Last week, my mom wrote about the seeming contradiction sheâs seen with her Russian friends, whoâve seen even peaceful protests as somehow innately bad, while not minding violating laws on the sly.
I definitely get where sheâs coming from. Growing up in Russia, Iâve often seen grown-ups express the attitude that itâs almost virtuous to take advantage of loopholes, and thereâs nothing wrong with violating the rules so long as they arenât effectively enforced. Similarly, Iâve seen plenty of people take pride in following the letter of the law while violating the spirit. And itâs not even a solely Russian thing â as I got older, I saw the same kind of attitude in many other ex-Soviet countries.
Iâve already been thinking about this a lot during the pandemic. During the Illinois lockdown, people werenât supposed to go outside except for essential reasons, such as buying groceries. But there were several professions that were exempt from that, including journalists. So long as it was in the service of performing journalism duties, we were allowed to go wherever wanted.
Which is where the gray area came in. There is only so much journalism one can do from behind the computer screen. Sometimes, one has to go to places, see things as they happen, take pictures, talk to people. And sometimes, you need to see conditions on the ground to figure out whatâs worth writing about. And so, as those of you who followed me on social media know, I took trips to the suburbs, just to get out of the house and have a change of scenery. I took pictures and took notes that could be used for the article. A few times, I even legitimately got story ideas this way, or took pictures that were actually used in articles â but there were times that I didnât. And there were some instances when I took pictures for fun and wound up using them in articles because it just happened to be apropos. But there were also times when I didnât use them for anything.
My mom wasnât amused by any of this, chiding me for doing non-essential travel, but I honestly didnât feel bad. Who was to say that any given trip wouldnât retroactively serve a journalistic purpose? To quote Harry Dresden from Jim Butcherâs Dresden Files, it was a technicality I intended to hide firmly behind, if anybody asked (which nobody did).
Honestly, I was more confused why my mom took issue with that. She actually grew up in the Soviet Union, and i know for a fact that, back then, she did things that werenât legal, and things that were on the gray side.
It was the same thing with my visits to the Chicago beaches during the summer. While the beaches werenât closed, the closures werenât enforced after 7:00 PM. I didnât feel bad about not following the rules when they werenât in any way enforced, especially when other people did the same thing.
Now, unlike my momâs Russian friends, I have no issue with protests, at least not per se. Even when I donât necessarily agree with the goals, I donât have this common Russian reaction of âwhat are they doing, theyâre just stirring up trouble.â Protests bring attention to issues. They make a statement that the way things are wonât be tolerated. What is so wrong with people risking arrest and injury to stand up for their beliefs?
(Now, people wanting to protest without being willing to risk anything is another story)
As I commented on my momâs blog, I donât think the contradiction she talked about is that much of a contradiction at all. She and her friends grew up in the Soviet Union. Protest actions get people in trouble â ergo, those who start trouble are trouble-makers. Now, exploiting the blind spots of law enforcement, exploiting the loopholes and the legal particulars, doesnât get you in trouble (if you do it right), so thatâs okay.
I think it relates to the phenomenon Suki Kim described in Without You, Thereâs No Us, a book about her time teaching college students from North Korean Workersâ Party elite. She was struck by how her students lied constantly, without good reason, and how lying seemed so natural to them, and speculated that it was the consequence of growing up in a society where being truthful was a liability. DPRK apparatus is basically Stalinism on steroids, and my momâs friends werenât old enough to experience Stalinism in its original form directly, but I do think that any society where expressing oneâs opinions has severe consequences makes lying feel more natural, and makes concerns about self-preservation all the more overwhelming. And, as my own example shows, one doesnât need to live under Soviet repression to absorb some of the lessons it taught its citizens.
And, thinking at it now, I think another factor that may play into this is that my momâs generation came of age during Perestroika, when protests helped end the Kremlin Coup and end Soviet Union once and for all â only to experience the economic devastation, privatization creating a class of oligarchs and plunging so many people further into poverty, things like job guarantees vanishing overnight⌠Might put a few people off protesting,
I donât think itâs necessarily one thing, but an interaction of all three, with perhaps some factors I havenât considered mixed in.
I will end with one side note. As several second-generation Russian-American immigrants have observed on Facebook, itâs been kind of fascinating to watch the same people who cheered on protests in Belarus complain about BLM protesters, and the same people whoâd complain about police brutality in Belarus excuse police excesses in United States.
But that goes to a whole different, albeit related, bundle of traumas.
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