An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West by Konstantin Kisin

Author:Konstantin Kisin [Kisin, Konstantin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2022-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

Really? Cos over in Hong Kong things aren’t much better. Although it’s the capitalist region of socialist China, thousands of residents have been forced to protest for their free-market freedoms against the encroaching Communist Party. The problems first began in summer 2019 when Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, tried to implement an extradition bill, which would’ve enforced a Chinese legal system rooted in socialism. Many Hong Kong residents are so frightened of Maoist principles being implemented that they’ve sought refuge in the UK, where they are now asylum seekers.

To a certain extent, I know how this feels. Although I wasn’t fleeing an active regime, or seeking asylum, I knew how dangerous socialism could be and how it had decimated Russia. In fact, the fall-out of its experiment with social ownership was one of the main reasons why I was forced to leave without my family and emigrate to a new country. Although I was just a child, I can still remember the Soviet economic system – the Iron Curtain – portraying consumerism as evil. It demanded self-sufficiency in all areas of life, and by the mid-1980s had 95 per cent control over all retail trade. Imported consumer goods, especially those from the United States, were blacklisted because they represented vulgar Western decadence and moral decay.

Added price controls enforced by the State made everyday items, such as bread and butter, a rarity. Most supermarkets were empty or incredibly low on stock, causing food shortages and huge queues. Meanwhile, 20 per cent of the Soviet population, which equates to roughly 43 million people, lived on less than seventy-five rubles a month (US$120).

Eventually, the tax system began to disintegrate. In a desperate move, Mikhail Gorbachev’s government began frantically printing money to plug holes in the budget and prevent factories from going bust. But this created a sharp rise in inflation, which meant the average person’s money had less value as consumer prices went stratospheric.

As Gorbachev witnessed this, he also noticed that countries in post-war Western Europe, such as France and the UK, were thriving as a result of consumerism, which made life plentiful for them. The more they manufactured and consumed, the better their lives were. So, following their lead, he made tentative steps towards moving Russia into the market economy. Since then, it has enjoyed periods of major economic growth which wouldn’t have been possible before. Had the West not demonstrated the brilliance of the free market, and the benefits of capitalism, we would’ve been lost as a nation.

The legacy of this reality is always with me. These days, when I visit my grandmother in Ukraine, she always launches into the same old story about her post-war teenage years and the fears she had. ‘My girlfriends and I would worry about whether we would ever see real bread again, let alone taste it,’ she’ll say as we sit on the terrace of the family dacha (holiday home), surrounded by every comfort of modern civilisation. The table in front of us is full

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