Psikhushka
Anyone acquainted with the word freedom
will find nothing unexpected in its return from the dead.
Both Lavrentiy Beria and Nikita Krushchev
are expecting it outside the Kremlin Wall,
while the champions of social justice stare
in disbelief, as if the term, ‘corrective labour camp’
could still re-educate the intelligentsia,
though the Gulag is long gone into history.
So memory fades with each ringing of the clock,
and every uprising and massacre is drowned
in cries of derision from the floor. Who will hear a word
of Vorkuta or Kengir or Novocherassk –
when all the party faithful condemn
the only speaker who dares to tell the truth?
So the war for the past goes on; the struggle of man
against forgetting unravels in the meeting-room,
the lecture theatre, police cell and public bar
where brother turns against brother
in unforgettable disgrace, as once again,
and not for the last time, ‘the enemy of the people’ is named.
Anyone acquainted with the word freedom
will find nothing unexpected in its return from the dead.
In modern Europe, everyone is expecting it,
except, of course, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
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* Psikhushka - a Russian colloquialism for "psychiatric hospital",
as run by the NKVD to house dissidents.
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