The problem with that is all totalitarian governments spend massive amounts of time and effort making sure that their voice is the only one heard, and that everyone knows what the price of dissent and defection is. The average person might realize that they're being lied to and slowly starving to death, but everyone who leaves just disappears.
But I do agree with you in spirit, and I know people who defected from both countries. Hell, I know someone who defected on an embassy trip in Detroit in the 70s, because he realized that Detroit was the shittiest town in the US, and it was as nice as the average Soviet town.
The problem with that is all totalitarian governments spend massive amounts of time and effort making sure that their voice is the only one heard, and that everyone knows what the price of dissent and defection is. The average person might realize that they're being lied to and slowly starving to death, but everyone who leaves just disappears.
This comes to mind:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
The problem with that is all totalitarian governments spend massive amounts of time and effort making sure that their voice is the only one heard, and that everyone knows what the price of dissent and defection is. The average person might realize that they're being lied to and slowly starving to death, but everyone who leaves just disappears.
But I do agree with you in spirit, and I know people who defected from both countries. Hell, I know someone who defected on an embassy trip in Detroit in the 70s, because he realized that Detroit was the shittiest town in the US, and it was as nice as the average Soviet town.
This comes to mind:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956