Back in the USSR

In June of 1976 the Beatles released "Back in the USSR," a parody of Chuck Berry's tune, as well as of the Beach Boys, but actually referring to a particularly bad flight the band took from Russia back to Britain. When I was working at a sheet metal shop in prison I used to hear it a lot on the radio for some reason. Ironically, I have frequently described to people asking me what prison is like by drawing an analogy between the Soviet system and the prison facility.

Prison has it all--the Gulag, Big Brother, a tight, centralized, top-down, authoritarian government, a strictly regulated economy and repressive social and cultural system, as well as a thriving black market. It is also bleak and metallic ("Stalin" means "Steel"), homogenous and sparse--the product of an idolizaiton of sheer, raw power at it's most explicit.

Most of the time, responding to my friend's questions, I felt sort of like George Kennan, writing my long telegrams from this totally alien place, grasping for analogies that a member of the "free world" would understand.

Because it is not until one has lived in a totalitarian-authoritarian system that one fully understands it. Not until it begins to work on your identity, eroding away one's intrinsic sense of individual significance, that one begins to grasp the gravity of what it means to be controlled by a system.

When I got out I felt agoraphobic for a week. Men in black suits, or Crown Victorias were under-cover police folloowing me, waiting for me to slip up. Although these feelings were brief, and I immediately recognized them as silly and irrational--the fact remains that I actually experienced them. What were perfectly normal reactions in prison were silly and irrational in the "free world." This has been both profound and disturbing at the same time.

Coming back into the world of "freedom" has been an immense shock. More shocking however, for me, has been the realization of how consensual I had been to the state of the world before I was so abruptly rended from it.