Freedom’s Price

Freedom has an everyday price that is less lofty than the orator’s “eternal vigilance,” less expensive than the taxpayer’s big defense budget, and so much a part of this country that few Americans ever think about it.

The price includes competing for jobs, with winners and losers. For some people it is falling through cracks in society, sometimes even through the safety net. Sometimes it is a factory going out of business and the need to find another job or move on. It is a price that comes wrapped in cliches like “nothing ventured, nothing gained” and “dog eat dog.” At its worst, the price is the fear of being mugged by people looking for the wherewithal to pay the price.

For some the price is out of reach, as it was for 50 Soviet emigres, some of whom came to the United States as long ago as 1977 and went home to Moscow last week.

The exodus no doubt seemed strange, certainly ungrateful, to Americans for whom competition, and winning some and losing some, is second nature. But the tug of the motherland is particularly strong for many Russians, and breaking with a society that is protective, if clumsy and crude, often is agonizing. The pull of family, left behind, may be even stronger.

Making simple decisions--like which of dozens of different patterns and colors of shirts to buy--often verges on the impossible for people who grow up virtually without choices, even in such matters as their life’s work. Housing is in short supply in Moscow, but it is free. Free housing is no way to prepare a person for the relentless advance of the due date for the rent.

Valery Klever and his wife, Lidiya, both of whom are artists, left the Soviet Union in the first place because the government shut down their exhibit of abstract paintings. What they found in the United States was a kind of “tough freedom,” in a life dominated by worries about where they would find the money to pay the bills. The history of art, not only in America but the world over, is cluttered with artists who felt the same way.

Soviet leaders, with their new deft touch in public relations, will wring some propaganda value from the exodus, particularly if it is true, as they say, that the Soviet embassy in Washington is processing 1,000 more applications for repatriation. The Soviets will put it to the world that 50 people who have tasted American freedom have opted for Soviet communism instead. What they in fact did was opt for Moscow, Baku, Leningrad or Odessa in a package deal that included a Soviet version of communism that Karl Marx would have disinherited.

Whatever the exodus means in propaganda terms, it provided a rare chance to focus on very real differences in culture and values between the two nations and their people. It helps explain the resistance to General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms. It is further evidence of the thick streak of conservatism and distaste for change in Soviet society.

The two most militarily powerful countries on Earth might be able to live into infinity with these differences in values. Bridging the differences would take generations, but that makes opening up Soviet society and making it easier for its citizens to travel and learn all the more urgent. The episode also serves as a reminder that life is indeed harsh not only for immigrant Soviets but also for many Americans. And a reminder that those who enjoy and prosper while they pay the everyday price of freedom must never lose their compassion for those who cannot make it.