Yesterday, after many years, I re-watched the film of The Russia House. From the novel by one of my favorite authors John Le Carre.
The story takes place mainly in Russia during the pivotal days of Glasnost and Perestroika. A story about loyalties, duty, love of country, betrayal and inevitably, spies. I love the book and the movie no matter how many times I revisit it.. But this time it affected me in a very new way.
As the story rolled on, I was gripped by deep feelings of not only Russia, its vastness, starkness and implicit vigour which always stir me, but how it became the country that birthed Communism. An ideology I had never considered much having grown up in the West during the Cold War and constantly hearing how terrible and only terrible Communism was.
To add to that I am not too politically inclined. But watching that movie, the bleakness of the lives of the average Soviet citizens, the sameness of clothes and housing blocks and identical motor cars, I found myself feeling - I could live like that easily. How freeing to have so few choices about what is really very mundane stuff anyway. How unencumbered by excess and comparison. How adequate it is to have just enough, everyone, just enough and the same. (Forgetting for a moment of course the Elite who ruled the USSR and who had and took much more. The oppressions used to make the masses of the people adhere to this formula and not even dare to escape or challenge it. Forgetting all that for a moment.) Were the originators of Communism, I pondered, just trying to simplify all of living, to make it not about material possessions and differences which breed greed and corruption, envy and suffering? If they were thinking that, I could really live that way. Rather than the gaudy shine of consumerism we have grown to conflate with freedom in the West.
I just had that fleeting thought watching the film. As I say not a conclusion, just the germ of the notion how peaceful a life in a small but adequate home, with few possessions and a blandly simple lifestyle might feel. How much inner freedom that would allow within which all possibilities about more important things like art and inventions and love and inner growth could soar. Ideally.
Of course I know that is not how actual Communism played out. The irony of the fierce control and power it gave rise to in order to make people live with just the essentials allowed or proscribed and the suppression of the innate desire in each human to flourish as a soul. So I am not having any kind of wistful Socialist regression. I was just seeing for a flash what may have inspired the scheme for a new way of government way back in the early part of the 20th Century.
And with my fleeting glimpse I could understand for the first time why some people still idealize Communism. I can now see why. I would also, if the power and force and restrictions and repressions it seems to carry with it, did not come as part of the package.
Therein lies the rub I guess- every type of government, regardless of how revolutionary, implies top-down control. It goes that way. It is inborn in the system. Humanity has yet to find a way, it seems, that is not so inclined. One with the focus on what matters, enough for all and freedom for the best in everyone to arise. I believe we are evolving quickly towards that.
As I finished watching The Russia House I was overcome by sobbing not because of how it ended or its touching story. But shaken with what it made me think and feel: a kind of hope, hopefulness that goes beyond isms and ideologies. And the conviction that we can do it and we will. 
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