The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is gone. It died over twenty years ago and took with it the world Communist movement, the Iron Curtain that held eastern Europe within the Soviet empire and the subjugation of the other republics to the Russian giant. The USSR disintegrated at the end of the Cold War. If one thinks about the Soviet Union, one remembers the gulag and death on an unimaginable scale. Stalin killed about ten million during the 1930s as part of his move to "collectivize" agriculture. Millions more died in the Siberian camps, the gulags, over the decades of Soviet rule. Then there were the twenty million soviets who died during World War II. Without a doubt, the Soviet Union achieved major industrial strength, accomplished great scientific goals, and held a large portion of the globe under its power. Nevertheless, it is the death of millions upon millions and the destruction of basic freedom which truly defined the Soviet era. That truth leads to an important question: should the Olympic Games at Sochi celebrate that Soviet history?
I just finished watching a pageant like production created by the Russians for the opening ceremonies at Sochi. It was an amazing spectacle which demonstrated new technologies for creating visual displays unlike any I had ever seen. The problem, however, is that a big chunk of the program was a sympathetic look back on the Soviet era. Imagine now an opening ceremony for games held in Berlin that contained a ten minute tribute to the glories of the Nazi era. The Sochi extravaganza is not all that much different. It is true that Nazism was defeated and destroyed while the Soviets were tossed out after their system disintegrated. The terrors that these two systems inflicted on millions of innocent people were not all that different, however.
I know that the people watching around the world will not be influenced much by the opening ceremony; it is just TV spectacle. The problem, however, is that there are millions of Russian citizens who are not old enough to remember life under the Soviet system. It does not do good for these people to be told only about the glories of Soviet life without reminding them of the terrible costs of that system. We should all strive never again to see anything remotely like the Soviet Union on the face of the Earth.
I just finished watching a pageant like production created by the Russians for the opening ceremonies at Sochi. It was an amazing spectacle which demonstrated new technologies for creating visual displays unlike any I had ever seen. The problem, however, is that a big chunk of the program was a sympathetic look back on the Soviet era. Imagine now an opening ceremony for games held in Berlin that contained a ten minute tribute to the glories of the Nazi era. The Sochi extravaganza is not all that much different. It is true that Nazism was defeated and destroyed while the Soviets were tossed out after their system disintegrated. The terrors that these two systems inflicted on millions of innocent people were not all that different, however.
I know that the people watching around the world will not be influenced much by the opening ceremony; it is just TV spectacle. The problem, however, is that there are millions of Russian citizens who are not old enough to remember life under the Soviet system. It does not do good for these people to be told only about the glories of Soviet life without reminding them of the terrible costs of that system. We should all strive never again to see anything remotely like the Soviet Union on the face of the Earth.
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