Today's Russia may be a wealthier, more open nation than the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, but President Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine is working hard on restoring the stifling moral climate of 30 years ago. The Sochi Olympics, Putin's pet project meant to boost patriotic sentiment, presented the propagandists with a chance to take a giant leap in that direction.
The late years of Leonid Brezhnev's 18-year rule, and the brief interlude between Brezhnev's death in 1982 and Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, were marked by a peak in Cold War rhetoric against the U.S. and a dogged if not particularly cruel persecution of dissidents, who were universally condemned by patriotic Soviet citizens freely expressing their strong opinions in state-controlled media. It was clear who the enemies were: The hostile West and the fifth column within the Soviet Union, supposedly doing the bidding of its Western masters.
The Brezhnev-era government tended to overreact to the slightest suggestions that there could be something wrong with the Soviet Union or that the West could be getting something right. To people who remember those days, as I do, living in Russia in 2014 is a lot like time travel, and the time machine bears the Sochi 2014 logo.