The Psychological Impact of the Soviet Union’s Reign & Fall
When historical events are transcribed to the pages of history, it is common to read of figures and tallies — of death counts and abstract policies and shifting geopolitical sands.
But there is something tragically skimmed over in these accounts and it is the ‘human question’. Where does history take place? Not only on the grand scale of nation-states and society-at-large, but in the individual minds and daily lives of humanity.
Out of the Soviet Union do we face a long, monumental story of royally-failed mass political objectives, but we also encounter the face of psychological warfare, a nation of people scarred by a collectivist society and its troubled history of draconian measures, climate of fear, and disruption of what it means to be a free-thinking, free-moving individual.
The Soviet Union’s decades-long reach towards utopia finally crumbled, heavy with cynicism, before the turn of the millennium. Its death did not usher in an instant joyous revival of liberal society; instead, the fog of the past and the intractable psychological grooves it etched in the psyche of the nation clung.
It is no wonder that the historic horrors and the fatalistic shroud that the Soviet Union was draped in for so many years produced in its people a psychological damage that…
