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Signs of the Times In the February 17, 1994 New York Review of Books, Nobel Prize writer Joseph Brodsky reflected on his dark experiences in Russia, seeing the need for a much more overt effort by the new leaders to affect the cultural lives of their citizens. Brodsky warns of the danger of obscuring “the reality of human evil” by assuming that the nightmare of totalitarianism was due wholly to something called “communism” that is now removed. “Why don’t we simply start by admitting that an extraordinary anthropological backslide has taken place in our world in this century . . . [and] that it involved masses acting in their self-interest and, in the process of doing so, reducing their common denominator to the moral minimum?” He sees the West as “cowboys” who resist complexity, who prefer, as they deal with the “Indians” of the post-communist world, “to mount their high horses...deride...backwardness and derive enormous moral comfort from being regarded as cowboys—first of all, by the Indians.” The “Indians,” Brodsky argues, should not merely imitate the cowboys. “The real civility,” he contends, is not to create illusions. And among those illusions, it may be inferred, is the existence of the preconditions of a free press. |
Last Updated: 11/20/99 |
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© 1999 Post-Soviet Media Law &
Policy Newsletter |
