Earlier this month, I shared my visceral reaction to discovering Danzig Baldaev’s drawings from inside the Soviet Union gulag system. Those horrific images warn us that escalating threats to our freedoms in America could eventually lead to the same twisted torments in Soviet gulags. After months of closely following U.S. politics and researching the Soviet experiment in my English graduate class, I’ve become even more aware of the disturbing parallels between authoritarian history and our current American political hellscape.

Week after week, my class readings have shown the importance of preserving historical records and sharing personal experiences in the face of oppression. Obliteration of history is not new. Abusers of power have always done this to the communities that threaten them, suppressing resistance through hegemonic mass control. The Trump Administration is making every attempt to erase history right now and is utilizing foreign gulags to imprison immigrants without any due process. The purpose of this blog series is to challenge these malicious threats to our freedoms and to refuse erasure through the act of documentation. 

One of the books we read in class this month was Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg. It’s an autobiographical recounting of the first few years Ginzburg was imprisoned, and sentenced to solitary confinement, in brutal Soviet gulags. She shows how language and literature sustains the human spirit even in the face of terror.

Even the daily increasing severity of the prison regime could not damp the joyful excitement which we felt at the opening of the library. If it would only not shut again!

Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, p. 206

Ginzburg centers the role of libraries, books, poetry, letters, prison tap code, whispers, and encrypted argot and demonstrates how acts of language foster social connection and provide solace in the bleakest of circumstances. For long periods of her imprisonment, Ginsburg was at times deprived of books and relied on her memory. Much to her astonishment, she was able to conjure and recite entire pages from her mind. She also wrote poems and shared them with cellmates, providing both emotional and intellectual nourishment. Similarly to Ginzburg, writing is my tool for bearing witness in an era of political and cultural deletion. Just as literature sustained Ginzburg in prison, our written, spoken, or even remembered words can provide a salve against political violence. Journey into the Whirlwind reminds us that knowledge is not only power but sustenance to those deprived of words.

Another profound takeaway from Ginzburg’s testimony was how she stays true to her ethics and principles despite the consequences: even if the result is prison, exile, and torture. She sacrifices everything to uphold her core values. Sadly, she is still falsely convicted and locked up.

Is this what I may face for writing this blog series? Is this what we have to look forward to in America if we resist erasement and share our stories? Does Ginzburg’s text lay out the future of anyone in the U.S. who thinks differently than the MAGA cult? I mean, it didn’t even require that Ginzburg, or her falsely accused contemporaries, think or speak or write out of line with Stalinism exactly. They were accused and tortured or murdered merely for being an intellectual threat. Just the sheer possibility of resistance was enough to destroy their lives and torment their souls.

The bombardment of such authoritarian sadism and gaslighting that Ginzburg unveils in her book acts as a cautionary tale especially considering the erosion of rights currently happening within the U.S. The parallels of truth distortion, institutionalized fear, and democratic backsliding really hits home in a way that is utterly terrifying. 

The deliberate process of divide and conquer that comes with truth distortion is especially insidious when considering the family dynamics for me and many other Americans right now. Recently, I experienced a moment of much-needed reconnection with a relative, after months of avoiding them over political disagreements. I thought they voted for Trump because most of my family did, so I distanced myself to avoid conflict. We finally spoke this week. The conversation was unexpectedly beautiful: full of love and empathy. When I took the risk of sharing my vulnerability, they understood why I feel alienated and shared their regret for trusting Trump. They acknowledged that his promises about the economy were hollow, and his handling of immigration is brutally unforgivable. 

That conversation felt like a small act of resistance against the political forces that seek to divide us. Our reconciliation reaffirmed the power of human connection, especially within the family system. I didn’t realize how much I needed the mutual understanding and compassion we shared, particularly in a world that increasingly seeks to erase nuance, empathy, and truth.

I learned from my relative that they did not even vote because they had voter apathy due to the bread and circus of the last election. I made an assumption that they had voted for Trump because of the fanaticism I witnessed from the majority of my family that this person didn’t push back against and thus tolerated. I misinterpreted their silence as participation, but, although this person had hoped Trump would foster a healthier economy, my relative was actually disillusioned by the election’s train-wreck spectacle and its use as a diversion. I am so grateful we were able to overcome the ideological barriers foisted upon us in today’s polarized environment. It was our empathizing and curious love that saved our relationship that the MAGA cult seeks to erase and destroy on a microcosmic level.

On a macrocosmic level, nothing says erasure like stripping words and images from public institutions that preserve our collective reality. Like scrubbing web content of federally banned words: Black, diversity, women, people, trauma¹. I was just in Washington, D.C. and spent hours inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The exhibits documented the U.S. slavery system, segregation, and Black resistance through hip-hop and the Civil Rights Movement. Witnessing displays of slave ships and the global participation in enslavement reinforced the urgency of preserving history so it is neither forgotten nor repeated. 

The very institutions dedicated to safeguarding these atrocious historical facts are under attack right now, with the Smithsonian Institution facing federal funding cuts for promulgating “improper ideology” under the so-called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History executive order, which is more accurately destroying truth and adding insanity to American history.

This absurd and bizarro executive order, with its totalitarian tactics, embodies institutionalized censorship the anarcho-punk of my youth warned me and my friends about! Back then, I knew it was possible, but I never imagined I’d witness such blatant disregard for humanity in America within my lifetime. Clearly, I was naïve. 

I hope the American people start to recognize that imperialist governments maintain control by dividing the population. They manufacture stark divisions and fuel in-fighting to tighten their stranglehold on power and impose total domination. They pit citizens, classmates, co-workers, and families against each other. It’s a gradual decline through the use of propaganda and political gaslighting, which were favorite hits during the Soviet experiment. The United States government’s use of biopolitical manipulation — state tactics for controlling bodies and minds — mirrors the very methods once employed by the U.S.S.R., revealing a deep hypocrisy. Some of the cracks in our current iteration of the U.S. government reflect Soviet-era strategies: controlling the media; erasing words, literature, images, and histories; arresting, interrogating, and imprisoning innocent people and torturing them into false confessions of espionage or other political crimes. This is exceptionally ironic considering the Red Scare during the Cold War period when Russian and communist ideologies were a threat and even made to be illegal in our country via the Communist Control Act of 1954.

One of my favorite social critics, Noam Chomsky, exposes how power structures usurp population control by instigating divisions among populations in The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many. He states that “any conqueror is going to play one group against another,”² pointing out that at the height of British rule in India, they maintained dominance with fewer than 150,000 British personnel, relying instead on Indian forces to subjugate their own people³. In the same chapter, Chomsky argues this pattern extends beyond colonial rule: from Nazi-occupied Europe, where local populations assisted in rounding up Jewish people; to the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, where American forces leveraged tribal conflicts. Chomsky argues that “invaders quite typically use collaborators to run things for them,” manipulating existing rivalries to sustain power⁴. He forewarned that:

If the United States was conquered by the Russians, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Elliott Abrams and the rest of them would probably be working for the invaders, sending people off to concentration camps. They’re the right personality types.

– Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few And the Restless Many: “Divide and Conquer,” p. 58 

Can this argument also be applied to Donald Trump and Elon Musk in their relation to Vladimir Putin? Is the answer already unfolding before us? Ginzburg’s gulag testimony and Baldaev’s gulag drawings reveal that bearing witness is the last defense against eradication. Likewise, the Smithsonian museums show that history can be preserved if we fight for it. What are you willing to sacrifice for your freedoms? For your access to obscured truths? For your love(s) to remain strong?

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Like this post? Please check out the rest of the series:

• Witness & Resist: An Open Letter to Assata Shakur, an Ex-Political Prisoner of the U.S. in Exile
• Witness & Resist: A Nonconformist’s Backstory
• Witness & Resist: Refusing Erasure Under Institutionalized Censorship
• To Bear Witness is To Resist

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End Notes

1. https://pen.org/banned-words-list/ ↩︎
2. Chomsky, Noam. The Prosperous Few And The Restless Many: “Divide and Conquer,” p. 57. https://archive.org/embed/prosperousfewth00chom ↩︎
3. Chomsky, Noam. The Prosperous Few And The Restless Many: “Divide and Conquer,” pp. 57-58, https://archive.org/embed/prosperousfewth00chom ↩︎
4. Chomsky, Noam. The Prosperous Few And The Restless Many: “Divide and Conquer,” pp. 57-58, https://archive.org/embed/prosperousfewth00chom ↩︎