But cstross, the Soviet Union shot you
and your family in the back of the head if you tried to leave! And there were entire agencies devoted to getting persecuted minorities out of the USSR, including Sergey Brin's parents. It is not exactly comparable to what happens when you leave a company (the occasional Ballmer chair throwing fit notwithstanding).
As a Soviet immigrant, I take issue with the realism of your claim.
Yes, the country effectively had closed borders, and yes, it was downright impossible for most people to leave. A trickle of emigrants who were begrudingly permitted to leave officially began in the 1970s owing to international Jewish repatriation policies and so on, but that was not an option for most people.
Nevertheless, to suggest that people were simply shot for attempting to leave is an absurd level of hyperbole. They weren't shot, they were just prevented from doing so via the usual bureaucratic means.
There is the small number of people who attempted a beeline across the border - similarly to the Berlin Wall climbers - past the spotlights and the guards and all. Thankfully, there were not many of them, as this is a very stupid approach to crossing any national border anywhere. The American-Mexican border may prove to be an unusual exception.
So like a prison with life sentences! You could theoretically get out by a pardon -- but the only realistic way was to sneak out while hoping the guards missed, if they saw you...
The constant comparisons to a prison reflect the theoretical reality of leaving the country accurately, but poorly reflect the psychological perception of the issue by most citizens. The USSR was a vast, vast country, spanning 11 timezones horizontally as the Russian Federation does now. It contained 15 ethnically and culturally diverse republics, practically every far-northern, tundra, sub-tropical and tropical climactic region imaginable, and manifold examples of every kind of landscape and topography. In addition, travel to the Eastern European socialist republics was quite possible and routine for many people.
My point is, there was a lot to see inside the country. Were we technically "trapped" there? Absolutely. But to grok the actual significance of this, consider the single-digit percentage of Americans that hold foreign passports. Vanishingly few Americans have ever traveled outside the country, and a non-trivial number have never left their state or been beyond a neighbouring one.
So, while the fact that the borders were closed is important, and if that's your sole point, well, sure, but if you're likening it experientially to a prison, I think that's a little over the top. There were certain people who really wanted to leave and for whom that was undoubtably true. But as with most Americans, most Soviets were somewhere in the middle on that.
This is not an apologia or a whitewashing of the fact that our borders were closed, but an attempt to convey the human factor in a more nuanced, perceptive way.
>>The constant comparisons to a prison reflect the theoretical reality of leaving the country accurately, but poorly reflect the psychological perception of the issue by most citizens.
Of course, with information control from the cradle...
>>Vanishingly few Americans have ever traveled outside the country, and a non-trivial number have never left their state or been beyond a neighbouring one.
I thought Soviet didn't allow people to move to the place they wanted? Or was that just the big cities?
But sure, people traveled in the military service...? :-)
The Soviet Union shot you and your family if you tried to leave? Huh, that didn't happen to me or my family. Or any other person I know. I guess it's popular to spout bullshit like that though.
Soon after the formation of the Soviet Union, emigration restrictions were put in place to keep citizens from leaving the various countries of the Soviet Socialist Republics,[1] though some defections still occurred. During and after World War II, similar restrictions were put in place in non-Soviet countries of the Eastern Bloc,[2] which consisted of the Communist states of Eastern Europe.[3][4]
Most in the group were pessimistic about their chances — but none more than Mr. Mendelevich. He felt sure they would get caught, but to his mind, a group suicide was preferable to a life of waiting for an exit visa that would never arrive. Even a botched attempt, he figured, would at least attract the eyes of the world.
Early the next day, as the plotters walked onto the tarmac, they were, indeed, caught. The K.G.B. had known of their plan for months. And the two leaders were later sentenced to death.
But Mr. Mendelevich was also right that their desperate act would make their demand for free emigration impossible to ignore. Now largely forgotten, this planned hijacking, and the Soviet government’s overreaction to it, opened the first significant rip in the Iron Curtain, one through which hundreds of thousands would eventually flee. With great drama, it undermined Communist orthodoxy. After all, if the Bolsheviks had built the perfect society, why would any well-adjusted citizens want to leave, let alone risk their lives to do so?
The essential weakness of the Soviet Union was exposed: to survive, the regime had to imprison its own population. This would be the beginning of the end.
Jews were understandably at the forefront of the emigration battle. Even as they were forbidden to exercise any kind of Jewish identity, they also had no option to assimilate in Soviet society. Their internal passports were stamped “Jew,” a word that three generations after the 1917 revolution signified little more than their status as outsiders. Many had come to feel that their existence inside the Soviet Union was untenable, that the only way to escape this paradox was to move away. But the doors were firmly shut; those who requested permission to leave were refused and then ostracized.
The push to emigrate, which had begun in the early 1960s as an underground movement, had grown by 1970 into an open campaign. Letters to the United Nations were signed by hundreds of Soviet Jews. Only a few months before the hijacking attempt, the Kremlin had called for a public relations counteroffensive that would paint Zionism as “a vanguard of imperialism.” A large press conference was arranged with “acceptable” Jews, including the prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and the comedian Arkady Raikin, vowing loyalty to the Soviet Union and denouncing Zionism as expressing “the chauvinistic views and racist ravings of the Jewish bourgeoisie.”
Heh, I've heard that argument before, my family and everyone I knew was "elite" somehow. No, we were certainly not. Or are you saying my problem is being Jewish?
Sergei Brin, who you mention, was his family also shot? If you applied for the paperwork properly you were allowed to leave.
