Before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Russia established a capitalist government that was headed by President Boris Yeltsin and later, President Vladimir Putin, it was infamous for Orwellian language: government-owned media reported what the Soviet Communist Party told them to report. Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov was among those who grew up in the Soviet Union, and in a December 5 op-ed for CNN’s website, he finds some Orwellian parallels between the old Soviet Union and the Trump Administration.
Now 56, Kasparov points out that in the Soviet Union, “reality” was “whatever” the Soviet Communist Party “put out on the nightly news.” Kasparov notes that the Soviet Union’s official government newspapers were Pravda and Izvestia; in Russian, “pravda” is the word for “truth,” while “izvestia” means “news.” And Kasparov recalls that in the Soviet Union, a common joke was that “there is no news in the truth and no truth in the news.”
“I’m a post-Soviet citizen,” Kasparov explains. “The country of my birth ceased to exist in 1991. We enjoyed less than a decade of tenuous freedom in Russia before Vladimir Putin launched its post-democratic phase. My ongoing attempts to fight that tragedy led to my exile in the United States. Now, my new home finds itself locked in its own perilous battle: a battle to avoid becoming the latest member of the post-truth world.”