Brainwashed by a Regime of "Truth"

I would like to be able to write an essay about my heroic resistance to the Communist regime in Soviet Lithuania. I cannot, however. I was brainwashed by the regime. Born in 1960 in Communist-ruled Lithuania, I belong to the generation that knew close to nothing about the violent beginnings of that rule in our country. I was disoriented, as would be a man who unknowingly built his house on blood-soaked land.

The first twenty years of my life elucidate the power of the regime on the young mind. Somewhat unexpectedly, it seems that a majority of the young population nowadays is deluded by a similar lie. Between the Soviet regime then and “liberated” society now, there exist related lines of thought.

This is my story: my parents—and those of the majority of my friends—were very cautious in revealing to us the true history of our country: that the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in 1940, that from 1944 to 1954 thousands of our best men perished when fighting the Russian army, and that hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians were forcibly brought to Siberia to die of hunger. We also did not know that in the little town where we lived around half of the inhabitants were Jewish before the war, and that most of them were killed in 1941 by the Nazis.

We were robbed not only of memory but also of faith. My 11-year-old sister and her friend washed the floor for the elderly housemaid of the local bishop residing on the other side of the little street from our 12-unit apartment building. The girls were trying to be “good pioneers,” as good works were meritorious in the Youth Communist League, but helping a Catholic was another story. Our mother was scared: if the school administration found out, both the girls and their parents would face consequences.

I was so accustomed to the vacuity of words under the [Soviet] regime that when I encountered real speech in the United States, it took me by surprise. The fact that people actually meant what they said or wrote was a novelty.

On the other hand, my parents resisted the pressure to join the Communist Party. Thus, some sentiment against the regime was relayed to me and my sister, but not the duty to fight against it. I would say that we belonged to the majority in Lithuania at that time. After armed resistance was repressed in the 1950s, only a very small minority of the population remained in the underground opposition to the regime (e.g., publishing the Chronicles of the Lithuanian Catholic Church), while about 8 percent of Lithuanian citizens were Communist Party members.

What form of youthful idealism—an indispensable feature of youth—was lived by me and my contemporaries? To be a Christian was forbidden and, on the whole, strange; to praise the regime was also not so popular. Like young people in other parts of the world, we were aspiring to grow in athletic prowess and to travel, dreaming of idealistic love and ascending to prestigious professions. But an important part of our strivings was consumed by the “ideals” of the sexual revolution.

We were aware of the “free West” existing on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Voice of America and Free Europe were known to us, if only from the Soviet-produced hindrance noise coming from radio sets when our parents half-clandestinely tried to catch the forbidden frequencies. However, the mode of freedom that impressed the young was broadcasted by “Radio Luxembourg,” to which we listened with youthful piety. It transmitted pop music and proclaimed hippie ideals. We all dreamt of wearing long hair, which was forbidden by the Communist “morality” in our schools; well-known brands of jeans, imported from the West, had tremendous cachet. And “Radio Luxembourg” was easier to catch than The Voice of America. Free love and rock n’ roll, even if portrayed by the Soviets as decadent features of bourgeois society, posed less threat to the regime than the Catholic resistance.

Consequently, the Church was described as an outdated congregation of old ladies and reactionary priests. The mass media—the press, radio, and television—proclaimed that the independent Lithuania of pre-war times was a country where the exploitation of simple people reigned both in towns and in the villages. Having no access to other interpretations, we believed that, at least partially. In my town, there lived a prominent Lithuanian resistance figure, Fr. Jonas Kauneckas, now Bishop Emeritus in the Panevėžys Diocese. We heard rumors then, remote as they were, that a “strange” priest lived on Pioneers Street (a prophetic coincidence?), one who criticized the Soviet regime and for that, was frequently interrogated by the “militia.” Neither to me nor to my friends was this information important. We were, rather, interested in the freedom of the West. Sexual connotations were part of this freedom—a logical extension of the hippie mentality expressed in its pop music.

We were victims of our parents’ inability to give arguments for a moral life because they could not root it in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The officially reigning “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism” was fake and impotent. Parents knew what the Red Terror was and could not for one moment believe in the sincerity of the regime’s call for “moral purity,” “modesty,” and “brotherly relations” between people (“Man is to man a friend, comrade, and brother”). Newspapers and television praised dutifulness, love of truth, and solidarity, while most people thought to themselves that the most prominent newspaper in the Soviet Union should be called “Lie” instead of “Truth” (“Tiesa” in Lithuanian, “Pravda” in Russian).

The very terms describing moral values were corrupted. Even we, the young, who knew little about the true history of the Soviet regime, sensed that the words “duty,” “brotherhood,” and the like were empty of content. In my room, I hung the poster of Leonid Brezhnev, and then added to it the titles of photos from Communist newspapers about the milkmaids who were elected to the Supreme Council of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of the tractor drivers in kolkhoz who were proclaimed the “heroes of socialist work.” For myself and my friends, this was funny. I was so accustomed to the vacuity of words under the [Soviet] regime that when I encountered real speech in the United States, it took me by surprise. The fact that people actually meant what they said or wrote was a novelty. I had several such experiences: for example, I got a traffic fine for parking my car near the fire hydrant because I did not think the note not to park the car near it meant what it said. There was a revealing saying in the former Soviet Union: one thinks one thing, speaks another, and does still another.

Our parents could have had the chance to help us see that moral terms are not just empty shells if they had told us what really happened in Russia in 1917, and in Lithuania and other Baltic states in the 1940’s and after the Second World War: namely, that the central moral fiber of our society—the Catholic faith—was annihilated with bloody violence. Then moral education could have been effective. In that situation, the post-war generations could have been saved from the mesmerizing voices of the pop sirens of Radio Luxembourg. Then, our idealistic compassion for the “insulted and humiliated” would have distinguished between genuine injuries to human dignity and the ideological inversion of Christian moral principles.

This misplaced compassion seems to be one of the leading forces in young fighters for the sexual (“post-sexual” by now?) revolution both in the East and in the West. In both cases, it is rooted in the rejection of a Christian, that is, an adequate anthropology. The central dimension of it is expressed well by Mark Regnerus: sex in our day has become “naturally” infertile. As famous contemporary minds say, man gave in to this long-standing temptation by the massive use of the contraceptive pill. Both Soviet and “capitalist” ideologies led many young people astray in this crucially important area of life. The identical attitude toward sexual freedom of the capitalist West and communist East is logical: Herbert Marcuse, who argued for the normality of “polymorphous perversity,” and Willhelm Reich, who coined the term “sexual revolution,” were both Marxists.

It is not easy to distinguish between the freedom of spirit and that of the instincts. Delacroix’s La liberté… looks noble, and the “Rock March” of 1987–1989 in Lithuania claimed both, freedom for the country and freedom for the passions. The latter trend, given our habituation to the Dionysian rhythms of rock music (as Allan Bloom would say), was subconscious and matter of fact. Additionally, until the 1990s, only a few of us knew enough English—so the natural movement of modesty in our souls was undermined even more easily by our ignorance of the sexualized lyrics of rock.

The Marcusean ideal of “non-repressive” civilization is an enticing one. A powerful narrative has been formed in the post-war West about the oppressive nature of Christianity. Since young people need an enemy to fight against and an ideal to strive for, these ideological minds—as Erik Erikson called them—were misled. According to Agusto del Noce, in the post-war era, the political left moved its target from economic to sexual “exploitation.” The young passion for justice was redirected: the oppressed became those who were forbidden free love. One’s duty is to fight for it. How do we show it is a prison? Mere intuition that something is not quite true—as it was in the case of my generation with the regime’s proclaimed “truths”—does not suffice. This is my conclusion about a young soul: it needs to be told.

And what happened to me, that young man who grew up deceived by the regime? I was an 18-year-old student at the Medical School in Kaunas, Lithuania. One peaceful summer evening I went out for a walk just to clear my head from studying for exams. The sunset was beautiful. I, who was educated in a materialist ideology, thought to myself: if this beauty is merely a result of an accidental conglomeration of atoms, it is meaningless. Void. I rebelled against this depressive position. It took me some years to arrive at a point when I was able to say with our famous poet: “And why this midnight is so beautiful, O God, my God—how many stars in heaven!”