YES IT WAS AN 'EVIL EMPIRE': NEARLY EVERY FORM OF SOVIET NOSTALGIA GETS THE FACTS WRONG.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: PHOTO

IT WAS THE summer of 1983, and I, a Soviet emigre and an American in the making, was chatting with the pleasant middle-aged woman sitting next to me on a bus from Asbury Park, New Jersey, to Cherry Hill. Eventually our conversation got to the fact that I was from the Soviet Union, having arrived in the U.S. with my family three years earlier at age 17. "Oh, really?" said my seatmate. "You must have been pretty offended when our president called the Soviet Union an 'evil empire'! Wasn't that ridiculous?" But her merriment at the supposed absurdity of President Ronald Reagan's recent speech was cut short when I somewhat sheepishly informed her that I thought he was entirely on point.

In 1983, the 61-year-old empire looked like it would be eternal. My next memorable conversation about the Soviet Union with a fellow passenger, in December 1991, proved otherwise. I was aboard a flight from Moscow to Newark, New Jersey, after a two-week visit, waiting for takeoff. "Do you know that the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore?" the man next to me said. I stared. He showed me that day's International Herald Tribune with a headline about the Belovezha Accords, an agreement by which the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus agreed to dissolve the USSR.

The evil empire was over.

THE GULAG EMPIRE

THE WOMAN ON the bus in 1983 did not surprise me. By then, I had already met many Americans for whom "anti-Soviet" was almost as much of a pejorative as it had been in the pages of Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party. My favorite was a man in the cafe at the Rutgers Student Center who shrugged off the victims of the gulag camps by pointing out that capitalism kills people too--with cigarettes, for example. When I recovered from shock, I told him that smoking was far more ubiquitous in the Soviet Union, and anti-smoking campaigns far less developed. That momentarily stumped him.

My mother was also at Rutgers at the time as a piano instructor. She once got into a heated argument over lunch with a colleague and friend after he lamented America's appalling treatment of the old and the sick. She ventured that, from her ex-Soviet vantage point, it didn't seem that bad. "Are you telling me that it's just as bad in the Soviet Union?" her colleague retorted, only to be dumbstruck when my mother clarified that, actually, she meant it was much worse. She tried to illustrate her point by telling him about my grandmother's sojourn in an overcrowded Soviet hospital ward: More than once, when the woman in the next bed rolled over in her sleep, her arm flopped across my grandma's body. Half-decent care required bribing a nurse, and half-decent food had to be brought from home. My mother's normally warm and gracious colleague shocked her by replying, "I'm sorry, but I don't believe you." Her perceptions, he told her, were obviously colored by antipathy toward the Soviet regime. Eventually, he relented enough to allow that perhaps my grandmother did have a very bad experience in a Soviet hospital--but surely projecting it onto all of Soviet medicine was uncalled for.

It wasn't just the campus lefties. The Twitter generation may believe that mainstream American culture at the time was in the grip of Reaganite anti-communism, but some of us remember differently. Media coverage of Soviet human rights abuses, for instance, was frequently accompanied by reminders that the United States and the Soviet Union simply had "fundamentally different perceptions of human rights," as U.S. News & World Report put it in 1985: "To the Kremlin, human rights are associated primarily with the conditions of physical survival." A 1982 guide for high school study of human rights issued by the National Council for Social Studies even suggested that it was "ethnocentric" to regard "our" definition of human rights as superior to "theirs."

As Soviet society began to open up under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy ofglasnost (a term that means something like "openness and transparency," and that one Soviet dissident defined as "a tortoise crawling towards freedom of speech"), more information began to come out in the Soviet press that cast serious doubt on the Soviet Union's supposed gains on the social welfare side of "human rights." There were stories about the dismal state of Soviet medicine, about crime, about millions condemned to appalling living conditions, about Dickensian orphanages sheltering abused and malnourished children, and about homeless people who suddenly turned out to exist, despite prior reports to the contrary. (The weekly newspaper Argumenty i Fakty reported that 174,000 vagrants were picked up in 1984 alone.) Meanwhile, the regime was crumbling; as satirist Victor Shenderovich put it later, "the country still had Soviet power but the food had already run out."

In just a few years, Soviet communism was relegated, just as Reagan had predicted to much ridicule, to "the ash heap of history." The leaders of the new Russia that emerged in its place themselves echoed the language of "evil empire" when they spoke of the Soviet past: During the 1996 elections, President Boris Yeltsin told supporters at a campaign rally they had to win "so that Russia can never be called an evil empire again."

For leftists who still saw communism as a noble dream, this was a devastating defeat. In 1999, at the close of what was, in a very real sense, the Soviet century, the Polish-American socialist journalist Daniel Singer--himself the son of a gulag survivor--wrote in The Nation that a reckoning with communist atrocities was necessary; but he also rejected the "corpsecounting" of The Black Book of Communism, a collection of historical essays that sought to chronicle those atrocities. Singer took the authors to task for reducing communism's record to "crimes, terror and repression."

"The Soviet Union did not rest on the gulag alone. There was also enthusiasm, construction, the spread of education and social advancement for millions," Singer asserted, lamenting that the Black Book approach made it impossible to "comprehend why millions of the best and brightest rallied behind the red flag or...turned a blind eye to the crimes committed in its name." (It was apparently not satisfying to answer with the pithy phrase coined by statistician and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Because they were "intellectuals-yet-idiots.")

As the new century rolled onward, the Soviet Union was still dead, but it turned out to be an unquiet ghost. The new man at Russia's helm, career KGB officer Vladimir Putin, brought back the Soviet anthem (albeit with new lyrics...