The Partial Observer by Gayane Torosyan
Socialism: What the Heck Does It Even Mean?
Many Americans are quick to label the politics of former President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris as “socialist.” But I’d wager my 13th salary—the annual bonus Soviet workers received—that few of my college students could pass a quiz defining the term.
What most people think of as socialism is often more about the ideology or political movement that advocates for it, rather than the actual economic system. At its core, socialism involves public ownership of the means of production and the elimination of private property—concepts largely absent from American policy debates.
Yes, in the Soviet Union, people lived rent-free in government-provided apartments (unless they joined a housing co-op). Utilities and basic goods were dirt cheap. But so were salaries. And the value of free public healthcare? Often exactly what it cost: nothing. “Medicine for nothing is worth nothing,” Soviet Russians used to say. With few exceptions, free medicine did little good.
Medical students earned tuition-free degrees, but a system rife with scarcity and corruption bred ruthless competition—especially among children of the privileged elite, the so-called priviligentsia. The result? More opportunists and butchers than doctors and surgeons.
Yet education wasn’t the worst part of Soviet life. We all had access to it, and those who worked hard could make the most of it. The real misunderstanding about socialism lies in the myth that people fled the Soviet Union to escape it. That’s an oxymoron. You couldn’t leave the Soviet Union when socialism was in full force.
Just look at Andrei Sakharov—the renowned Soviet nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He became one of the regime’s most outspoken dissidents, while his wife, Yelena Bonner, longed to leave as pressure mounted on her family. But with his high-level security clearance, Sakharov was forbidden from traveling abroad. When he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 but was barred from attending the ceremony, Bonner accepted it on his behalf in Oslo, using the moment to amplify his voice against Soviet repression. She often served as his voice when he was silenced or under surveillance.
Bonner’s children from a previous marriage emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1970s under duress. She and Sakharov, however, were never allowed to leave. Instead, they became symbols of moral resistance, pushing for reform from within.
Born Lusik Georgiyevna Alikhanova in 1923 in what is now Turkmenistan, Bonner had a richly complex background. Her biological father, Levon Kacharyan, was Armenian. Her mother, Ruf “Ruth” Bonner, was a Jewish communist activist from Siberia. Her stepfather, Gevork Alikhanyan, was a key Armenian communist and the founding First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia. Deeply connected to her Armenian heritage, Bonner later became a vocal advocate for Armenian rights, particularly during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. She and other Moscow intellectuals played a role in igniting a separatist war—one that ended tragically for Armenia but proved beneficial for the Kremlin: Divide et impera—when you can’t save the empire, divide and rule. But that’s a topic for another column, ideally published in Armenia, where nobody knows how to find me and kick me to the curb for speaking treason.
The point of this detour into the Sakharov-Bonner family history is that not many of us were nuclear physicists. Our struggle for freedom was on a completely different scale. We were simply trying to survive.
In his wonderfully complex literary short story “From, To,” published in the print edition of “The New Yorker” magazine on April 6, author David Bezmozgis captures this tension through the reflections of a Soviet Jewish protagonist mourning his mother’s death while his daughter protests against Israel at her elite university:
“His family escaped a totalitarian regime that persecuted them and now complain about opportunistic and culturally incompatible immigrants who seek to transform their adoptive country into a version of their regressive, Jew-hating, theocratic homelands. In short, his family are essentially fascists, comfortable with totalitarianism if it suits them. Not just his family. He is convinced that this is true of most people. Democracy is a discipline, like diet and exercise, strenuous and irksome. Sooner take a pill or eat cake.”
As a former Soviet citizen, I agree with Bezmozgis—while also taking pride in the profound contributions of Jewish intellectuals to Soviet science, culture and the arts. Figures like physicists Andrei Sakharov, Zhores Alferov, Lev Artsimovich, and Boris Podolsky; mathematicians such as Grigori Perelman, Naum Akhiezer, Grigory Margulis, Israel Gelfand, Vladimir Arnold, and Boris Delone; and cultural icons like Vladimir Vysotsky, Isaac Babel, Marc Chagall, and psychologist Lev Vygotsky all left an indelible mark on Soviet intellectual life.
Their achievements are undeniable, even as they—and many others—faced discrimination. But it is important to remember that in the Soviet Union, marginalization was not limited to one group. It was a system that oppressed broadly and indiscriminately. People from the Caucasus were mocked for their fiery tempers and dark features; Central Asians were stereotyped as indolent; and the Indigenous peoples of the Russian Arctic—collectively and reductively labeled “Chukchi”—endured relentless ridicule while bearing the brunt of resource extraction, settler colonialism, and the devastating spread of European diseases.
The Soviet regime didn’t just target Jews—it suppressed the dignity and identity of all its people. On a personal level, my younger self had my dignity crushed daily: denied an appointment with a semi-literate hair stylist who only served the well-connected elite; my father unable to buy a factory-fresh lemon on four wheels without the right connections; my mother unable to find proper clothing or shoes that fit me—let alone blue jeans or Beatles records.
We survived all that. But when the system collapsed, our bleak yet predictable socialist future dissolved into a big, fat question mark. Huddled in tight-knit circles of friends and family, we searched for ways to escape.
The largest wave of emigration came during and after Perestroika, when Gorbachev dismantled the Communist Party’s grip on power. Families like mine did not leave our ancestral homes because of socialism itself—we left because of war, economic collapse and despair. We did not flee socialism. We fled its ruins.
Dr. Gayane Torosyan is a professor of media studies in the Department of Communication and Media at SUNY Oneonta.
