Later, the drive to conform would take a leading role. This produced what Gudkov meant by “doublethink”: it was not the bizarre state described by Orwell but rather a habitual, almost passive fragmentation, when people thought different, often utterly contradictory things at different times and in different situations—whatever they needed to think in order to conform at that particular moment. This, more than anything else, guaranteed that no effective resistance was possible in the Soviet Union: fragmented people could not form and sustain relationships of solidarity and could not
...more
