UnlearningSilence.blog

For much of my life, I believed that people who grew up on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain belonged to different worlds.

The more years I spend reflecting on my own life, the less certain I am that this is true.

We inherited different stories.

That much is undeniable.

Those of us who grew up in the former Soviet republics came of age during uncertainty, transformation and reinvention. The world our parents understood disappeared and we learned very early that history could arrive uninvited and rearrange everything.

Meanwhile, our peers in Western Europe and North America appeared to be entering an era of confidence. The Cold War was over. Liberal democracy had prevailed. Markets were expanding. Globalisation was accelerating. The future seemed full of promise.

For a while, it looked as though our generations were travelling in opposite directions.

Thirty years later, I am no longer convinced.

In fact, I increasingly suspect that we have been asking the same questions all along.

When I was growing up, many people in my part of the world looked West with a mixture of curiosity, admiration and hope. The West represented prosperity, freedom, opportunity and stability. It was the place where history seemed to be heading. It was modern, confident and successful.

At the same time, many people in the West viewed the former Soviet world through a very different lens. To them, it represented shortages, inefficiency, restrictions and failure. The collapse of the Soviet Union appeared to confirm what many already believed: one system had won and the other had lost.

History seemed settled.

The future seemed obvious.

Looking back now, that confidence feels almost touching.

Not because it was foolish, but because every generation eventually discovers that history is more complicated than it first appears.

The East entered uncertainty immediately.

The West encountered it later.

That is perhaps the biggest difference between us.

My generation in the former Soviet republics grew up watching institutions disappear, economies transform and societies reinvent themselves. We learned very early that certainty was fragile. We learned that systems can collapse. We learned that adults do not always have answers.

For many people in the West, those lessons arrived more gradually.

The decades following the end of the Cold War were, in many ways, remarkably successful. Living standards improved. Technology transformed everyday life. Opportunities expanded. Travel became easier. Information became more accessible than at any point in human history.

And yet, despite all of those achievements, something unexpected happened.

Many people became wealthier.

But not necessarily happier.

More connected.

But often lonelier.

More informed.

But sometimes more confused.

More free.

Yet frequently uncertain about what that freedom was for.

The questions that haunted my part of the world in the 1990s gradually began appearing elsewhere.

Questions of identity.

Questions of belonging.

Questions of meaning.

Questions about what holds societies together.

Questions about what happens when people no longer trust institutions, leaders or even one another.

It turns out that prosperity alone cannot answer those questions.

Neither can ideology.

One of the most interesting observations from having spent half of my life in the East and half in the West is that human beings are remarkably similar regardless of the political systems they inherit.

People everywhere want dignity.

People want meaningful work.

People want security for their families.

People want friendship.

People want purpose.

People want to feel that their lives matter.

People want to belong.

The systems change.

Human nature does not.

That does not mean the differences between East and West are unimportant.

Far from it.

The differences shaped generations.

The Soviet system provided stability and collective purpose for many people, but often at the expense of freedom, individuality and choice.

The Western model delivered extraordinary innovation, prosperity and personal liberty, but often struggled to satisfy equally human needs for community, belonging and social cohesion.

Both systems succeeded in some areas.

Both failed in others.

Both revealed important truths.

Both created new problems while attempting to solve old ones.

The older I get, the less interested I become in arguments about which side was right.

I am far more interested in what each side got right.

What can we learn from societies that valued education, community and collective responsibility?

What can we learn from societies that championed freedom, creativity and individual opportunity?

How do we preserve liberty without creating isolation?

How do we encourage ambition without weakening community?

How do we reward individual achievement without abandoning those who struggle?

How do we build societies where people are free but do not feel alone?

These questions seem increasingly urgent.

Across the world, people are searching once again for identity, belonging and meaning. We see it in politics. We see it in culture. We see it in the growing sense that many of the promises of the late twentieth century remain unfulfilled.

Perhaps this is one reason why so many political systems appear unsettled today.

Across much of Europe and North America, traditional political parties are losing support. New political movements emerge on both the left and the right. Some people disengage entirely, convinced that politics no longer speaks to their concerns. Others are drawn towards more radical alternatives. Younger generations often appear less attached to established institutions than previous generations were.

It is tempting to view these developments purely through a political lens.

I am not convinced that politics alone explains them.

What I see instead is a deeper search for belonging.

For much of the twentieth century, people inherited ready-made identities. They belonged to a nation, a religion, a community, a political movement or a social class. Those identities were not always perfect, but they provided meaning, structure and a sense of place.

Many of those structures have weakened.

People are freer than previous generations in countless ways.

Yet freedom creates its own challenges.

When fewer things are given, more things must be chosen.

Identity must be chosen.

Values must be chosen.

Communities must be chosen.

Purpose must be chosen.

For some people, that freedom is exhilarating.

For others, it is exhausting.

The rise of political fragmentation, populism and social polarisation may have many causes, but I suspect that beneath them lies a simple human need that has never changed.

People want to feel that they belong to something larger than themselves.

They want to feel seen.

They want to feel heard.

They want to believe that their sacrifices matter.

They want to believe that the future holds a place for them.

When societies fail to provide that sense of belonging, people begin searching for it elsewhere.

One lesson I carry from my childhood is that no society is as permanent as it appears.

As a teenager, I sometimes found myself frustrated with my parents’ generation. I wondered how so many intelligent, educated people could have entrusted so much power to a system that eventually proved incapable of reforming itself. Why had they accepted certain things for so long? Why had they believed that the future would simply take care of itself?

Age has made me more compassionate.

Most people do not create the systems they live under. They inherit them. They adapt to them. They raise families within them. They assume, often quite reasonably, that the structures around them will continue to exist tomorrow.

My parents were not unusual in that respect.

Neither are we.

That is precisely why the lesson matters.

The Soviet Union did not collapse because ordinary people woke up one morning and decided they wanted chaos. For many people, the collapse was not a liberation but a profound loss. A loss of certainty, security and identity. The system had flaws, many of them serious, but it also felt permanent. Few imagined it could simply disappear.

Yet it did.

Perhaps that is why I become uneasy when I hear people speak as though today’s institutions are indestructible.

Democracy is not inevitable.

Social stability is not inevitable.

Prosperity is not inevitable.

Environmental sustainability is not inevitable.

These things survive only when people are willing to engage with them, challenge them and improve them.

History is full of examples of societies that assumed someone else would solve the problem.

Someone else would defend democratic norms.

Someone else would address corruption.

Someone else would tackle inequality.

Someone else would confront environmental decline.

Someone else would act.

Eventually, there is no one else.

One of the most important responsibilities of citizenship is the willingness to think critically. To question what we are told. To examine information carefully. To resist the temptation of easy answers and comforting certainties. To participate rather than withdraw.

The rise of political extremes concerns me not because I believe one side possesses all the wrong answers and the other all the right ones. It concerns me because extremes often flourish when large numbers of people lose faith in institutions and stop believing they have agency.

But we do have agency.

More than we realise.

Not individually perhaps, but collectively.

Every generation inherits a world it did not create.

Every generation also leaves one behind.

The question is not whether future generations will judge us.

They will.

The question is what they will say.

Will they see a generation that recognised emerging problems and confronted them honestly?

Or will they wonder why we assumed that someone else would take care of everything?

Perhaps this is where people like me, who have lived in more than one system and more than one culture, have a small advantage.

We know that no political order is permanent.

We know that no ideology has all the answers.

We know that societies are more fragile than they appear and more resilient than we imagine.

Most importantly, we know that history is not something that happens to other people.

It happens to us.

The future is not built by governments alone.

It is built by citizens.

By teachers.

By parents.

By neighbours.

By communities.

By ordinary people who choose to pay attention rather than look away.

Perhaps that is why I no longer think of my generation as divided by a wall, an ideology or a geography.

I think of us as people who inherited different stories and spent our adult lives discovering their limitations.

Some of the stories we inherited were true.

Some were incomplete.

Some no longer serve us.

The challenge now is not to defend them.

The challenge is to learn from them.

To take the best ideas from different worlds and ask a simple question:

What kind of society do we want to build next?

Because if the twentieth century taught us anything, it is that no civilisation has a monopoly on wisdom.

The future will not belong to those who cling most tightly to old certainties.

It will belong to those willing to learn from different experiences, different histories and different ways of seeing the world.

Perhaps that is the unexpected gift of having lived between two worlds.

You eventually realise that the most important divide was never East and West.

It was between those who believe history is something that happens to them and those who understand they have a role in shaping it.

And that, I think, is a lesson worth passing on.