Before the "October Revolution" of 1917, Russia was, politically, not much different from France or the United States. That was something that Marxists like Lenin could not stand! According to Marx, private employers, whom he called "capitalists," received a profit, that is, robbed their employees, who were starving as a result. "Arise ye prisoners of starvation" is how started the hymn called "The Internationale."
In October of 1917 (by the Russian calendar), the power in Russia was taken over by Lenin and his disciples, who forbade private employment. But the result was so disastrous that Lenin reintroduced private employment as the New [old] Economic Policy. The political power that was established was called "Soviet," since the Russian word "sovet" means "advice" or a "group of people seeking the best advice for institutions and enterprises."
That is, in October 1917 and thereafter, the political power in Russia persecuted whomever and however it wanted, to make its power absolute. Yet it was called Advisory (Soviet) Power, and Russia was named "Soviet" (from the Russian word "sovet").
However, Lenin became ill and was confined to a hospital, while one of his little-known subordinates named Stalin (from the Russian word "steel," not "sovet") suggested that Lenin stop writing letters from the hospital "not to aggravate his condition," but ill tongues were saying that Stalin actually wanted to keep his beloved leader from being seen by new, outside physicians.
Well, Lenin died in 1924 at the age of 54, and Stalin became the "democratic dictator," as Mao was called in a recent TV program in New York.
Stalin soon "discovered" that all the once venerated disciples and rivals of Lenin and Stalin (Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and others) were "subhuman monstrous traitors." So, having gotten rid of them, Stalin alone remained the "democratic dictator" up to 1953, when he died at the age of 74, and shortly after his death he was attacked by his dearest helpmate in a letter, read at all enterprises and describing Stalin as "our Hitler, only worse," as I was told by our neighbor, a singer for the Soviet countrywide radio station.
In Athens and in Rome, when they were centers of culture, slaves were called slaves. But the Soviet creators of slavery had to turn Russia into a concentration camp and keep their slaves as its spiritual, and not only physical, prisoners.
It was actually a new slavery. Why was the old slavery no good?
In the old slavery, no one tried to convince slaves that they were not slaves: they were called "slaves." But in the twentieth century, there were large and rich countries, and soon they had radio to broadcast their radio programs to Russia, regardless of what Soviet creators and supporters of the Soviet slavery said.
So in order to preserve Stalin's vast concentration camp once called Russia, the slaves were to play happy dwellers of paradise-on-earth, in contrast to evil capitalism all over the world. To make those slaves within the vast concentration camp seem happy paradise dwellers, a new, Soviet, culture had to be created by suitable Soviet slaves (for money and other privileges) and imposed on all slaves, and first of all on their children, via new Soviet nurseries, kindergartens, schools, and other new Soviet educational institutions. The new Soviet media, movies, radio, and later television were to convert all slaves to the Soviet culture, making all slaves believe that the new slavery was freedom, happiness, and the divine truth, for Stalin finally wanted to be God.
The task of the Soviet workers of the Soviet culture was not as easy and simple as it may have seemed to some of them. True, those being converted could not argue, for those who argued were enemies to be arrested if they were of age or to be taken to correctional institutions if they were not. But on the other hand, a silent slave is also a problem. I went to the kindergarten when I was six years old, and, miraculously, in a Soviet propaganda move intended for the West, I emigrated (!) to the West with my family when I was 44 years old. So the Soviet culture had 38 years to convert me. Yet the result was my understanding of the new (spiritual, and not only physical) slavery, which appeared in Russia in October of 1917, to be followed by Germany in 1933 and by China in 1949.
There were difficulties for the Soviet "conversion slaves," that is, slaves converting Soviet slaves to spiritual slavery. Russian prose (such as Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky) had been embraced with love and devotion in the free countries. But something began to grow at the beginning of the century: the unique Russian poetry, which was missed in the West because it required unique translation. So it was ignored globally, but we, in secret love with it, knew it by heart and kept whatever remained of it materially. Hence while the spiritual slaves missed it, we recognized it, as did the Russian poets themselves, in contrast to the producers of Soviet rhymed and blank-verse platitudes as "poetry" for the new slaves.
But the publicly secret poetry of genius was not the only obstacle to everyone's spiritual slavery. Life itself, as crude as reported in Soviet political news, undermined the belief into the Soviet truthfulness even among the most credulous. The Soviet leaders? So, after Lenin's death at the age of 54, the Soviet spiritual slaves were being forced to believe that the "Soviet power" consisted of heinous traitors, except for Stalin, a Georgian who spoke Russian with a heavy accent, and who lived and ruled up to 1953, when he had died at the age of 74, before he had installed a statue of himself as of God in the major Russian Orthodox Church, as his former subordinate told me after Stalin's death.
