The Kremlin rarely surprises me.
When I read George Orwell’s "1984" in the 1970s, at age 10, I immediately recognized our Soviet life. By then, everyone was used to the state insisting that everything was becoming “better and more joyous,” as Joseph Stalin had claimed in 1935 when people were dying of hunger and being imprisoned for fictitious crimes.
Later, in the 1970s, when Leonid Brezhnev was touting the Soviet model of “developed socialism,” some 300,000 Soviet citizens were defecting to the West. Yet as large as that number seemed at the time, it pales in comparison to today’s figures. The mass exodus following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is more reminiscent of the one triggered by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Between 1917 and 1922, up to 3 million aristocrats, landowners, doctors, engineers, priests and other professionals fled the new dictatorship of the proletariat.