| I don't have time for a long discussion so I will just address a few glaring points and then leave it at that: > Chernobyl Withholding information is not the same with lying. Many Americans still don't know about Three Mile Island, leave aside having any idea that the regulatory agency keeps reducing the safety standards for US reactors to keep 40+ year old reactors operating. > Korean Air Lines Flight 007 Where's the lie in that. Multiple times the USSR warned about violations of their airspace, and shot them down when they have not complied. > The Katyn massacre Reported by Nazis, whose memoirs worry about someone investigating the bullets found on the location and getting the event linked to the Germans. Even if you trust the Nazis, Soviets did not lie about the incident, they did not release any information. > * Soviet government always claimed that people’s living conditions in the Western countries were worse than in the Soviet Union Kennedy administration's internal memos say the same. Soviets were raising their life standards too fast. Which was 'worrying' because other countries could copy them and try 'independent development' (socialism), leaving US axis. Leading to what is today called 'the domino theory', and to Vietnam war and all the atrocities that followed it. Along with the arms and space race that the Kennedy administration started to starve them of GDP as economic warfare. There was no lie in it. They were correct. The reality is to the opposite and its so much worse - USSR told Soviets that there was much poverty in the US and there were a lot of homeless even in places like NY. Soviets did not believe them. ~40 years later, there are still Russians who believe that there are no homeless in the US. > Soviet-Finnish production that came out in 1986. By 1986, the Soviet administration was co-opted with many Yeltsinites doing whatever the US asked of them. There is no 'Soviet' at that point. They even went to the extent of doing EVERY single thing that the 'chicago boys' wanted. They did things that were not even imaginable as policies during Reagan era in the US. And sorry, but if a movie is your basis for opinion, your opinion stands on shaky grounds. Here is what the former citizens of the Eastern Bloc think. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-... I recommend you do your own independent reading. Starting from the cold war relic Angloamerican and satellite press and publications, you won't get anywhere near the truth. |
You completely missed the point. By the 80s standards of living in the US and Western Europe were vastly better than inside the USSR but the USSR lied to its population. This is why a movie showing average middle class life inside Finland was so shocking to the average Russian.
as for Korean Air Lines Flight 007 the USSR initially LIED and said they didn't shoot the plane down. They later admitted the TRUTH that they did shoot down the plane, but they lied about the true nature of the plane. The USSR also lied about "no remains of the victims, the instruments or their components or the flight recorders have so far been discovered". This statement was subsequently shown to be untrue by Boris Yeltsin's release in 1993 of a November 1983 memo from KGB head Viktor Chebrikov and Defence Minister Dmitriy Ustinov to Yuri Andropov. This memo stated, "In the third decade of October this year the equipment in question (the recorder of in-flight parameters and the recorder of voice communications by the flight crew with ground air traffic surveillance stations and between themselves) was brought aboard a search vessel and forwarded to Moscow by air for decoding and translation at the Air Force Scientific Research Institute." The Soviet Government statement would further be contradicted by Soviet civilian divers who later recalled that they viewed the wreckage of the aircraft on the bottom of the sea for the first time on September 15, two weeks after the plane had been shot down.
Concealing information IS lying when it comes to situations like this.
"Even if you trust the Nazis, Soviets did not lie about the incident, they did not release any information."
Soviet leaders insisted for decades that the Polish officers found at Katyn had been killed by the invading Germans in 1941. This explanation was accepted without protest by successive Polish communist governments until the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union allowed a noncommunist coalition government to come to power in Poland. In March 1989 this government officially shifted the blame for the Katyn Massacre from the Germans to the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. In 1992 the Russian government released documents proving that the Soviet Politburo and the NKVD had been responsible for the massacre and cover-up and revealing that there may have been more than 20,000 victims. In 2000 a memorial was opened at the site of the killings in Katyn.
Lie by omission https://www.google.com/search?q=Lie+by+omission