Living under authoritarian regimes is both relatively boring and normal AND incredibly corrosive to the human soul. These things can absolutely co-exist.
This is why everyone needs to resist authoritarians, even people who privately assume they’ll be just fine.
The damage this causes across generations (even if the regime is short lived!) is so hard to grasp if you haven’t lived with it. It touches every aspect of life. It makes trust impossible, and without some level of trust and a belief in the possibility of justice, *nothing in society works.*
I visited the USSR as a teenager and I'm reasonably certain I spoke to a KGB agent assigned to our group to pay attention to young adults.
And she clearly was so insanely bored with her job that she stepped in to translate for me and an Estonian woman when we were trying to get into the one disco.
we had a MSS (or something similar) minder at my workplace in china. it was extremely obvious, even the students made jokes about the spy. very nice guy, spoke near native english. office conversation sure dried up real quick after he was "hired"
Yeah, her English was idiomatic — we were sneaking them+a guy named Alex back into our hotel to listen to music and hang out and talk, and we asked her if she knew what yeah meant, to say to the hotel security, and she listed about 10 synonyms like that. Super pretty too. Just no way she wasn't.
The next day, I, the Estonian woman, and the KGB woman went to a cafe for a drink and one of the older people on the tour realized what the heck was going on and decided to go along with me. lol.
just to be clear here, though I think I was 17?, I looked 13 but I had absolute confidence in being able to talk to people if they talked to me first. which both of the women did. so we just talked and listened to music and met up to go to a cafe the next day.
