Iron Curtain ‘Saved’ Russia, Neo-Scythian Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 10 – If there is one thing that one might have expected all Russians to agree with, it is the proposition that the fall of the Iron Curtain was a positive development, opening up all kinds of opportunities for Russians as well as others in the former evil empire. But in fact, some Russians don’t agree and now argue the Iron Curtain was the salvation of Russia.

            That some of them are prepared to make that argument proudly and in public is one more measure of just how far things have changed in the wrong direction in Putin’s Russia and how much support there is in the population of that country for obscurantism, oppression, and self-imposed isolation. 

            In a post on the Newsland portal, Mikhail Afonsin of the ‘We are Scythians’ group says that agajn and again Russians have been told that when the iron curtain existed, “e lived in full isolation, knew nothing, and we didn’t eat anything sweeter than carrots, never went anywhere, and everyone was afraid of us” (newsland.com/community/4489/content/zheleznyi-zanaves-ili-spasitelnyi-shchit/6665859).

            Then the iron curtain came down and “a deafening freedom” spread across Russia. “We found out a lot – for example that homosexuality is not bad and that half the world lives in unisex passions, that a guy can become a girl and conversely and that this could happen not figuratively but surgically.”

            There were even worse things, Afonsin continues, which he cannot even bear to mention; and in addition, Russians learned that food can be “absolutely tasteless or even plastic.” Russians travelled everywhere but “somehow came back for they came to understood that there is no ideal life anywhere.”

            “We became acquainted with nice people from the West who taught us that there won’t be any speculation but that to buy cheap and sell high is completely normal and that prices for goods can instantly jump; but that’s ok, because we are approaching the status of great Western civilization.”

            “We found out about paid medicine, where enormous sums are taken from us” without our being cured, and other delights of the West.  “We now have a great deal of knowledge.”  But we have lost a lot too.  And what we have lost is more than we have gained, the blogger suggests.

            “Perhaps,” he concludes, “’the iron curtain’ was not a closed gate to the world and not a bulletproof vest but a shield?”