A Soviet man could be genuinely convinced that there was no mass repression in the 1930s. That Katyn is the work of the Wehrmacht, and not of the Soviet firing squads. That punitive psychiatry is a slander of the West. That the Communist Party genuinely builds a state of universal prosperity, - writes Pavel Kazarin for the Crimea. Realities.

In the end, what do we want from a Soviet man in the street, sandwiched between work and home, between the queue on the Swedish wall and an attempt to get food deficit? The information "Iron Curtain" was strong - any alternative picture of the world was suppressed. The surrounding reality was built before his birth, the propaganda system was honed long before he began to ask questions. He simply did not have a different reality than the one in which he lived. And as soon as the sealed canopy began to crack - the Soviet Union began to creep at the seams.

But the post-Soviet man, nostalgic for the USSR, is a completely different phenomenon.

Because in the luggage of the new philistine - the nineties. The very ones when the archives were opened. When there were interviews of dissidents. When information became available on the scale of repression. When there was no longer any illusions about the Soviet system of suppressing dissent.

The post-Soviet man did not even have to look for information about the system that was built in the USSR. In the 90's, these data became mainstream - they sounded from all screens and from all newspaper pages. They were the main content of election campaigns and a new agenda.

Soviet people could justify the Soviet system by ignorance. But the post-Soviet supporter of the Soviet Union does this deliberately. The Soviet man rejected accusations against the regime because he could not believe in them. Post-Soviet - acts as a devil's advocate.

The post-Soviet philistine can no longer refer to the fact that he does not know something. What is not available to him about the real scale. On the contrary, he knows them, but hides behind the crafty "but". "But space ships". "But everyone was afraid". "But stability".

All of his "but" - just an attempt to justify the personal comfort of repression against others.

He convinced himself that he personally was comfortable in the old reality - and he without a shadow of a doubt is ready to exchange it for the fate of others. The place of naivete took cynicism. Ignorance was replaced by meanness.

The post-Soviet pro-Soviet is one who consciously renounced the truth. The one who voluntarily put on blinkers. The one who is ready to make one part of the equation personal comfort, and in another - the fate of all the rest.

And if this is not a meanness, what then is the meanness?.