I got triggered today by someone repeating Russian propaganda, and it got me thinking about Western leftists who never experienced the USSR firsthand, yet praise it because of a few books.

Recently, in Italy, I saw someone - clearly part of the LGBT community - wearing a T-shirt with a huge hammer and sickle and “USSR” written in bold letters. The irony is hard to miss. In the USSR, anything even slightly outside the sexual norms (homosexuality, trans identity, etc.) was considered a severe mental illness. People were forcibly placed in psychiatric wards and “treated” in all kinds of ways - including electroshock - until they were “cured.”

There were no human rights as we understand them today. Human rights meant doing what you were told, living where you were assigned (if your workplace decided you had to relocate, you had no choice), and believing whatever the system told you to believe.

My grandfather was a university teacher and an intellectual. He was exiled to Siberia because he loved his country and didn’t support the occupation. He spent 12 years in a concentration camp there.

You know my parents couldn’t even listen to the music they liked? Everything had to be approved by the government. Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Doors... their albums were censored, tracks removed, covers changed, some outright banned. At every local music event, there were men in suits watching - listening to the lyrics, checking how the musicians dressed and behaved. If something was “off,” they could be arrested on the spot - or worse, notes were taken, and they’d be picked up quietly the next day.

In every school or university class, there were snitches. Their job was to listen to what others said and report anything “suspicious” to their senior officer. That would lead to consequences, sometimes for the individual, sometimes for their whole family.

So, to all the modern-day Western leftists who believe the USSR was a good thing - you wouldn’t last a single day in the real USSR. Not the version in your books. Not the one crafted by russian authors still stuck in their own mythologies.

Epistemic imperialism is when one group's way of knowing (usually Western) is forced as the "correct" way, dismissing other knowledge systems. Your example perfectly illustrates this - Soviet propaganda attempted to impose its singular "truth" while suppressing alternative viewpoints and lived experiences.