“A new Iron Curtain?” That was the question in a recent headline of The Christian Science Monitor.
It mirrored Ukrainian President Zelinsky’s alarm on the very day Russia invaded his sovereign nation. He called it “the sound of a new iron curtain.”
I worked behind the Iron Curtain. It is a frightful sound.
If there is a new one, it could separate Ukraine from the West. It could even separate the entire East— as much as Russia can chew off— from the West.
But it also could be a new Iron Curtain for Russia itself. Not so much to keep its people in, but with Vladimir Putin’s almost complete suppression of free speech, to keep authentic documentation of the war out.
It might be the only way, in what is otherwise an age of instantaneous information, that Putin as president can survive.
During the Cold War, I traveled in and out of the Soviet Union. At our Moscow bureau I’d watch evening newscasts on Soviet TV, with a translator telling me what was being said. Every night there would be a story about the USA. One night it would show homeless people sleeping on park benches. The next night, jobless people in unemployment lines. The next, a murder victim lying in a pool of blood on an American city street.
Then, in an endless cycle, they’d run again.
That was the picture people got of life in the United States. The only picture. It was not so much a vacuum of information as it was a vacuum of accurate information.
The vacuum was so impermeable that for many years, American presidents were only portrayed as devils, with fire spitting from their lips, horns growing from their heads.
But when President Ronald Reagan held his first summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, it was shown live on Soviet television and Soviet citizens, long isolated from the realities of the outside world, saw Reagan up close and unadulterated for the very first time.
I covered the Moscow angle of the summit and at an appliance store across from our bureau, people were lined up outside on the sidewalk, two and three deep, watching the summit from TV sets inside the store. I went over and asked why they were braving the icy November cold, even though they couldn’t actually hear the program. Their answer was, they wanted to see the real thing.
The question for Russia today, more than 35 years later is, is “the real thing” a relic of a vanishing flurry of freedoms? Is this a new Iron Curtain coming down?
In a way, yes. In another way, no.
Yes, because in a distressing duplication of Soviet control, Vladimir Putin has cut his people off from accurate information about the bloodthirsty barbarity of Ukraine. The simplest and most obvious example is the euphemism he created for what is a full-scale war: “special military operation.” He’s telling his people that their armed forces are in a fight, but what he’s telling them about the fight— what he’s keeping from them about the fight— is a lie. By and large they are stuck with what state-run media wants to tell them.
So they know precious little about the Russian butchery in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, where the latest count of slaughtered Ukrainian citizens is 164.
They know precious little about the Russian rocket that killed more than 50 two days ago at the railroad station in Kramatorsk, where refugees had been boarding trains to get someplace safer— the Kremlin called stories of the attack a Ukrainian “provocation” that “absolutely do not correspond to reality.” They surely wouldn’t be allowed to see this raw and revolting report from CNN, in which Russian soldiers are recorded urging indiscriminate murder.
Writer William Doyle has been interviewing Russians who have just fled to Finland from Russia. One described his countrymen this way: “They are very isolated, with no communication, only their television. They work hard all day, come home exhausted and the TV is their only source.”
That might explain the view of Luka Chernykh, a Russian man in Siberia who was interviewed by phone by The New York Times. Although his own 22-year-old soldier son died in the war, Chernykh told The Times, “If America didn’t supply weapons to the Ukrainian Nazis, then there would be no deaths of our young guys. I know the Russian spirit and I know that Russians do not shoot at civilians. Only Nazis could do that.”
But no, an Iron Curtain as impenetrable as the old one can’t be built again, because the curtain can’t be made of iron any more. Inevitably, information does seep through. Not all of it, and not to everybody, but plenty of Russians find their way around Putin’s restrictions and then, if by no more than word of mouth, spread the word to others.
Of course that carries its own risks, which limit the spread. There are reports of Russians, across its eleven time zones, being fined and sometimes arrested for even the smallest infractions of Putin’s new laws prohibiting even the use of the word “war,” let alone actually protesting in the smallest ways. Shockingly, there are even reports of Russians turning on, and turning in, fellow Russians who aren’t supportive of their nation’s “special military operation.”
Shades of Stalin.
No surprise, since Putin called a few weeks ago for a “self-purification” where citizens could “distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths.”
More shades of Stalin.
Russians are nationalists. They revere what their nation has accomplished: its history, its culture, its fortitude, its power. They have a lot of things to make them proud. If they ever learn the full scope of this ruthless war though, it won’t be one of them.
If they ever learn. A new Iron Curtain might mean, they won’t.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.