Remembering a Father Who Was Born in the Soviet Union
Reason contributing editor Cathy Young remembers her father, who was born in the Soviet Union and died last month at age 75:
Born Alexander Jung in Moscow in 1935, my father was 12 when both his parents were imprisoned in the Gulag camps….
When I came home from school at the age of 7 and started talking about how lucky I was to live in the Soviet Union rather than under the capitalist yoke, my father decided to take matters into his own hands. Plenty of educated Russians in the 1970s were closet dissidents, but not many of them spoke frankly about politics in front of their children. My mother would often remind me to be discreet at school, and I would earnestly answer, "I know—or Daddy will go to jail."…
My father's candor was not limited to home and family. To him, one of the worst things about the Soviet regime was that it forced most of its subjects to live a lie; and that was something he tried to avoid as best he could….