If you are a Westerner and talk to us Russians about freedom, you need to know that we understand freedom quite differently from you.
Western Europe, with its offshoots of German influence in Eastern Europe, has grown big and mighty on the principles of contractual law. You have rules and suchlike. Your understanding of freedom is the one in Magna Carta: those in power shall not impinge on the rights of their subjects above what is allowed by law.
We in Russia have little time for rules and law. We think it´s something that the big guys in power use to bludgeon us into submission. As the grand motto of Putin’s rule proclaims: “To friends, everything. To enemies, the law.”
For us, freedom is the possibility of escape, to do whatever we want without regard to whichever oppressive power we’ve been living with all day long: police, wife, party cell, work we hate, the cold of Russian winter, the sweaty bodies of fellow commuters on the crammed suburban trains.
In English, there are two complementary words for the topic: “freedom” and “liberty”. We also have a pair, “svoboda” and “volya”. But the complementary meaning for the second one is quite different from “liberty”.
“Volya” also means “the will”. Yes, yes, like in the Nazi’s Triumph des Willens. In other words, it’s the ability to do what you want, to impress your will on whatever you have.
Vólya also forms the stem of another word, very pleasant to the Russian ear, privólye (an open space, an uncluttered expanse with no unwanted obstacles). Here´s a picture of “Russian privolye”:
What’s so exciting for us Russians about this?
Look: No people! No cars! No police! No kids! No one!
FREEDOM!
This perception of freedom is also worth keeping in mind when you come across all the passionate Russian postings about the yoke of political correctness and stifling liberal oppression that you Westerners must suffer every passing day.
For us, having to take into consideration other people, with their annoying habits, pesky demands and petty pretenses is also a form of non-freedom. It is often more oppressive, because you can hide from police and taxmen when you really need to. But other people, they are always around! They haunt you everywhere!
This might be a relic from centuries of living in tight-knit peasant communities, with the subsequent jump into the communitarianism of the Soviet period. As a result, many claim we Russians have become the most individualistic nation (I´m not sure we are).
As our national poet has said, “There is no happiness, but there’s peace and volya”.
To wrap it up, the answer to your question. As long as Putin´s buddies don’t lock us up, and let us leave the country, we feel more free than you in the West, with your liberals, your political correctness and the zillions of rules and laws that even the most powerful men like Trump (what a humiliation!) must observe.
Picture Source Google
Thanks for Reading
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