-overcast northern city where the Neva River meets the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea, memorialized as the miasma-beset protagonist of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, and which, in our time there, bore the nation’s founder’s holy name.

My parents and grandparents brought with them in tow a few possessions—some clothing, jewelry, photo albums and the like—the four-year-old me, and a grand total of $300, the maximum you were permitted to take with you when you left back in those days. My family was educated. My grandfather was a dentist, my grandmother a teacher. My mother had a degree in British history, while my father was working on his Ph.D. dissertation in psychology. My grandparents, especially, lived a comfortable life, with a spacious apartment in the very center of the city. Why, then, did we flee? Why would my parents and grandparents leave behind everything and everyone they had ever known, their culture and heritage, their apartments and their lifetimes of cherished, accumulated objects for a country where they knew no one, where their degrees and skills would be of little use, where unfamiliar words would be mashed together and left to bound around in what sounded, to the earthy Slavic ear tuned to the patter of plosives and hiss of fricatives, like so many thick, plucked strings echoing out their facile twang?

A line in the city of Saratov in the Soviet Union. Image via Russia Beyond.

By the late 1970s, already deep into the nation’s dotage in the Brezhnev years, Soviet citizens no longer felt either the thrill, sturm and drang of Lenin’s world-shattering revolution nor the incessant terror of Stalin’s long reign, nor even the new energy infused by Khrushchev’s humanizing reforms. Daily life in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was a slog but a slog it was possible for most to endure. There were the internationally renowned bread lines, of course, amid many other regular food shortages, and the general chronic resource misallocations that are part of the package when the State’s central planners replace the free market (hence, the infamous mass re-appropriation of old newspapers when toilet paper was not available, as it usually was not), but people were not dying of hunger in the streets. There were the bureaucratic obstacles to be navigated and the arrays of hoops to be jumped through at every turn, but those who endeavored to live a quiet life (and stayed away from direct criticism of the powers-that-be) were largely left alone.