David McDuff has more news about the pension protests going on in Russia. But what I found even more interesting was his reflective thoughts on his Russian studies and his own thoughts on totalitarianism while the Soviets were in power.

Since for someone from a Western democracy it’s almost impossible to understand cognitively the reality of the fabric of life in a totalitarian state, a Westerner????????s memories of contact with that fabric are almost always bound to be selective, personal and subjective to an extent that may make them irrelevant in terms of historical truth. Yet I believe that since part of the legacy of the Cold War has been a consciousness of the old divide between East and West, and the barriers it created between human beings on either side of it, it????????s perhaps important for those in the West who did have first-hand experience ???????? however partial and ???????cushioned??????? ???????? of life in the Soviet reality, to talk about it and discuss it. For it was a world that was not merely physical and geographic, but also extended far into realms of thought, morality, political awareness, aesthetics, and other regions, while at the same time functioning as a kind of reversing mirror of Western social and intellectual norms.

Agreed. I myself have never experienced oppression to anything near that degree; many of us haven’t. Because of that, it is important to arm ourselves with as much knowledge as possible of the events of generations past so that they may continue to fade from history.