When a people grow accustomed to living in lies, shunning taboo writers, and conforming to the official story, it deforms their way of thinking, says Grygorenko—and that is very difficult to overcome. He is concerned by polls showing that Americans’ support for the First Amendment—which guarantees the constitutional right to free expression—is waning, especially among younger Americans, who are increasingly intolerant of dissenting opinion. Grygorenko sees this as a sign that society prefers the false peace of conformity to the tensions of liberty. To grow indifferent, even hostile, to free speech is suicidal for a free people.
“In this country, what we need to do is protect free speech,” says Grygorenko, who became a proud American citizen in 2019. “The First Amendment is important. For us, the Soviet constitution had no meaning. Everybody knew these were just words that had no relation to real life. In this country, the Constitution is meaningful. We have an independent judiciary. We have to protect it. We don’t need to invent anything new—we just need to have the courage to protect what we have.”
Defending the right to speak and write freely, even when it costs you something, is the duty of every free person. So says Mária Wittner, a hero of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation. A communist court sentenced Wittner, then only twenty, to death, though this was later commuted to life imprisonment.
“Once I said to one of the guards in prison, ‘You are lying.’ For that alone, I was taken to trial again,” remembers the feisty Wittner. “The state prosecutor said to me, ‘Wittner, why did you accuse the guard of being a liar? Why didn’t you just say, ‘You’re not telling the truth’? I said, ‘It matters that we speak plainly.’”
For her insolence, Wittner was sent back to prison with extra punishments. She had to sleep on a wooden bed with no mattress and was given reduced rations. By the time her sentence was commuted and she was released, Wittner weighed scarcely one hundred pounds. Nevertheless, she insists that a broken body is a price worth paying for a strong and undefiled spirit.
“We live in a world of lies, whether we want it or not. That’s just the case. But you shouldn’t accommodate to it,” she tells me as I sit at her table in suburban Budapest. “You will be surrounded by lies—you don’t have a choice. Don’t assimilate to it. It’s an individual decision for each person. If you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul. If your soul is free, then your thoughts are free, and then your words are going to be free.”
Under hard totalitarianism, dissenters like Wittner paid a hard price for their freedom, but the terms of the bargain were clear. Under soft totalitarianism, it is more difficult to see the costs of compromising your conscience, but as Mária Wittner insists, you can’t escape the decisions. You have to live in a world of lies, but it’s your choice as to whether that world lives in you.
Cherish Truth-Telling but Be Prudent
While it is imperative to fight assimilation to lies, combating the lies doesn’t mean refusing all compromise. Ordinary life, in every society, requires assessing which fights are worth having in a given context. Though one must guard against rationalization, prudence is not the same thing as cowardice.
As a Hungarian Boy Scout, Tamás Sályi’s father had been linked to a typewriter on which someone composed anti-Soviet propaganda. The year was 1946, and the Red Army occupied Hungary. All the Scouts connected to the typewriter suffered punishment—death, exile, or in the case of the elder Sályi, internment without charge in a prison camp.
In 1963, when Tamás was only seven years old, he came home from school and told his father how the Soviet Army had liberated their nation.
“He said, ‘Boy, sit down,’” Tamás remembers. “He began to tell me stories about the ’56 uprising and the Soviet invasion. He told me the truth, and when he finished, he warned me never to talk about that at school.”
Tamás glances down at the floor of his Budapest living room.
“We have so many problems today because fathers never talked to their sons as my father did to me in 1963.”
Tamás Sályi’s point is that parents were so afraid that their children would be punished for inadvertently telling the truth that they chose not to tell them the truth at all about their country’s history and regime. Sályi’s father, though he knew from personal experience how vicious the communists were, believed that his son deserved the truth—but should also be taught how to handle himself with it.
Judit Pastor, Tamás’s wife and a literature teacher at a Catholic university, also watched her father suffer from persecution—though his fate was much crueler. He was sacked as a military journalist for refusing to swear a loyalty oath to the government installed by the Soviets following the 1956 invasion.
Then, in 1968, outraged by the persecution of ethnic Hungarians by the communist government in neighboring Romania, Judit’s father went to a trade fair in Budapest, ripped down a poster of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu at Romania’s exhibit, and stomped on it. For that, he received eighteen months in jail.
It shattered him.
“Based on the Soviet method, it was common practice to label political prisoners mentally ill and give them treatment,” says Judit. “He got fifty electroshocks. He suffered a heart attack as a result of the electroshock, but it was never treated. His wasn’t an uncommon case.”
When Judit’s father was released, he was a shell of himself. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic, put on a medical pension, and reduced to living on the margins. Judit’s mother divorced him after a while. No one in the family spoke of it. Ever.
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