If you’ve decided that the West is too woke, violent, corrupt, whatever, you can now apply for citizenship in Russia, under a so-called ‘Shared Values Visa’. (Watch the video below for more details.)
The Shared Values Visa is new…but not really. The Kremlin has a long history of rolling out the red carpet for westerners who are disillusioned with life in their home countries.
During the Great Depression, several thousand Americans, Canadians, and Europeans moved to the USSR to escape “capitalist corruption” and live in a “workers’ paradise”. Many of these emigres were among the first folks to go into the gulags during Stalin’s subsequent purges.
Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s assassin, defected to the USSR from 1959 to 1962. Overall, Oswald’s Soviet adventure did not work out. But he returned to the USA with a Russian wife. The rest of Oswald’s story is a tragic one, both for him and the rest of the world.
No, this isn’t where I segue into a conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination. (I have no novel insights on that matter.) My point is: westerners defecting to Russia for one reason or another is nothing new. This has been happening since the earliest days of the USSR, a hundred years now. And it has never really ceased.
(I might also suggest that you watch the movie Reds (1981) if you haven’t seen it.)
Once again, a knowledge of history comes in handy for decoding the present. History often repeats itself, with only a few superficial changes.
And so it is here, with Russia’s ‘Shared Values Visa’. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
-ET
**View books about the history of the Soviet Union on Amazon!