Julie Burchill, whose writing was once so full of spunk, recently published a compelling article in Unherd - the link is below. You should read it. As well as being an intense, rather sad, glimpse into her early life, it touches on the challenge of making something of your life in a culture and economy under constant strain.
She describes how her working class father was an uncritical disciple of Soviet communism, and, as a child, she took on his attitudes to be close to him. Her father, "handsome and witty, generous and kind", "A clever man from an illiterate, poverty-wracked home", "idealised the Soviet Union in a manner that reminds me of the images on the cover of The Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witness magazine; people wandering beatifically unharmed among wild animals, the lion and the lamb making eyes at each other...He was, for example, obsessed with the cleanliness of the Moscow underground stations; in a television film I wrote about him, Prince, a young Sean Bean tells his daughter about Russia:
“It’s very cold, very clean… and everybody’s happy. Because the country belongs to them. Their subways stations are immaculate — you could eat your dinner off the floor. Because nobody drops rubbish. Because it all belongs to them — the people.” Never religious, the USSR was his Promised Land." "I was his little comrade, always happy to stay up late cheering for the USSR during the Olympics."
It is hard not to feel for her. Anyone who has loved a parent will recognise the urge to be part of their world, included and approved of.
Discontented, she had more than was needed for her available opportunities, and didn't want to miss out on achievement and recognition:
"it was impossible not to be bewitched by the beautiful Communist gymnasts: ... I still remember when Nadia Comăneci, the most gifted Romanian girl of all, was named the youngest ever Hero Of Socialist Labor by the dictator Ceausescu."
"But what I most approved of about the gymnasts was the way Soviet children who showed a particular talent were snatched away from home at an early age — Olga Korbut was in full-time training from the age of eight — and sent to work in academies of excellence; meritocracy at its rawest...I wasn’t scared of hard work, but I was scared of going nowhere. As a smart working-class girl at a provincial Seventies sink school, the most I could hope for was teacher training college... Why couldn’t I be snatched away from my parents and stuck in an academy of writing excellence? At 17, I escaped through a job at the New Musical Express instead."
However, her restlessness did not end with her success as a writer:
"After he died ... I transferred my affections to (the State of) Israel.... Why did I feel the need to latch on to somewhere new? I’m not entirely sure. Though if you’ve been brought up to think of an unseen land as your own, it can feel small-minded just cheering on the place where you happened to be born."
People unsettled on the inside are often drawn to the appearance of strength in others. She is slighting of 'cheering on the place where you happened to be born', but there is more to be said for it. Were the USSR-born soviet patriots small-minded? Or the Israel-born patriots only narrowly tribal? Maybe they saw real virtues in the societies they grew in, and were happy to stand up for them.
Back then, Ms Burchill's writing expressed the dissonance of being young: Why am I misunderstood? Why must I get drunk every night? What is the world coming to? For her generation, that is probably resolved now, one way or another. However, as she indicated the populations that will determine the next few decades have live tensions that are probably worse than the 1970s. Already mentioned, there are the tensions between an universalised idealism and belonging somewhere; We already have a generation for whom higher education meant significant debt without opportunities; There are many Dad-deprived that Jordan Peterson often resonates with - hopefully, they will be able to look at their daddy issues as honestly as Ms Burchill has; There are many are "bright proletarian men ... with no opportunities" like her father; Many young women will have to choose, eventually, between the infinite promises of feminism and the earthly reality of having a family; the sources of mass employment are largely gone, and with them prospects for home ownership. You can fill in the rest. But ultimately, the promise of a young life can only be fulfilled in a real place in real time - the consoling dream of an eternal promised land will remain just that.
"People are far more interested in what happens in their own country than in others; patriots put their birthplace first and “progressives” put theirs down. But both sides are united in the exceptionalism they display towards their homeland, either believing it to be better or worse than anywhere else."
"I hear of young people calling themselves Communists now; they’re not, they are simply ABEs: Anyone But England...Certainly today’s revolutionaries share none of the Soviet stoicism that appealed to my dad, ... Though considering what we know now — the Terror, the massacres, the starvation and beatings which went into making Comrade Comăneci the youngest ever Hero Of Socialist Labor — perhaps there can be such a thing as too much Stoicism."
Of course, the Soviets were experts in weaponising rootless, discontented adolescents, if not in providing economic opportunities or life chances.
And what was true then is true now: You may love globalised, decracinated authoritarian technocracy, but it's never going to love you back.
Julie Burchill's piece in Unherd https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-i-fell-for-the-ussr/