In their apartments and homes, the Soviet citizens of Leningrad huddled in fear, wincing at every slam of the door, every step on stairs, every spoken word outside. Stalin’s Great Terror was upon them, and the relentless machine of his NKVD churned on, arresting and grinding up dissidents, disfavored minorities, and people that were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
My grandmother lived through a similar period in post-World War II Czechoslovakia, where the quiet and stealthy arrests of the Soviet internal police made a stark contrast to the pomp and circumstance of the Nazi Gestapo, which had occupied her hometown just a few years prior. The Soviet police, she told me, would remove their shoes before going up the stairs of the apartment building so as to not awaken the neighbors of their target. People would simply disappear, only to reappear on trial or at an execution, and you never knew whether you would be next.
The fear of eventual arrest and punishment silenced many critics before they said a word. It quashed counterrevolutionary groups before they even formed. It had what the U.S. Supreme Court describes in free-speech litigation here in America as a “chilling effect” on speech and even thought. Stalin didn’t have to arrest every single enemy of the state—he just had to arrest enough, and the rest would police themselves.
Even today, communists, socialists, and authoritarians use fear as their primary tactic. They don’t have to resort to violence every time, because if they simply punish enough of their enemies, the rest will fall in line. For years, cancel culture in America, though far, far less severe than the gulags and executions of the Soviet Union, silenced criticism and stifled discussion—even today, certain non-politically correct topics are simply off-limits.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a famous Russian author who lived through Stalin’s purges and went to the gulags himself, identified a simple shortcoming of the Soviet people in a footnote to the first chapter of his most well-known work, the “Gulag Archipelago”:
“We didn’t love freedom enough. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterwards.”
In that same footnote, he wonders what it would have been like if the people of Leningrad had resisted arrest, if they’d armed themselves with “axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand,” theorizing that, “notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
Ultimately, though, he concluded that it didn’t matter—the Soviet citizenry didn’t love freedom enough.
But our Founding Fathers did love freedom enough. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to bring about the nation that we have today, and the men and women of America have spent generations doing the same.
The people of America are not like the people of Soviet Russia, and from us, leaders will emerge and the necessary work will get done. While President Ronald Reagan famously said that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction, the reality is, freedom is not extinct, and no matter how dire things may seem, the work ahead is doable—we just need to buckle down and get it done.
As Victims of Communism Day (Nov. 7) passes, we can remember those who lost their lives to the communist state while honoring those who gave their lives for freedom before us, by resolving to never give up, keep moving forward, and carry on the torch of freedom for the generations to come.