Thank you for being sincere. To be honest, I find talking to Westerners/Americans about the USSR really exhausting. It all feels like either one big meme or a purely theoretical argument, not people’s lives. When I look at my family, and at their other Soviet friends, and how the culture there is now more generally, I just feel like… it left so much indirect trauma and fucked with their way of thinking. I don’t think of free speech as the most important right blablabla. But it also makes me uncomfortable when my parents watch some random short film about a girl getting arrested for reading a book on a tram and their first reaction is “ahahahhaha serves you right, idiot, you have to read it by candlelight in the dead of night, duhh.” I don’t know if, in hind sight, repression was worth it.

It’s a dope way to die, I guess. Suicide by poem.

We are living, but can’t feel the land where we stay,

More than ten steps away you can’t hear what we say.

But if people would talk on occasion,

They should mention the Kremlin Caucasian.

His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live-baits,

And his accurate words are as heavy as weights.

Cucaracha’s moustaches are screaming,

And his boot-tops are shining and gleaming.

But around him a crowd of thin-necked henchmen,

And he plays with the services of these half-men.

Some are whistling, some meowing, some sniffing,

He’s alone booming, poking and whiffing.

He is forging his rules and decrees like horseshoes –

Into groins, into foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows.

Every killing for him is delight,

And Ossetian torso is wide.

Because he wrote an anti-Stalin poem?

Yeah fuck you Osip Mandelstam, poetry deserves death

Tbh as a cis woman I’m really happy about the mandatory pronouns too. Tons of people online stick to the generic “he” when talking about a user. It was always annoying when people on the old sub said something like “He has a point” or whatever. Each time I’d struggle between not wanting to make a big deal out of it by correcting them, but also wanting to push back against the idea that it’s only brocialists on r/CTH. Plus it’s cool to scroll down and see she/her and realise you’re not the only woman commenting, particularly when there’s something about sexism or feminism. It’s made me less hesitant to push back against some stuff.

the left wants to take away your social alienation

Probably after conscription ends?

Okay but are they doing this on purpose? Is this their way of subtly saying “haha fuck u the protests do nothing”? Like, the story would be heartbreakingly awful at any time, but acting so inhumanely while there’s anti-police protests all over the country for over three months???