Life under Socialism: Recounted by Zina Brodovsky

This article is the first of what will be a multi-part series on life under socialism, recounted by people who’ve actually lived under socialism.

In this initial article, Brad Zinn* interviews Zina Brodovsky*, a naturalized US citizen who lived under Soviet socialism and communism in the former USSR.

Americans who think socialism sounds like a great way to achieve “fairness” and “social justice” should listen carefully to Zina’s story.  She knows firsthand how the real-life version of socialism works compared to any utopian university-faculty-lounge version.

This interview consists of three parts, each less than 15 minutes for a total of 39 minutes. You can listen to the whole interview or use the time slider on the video to choose topics of interest from the index of topics below.

All three parts offer valuable insights, delivered from the heart, but I especially recommend the third part (at 38:15), where Zina delivers a message to her fellow Americans, so many of whom have come to take America’s freedoms for granted and have been seduced by socialism’s false promises.

Fortunately for Zina, she could escape to America in 1987. But America has been moving visibly leftward toward socialism for more than a half-century. In fact, socialism’s full history in America goes back nearly 200 years and technically twice that far if one counts the 400-year-old socialism failure at the Pilgrims’ Plymouth Colony!

Related Article: The 1623 Project – When Socialism Failed, and Free Markets Won

Most importantly for today, socialists and Marxists, whether implicitly or explicitly declared, now have nearly full control of one of our major political parties. Aided (indeed some would say led) by a complicit media, the outlines of a future socialist America are beginning to appear.

For example …

Today’s censorship and “cancel culture” behaviors are a soft-core version of what a socialist American government would do, under color of law and at the point of a gun, to its citizens to regulate speech and thought.

Already today, tens of thousands of censors have been hired by Facebook, Twitter, and Google/YouTube. These censors are arguably a farm-team training group from which Big-Government can draw its own future thought police. Of course they’ll start by watching and listening for “systemic racism”, “hate speech”, and “harmful misinformation”. But that will quickly morph into anything that goes against The State.

Do you think nothing like that could ever happen here? Six months ago, did you think what you see in the news today could ever happen here?

Finally …

A big question for us, We the People, is this one: If and when a “transformed” America does become the kind of secular, socialist, tyrannical hell that Zina experienced in the USSR, what country will we Americans flee to? 

Part 1 – Life in the former USSR

00:27  Zina’s recollections of communist indoctrination growing up in Odessa, Ukraine, USSR
02:10 Zina’s first realization that the socialist promise was a lie
03:49  Government involvement in everything
04:45  Socialism’s false promise of “fairness”
05:20  The black market and corruption
06:20  First truths about Stalin era come to light after his death
07:25  Zina’s personal history, KGB intimidation, and emigration to America with her daughter
09:55 Departure via Moscow, more intimidation
11:34  The socialist view of capitalism
12:20  Socialism and the press

Part 2 – Soviet Socialism — Lies, Starvation, and Slavery

13:30  Famine in the Ukraine — 1921 — Government theft and murder — the Red Terror
15:25  Famine in the Ukraine — 1931,32 — Stalin’s murderous concentration camps
17:21  Pavlik Morozov — making a Soviet hero out of a boy who betrayed his family
19:20  Soviet brainwashing of youth
20:45  Famine leads to cannibalism, and the truth is hidden beneath press propaganda
21:39  Millions die of starvation, and the world is silent
23:15  The brutality of the 20th century eclipses all others combined
24:25  Soviet era deaths and slavery, all in service to the state
25:38  The false promises of Marxism — forced study of “dialectic materialism”

Part 3 – The Lessons of Socialism —  A Message for America

27:00  Zina’s first impressions of America, plentiful food and opportunity
28:10  American naïveté about sharing and “social justice”
29:20  How the Russian people started out believing in the promises of socialism
30:14  Could socialism work if the “right people” were in charge of it?
31:00  What happens when socialist governments gain power?
31:50  What happens to the idealists who start the revolutions?
33:00  What Zina thinks about “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations (today’s Marxist exploiters of BLM, Antifa)
34:00  Demonstrators should study how history repeats itself
34:15  Substitution of Communism for religion in the USSR
36:00  The worst of the horrors that Zina fortunately missed
38:15  Zina’s heartfelt message to her fellow Americans

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Disclosure: Brad Zinn is a professional entertainer, comedian, magician, and speaker from whom I learned much. I first met Zina Brodovsky when I filmed this interview, and I’ve been blessed to have her as a friend ever since. WesternFreePress.com is no longer online, but it was a leading conservative-friendly, independent news and opinion website operating from 2010 to 2020.