Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
A few days ago, Turkish student Rümeysa Öztürk was walking down the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, looking for the restaurant where she had arranged to have dinner with some friends. A man blocked her path; she tried to continue walking when five more men, police officers in civilian clothes, took her phone and backpack and, after handcuffing her, put her in a car. They took her 1,500 miles away from home, to a detention center in Louisiana, for having published an article about Gaza in the university press. Without a trial. For 48 hours nobody heard anything about her: neither her attorney not her college. Furthermore, nobody knew that, without any notification, the Department of Home Security had arbitrarily canceled her student visa, thus making her illegal. (Regarding this procedure, Secretary of State Marco Rubio proclaimed to the press that his department had already revoked more than 300 legal statuses and that there would be more: “Every day we look for this kind of lunatics.”) Öztürk, who suffers from asthma, was unable to access her medication or call her lawyer, something that also happened to other foreigners detained in a similar way: Germans, Russians, Canadians.
Öztürk’s case makes me think of the people who were detained in the totalitarian communist regimes of the 20th century. A few years ago I interviewed a dozen women sentenced to years or decades in the gulag, during Stalinism and after it, who told me similar stories. The Spanish classical singer Lina Prokofiev, wife of the composer, was kidnapped in the late 1940s in the street by the Soviet secret police during her stay in Moscow. She was taken to prison and from there to the Siberian gulag where she spent seven years in the freezing cold cutting wood and peeling potatoes. Irina Emelianova, the daughter of Olga Ivinskaia, Boris Pasternak’s last love, was arrested by the KGB after the poet’s death in 1960, along with her mother, and sent to the gulag, while Irina’s French boyfriend, Georges Nivat, after being poisoned, was put on a plane that took the expert in Russian literature far from the Soviet border. This was the regime’s revenge for the publication of the novel Doctor Zhivago abroad.
Arbitrariness, persecution and lack of respect for the rule of law is what best defines totalitarian regimes. Without going any further, I think of my father. In the 1950s, he was a young university professor living with my mother in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia within the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. One day, my parents were woken by the doorbell in the middle of the night. Two men in leather coats took my father to prison where – resorting to torture – they tried to get him to collaborate with the secret police and denounce his colleagues at the university. My father did not give in to the pressure of the secret police, so the early morning ringing and banging on the door was repeated over and over again; my mother never knew when her husband would return or if he would return at all.
Since Trump came to power, the lawmakers of several states have proposed a reward for those who find undocumented immigrants. In communist countries, denunciations were paid for with favors, so that if someone coveted a flat, it was enough to denounce its tenant so that he would soon end up in the gulag and the flat would be awarded to the denouncer. As in the Stalinist era, those expelled from the United States can end up in the dreadful prisons of San Salvador or Guantanamo. In a recent article, the journalist Masha Gessen talks about groups formed on purpose to carry out the denunciations and purges. Gessen makes special mention of the entity Documenting Jew Hatred, which has begun to identify professors at Columbia University who, according to the group, should be purged.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also just called on US diplomats not to issue visas to anyone who has criticized the current administration or Israel, even if the criticism consisted of a heart under an Instagram post. This is how autocrats behave: Russia stopped issuing visas to journalists critical of the war against Ukraine. In the communist Prague of my childhood there were no foreigners to be found admiring the views from Charles Bridge because they were afraid to travel to a country where they would be watched, pestered and possibly harassed. Similarly, I know a number of European and Asian writers, journalists and scientists who have canceled their business trips to the United States. The American historian Timothy Snyder recently told me why he and his wife, the professor Marci Shore, had decided to move to Canada.
Many of the things currently happening in the United States remind me of what took place during my childhood. We were well aware of the words and concepts that were ‘not recommended’ – in other words, forbidden – by the communist regime. The Trump administration has also published its list of “not recommended” terms; among the hundred or so entries are such everyday words as “women”, “victim”, “trauma”, “sex”, “sexuality”, “immigrants”, “racism”, “identity”, “gender”, “expression”, “diversity” and “activism”. Censorship, which those of us who have experienced totalitarianism know so well, is beginning to take hold in the United States. In February, the five largest US publishing houses took to the courts to challenge the banning of certain novels in schools and libraries, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Regimes such as the communist one or the one being imposed by Trump like to create chaos so that there is no rule other than unpredictability. And unpredictability breeds fear: everyone knows that the regime can corner them at any moment. That is why musicians like Shostakovich in the Soviet Union, writers like Václav Havel and scholars like my father in Czechoslovakia slept badly with their briefcase ready for prison under the bed while they anxiously tried to pick up the slightest noise in the night. My friends in the United States tell me that they have begun to notice signs of fear, both among Americans and foreigners: the latter are afraid of being deported. The streets in neighborhoods inhabited mainly by immigrants are becoming empty: people are afraid to leave their homes. Many undocumented immigrants have stopped showing up for work and children are not going to school. Americans are afraid of losing their jobs. Self-censorship is spreading. In the seventies, after the Soviet invasion, my father saw how the authorities were throwing his colleagues out of the university and replacing them with trusted people who were not experts on the subjects they taught, but obeyed the political guidelines of the day. That is why in the seventies my parents made the painful decision to go into exile with their children. Just like Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore have done these days.
When I look at Elon Musk who, like the communist authorities in my home country, has fired tens of thousands of workers from different areas, I can’t help thinking of the persecuted of the 20th century, a century of ideologies and wars whose logic has invaded the present century and filled it with more autocracies and wars, and again with citizens living in fear, threatened and harassed in the country that until two months ago was the paradigm of freedom.
