Joseph Brodsky: The Soviet poet who loved America — and distrusted ‘equality’

Those words, written by Joseph Brozky in 1986, drips with irony.

“To be ruled by nobody,” Brozky wrote.

Brozky, an exiled Russian poet, knew firsthand the tyranny. Born under Stalin, he was shaped under Khrushchev and later exiled under Brezhnev, where he overcomes the mechanical cruelty of the Soviet regime. It was a world where objections were not suppressed, they were criminalized.

dropout

From his early days, Brozky rebelled against the ubiquitous symbol of state control. He hated Lenin and was tired of seeing his face staring at him from banners and posters. At age 15, he dropped out of school and drifted through a series of strange tasks, including sewn corpses in the coroner's office. This was not a teenage rebellion. It was the system's refusal to request full submission.

His poems were initially apolitical and became a form of his quiet resistance. However, tyranny does not have tolerance for neutrality.

By the age of 24, Brodsky was branded as a “malicious social parasite.” The state-run newspaper dismissed his work as “pornography and anti-Soviet.” The arrests continued. In 1964 he was tried in a courtroom packed with secret police. The judge chuckled him as a “pseudo-poet of velvetine pants.”

Proclaimed five years of hard work, Brozky finds himself squeezing fertilizer and breaking rocks on a farm in northern Russia at sub-zero. He provided 20 months of this sentence and was abused before being released, but not broken.

Back in Leningrad, he moved with his parents to a cramped communal apartment. Their portion is only 100 square feet. Two blocks ahead, young Vladimir Putin grew up in a similar state, breathing the same suffocating air of national control.

In 1972, Soviet authorities stormed Brozki's apartment and declared him “non-in.” They expel him and thrust him onto the plane heading for Vienna. He never returned to Russia.

Joseph Brozky found shelter in America, a land he embraced with gratitude and love. Over the next 20 years he became famous, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and as a US Poet Award recipient in 1991. .

“Terrorism,” he once said, “will make the whole population a reader of the poem.” It is both a dark and hopeful statement, suggesting that at least oppression may awaken the human mind.

In “To a Tyrant,” Brodsky described both the ominous and ordinary characters. An aging dictator, limp, slowly leaning forward, drinking coffee, fantasizing about raising the dead in front of him into a bow. Brozky is a tyrant who believes he is inherently boring, driven not by imagination or vision but by fear and self-preservation.

However, he also recognized the unique efficiency of tyranny. The first brings order, security and stability. People accept it, not because they love oppression, but because they long for simplicity. Despotism will make up your life for you and save you the chaos of democratic competing voices and the burden of choice.

However, this order costs money. Despotism suppresses individuality and replaces it with identity. Over time, even the illusion of participation fades away. Public discourse fades into whispering compliance. Quarantine begins – not only for the people, but for the tyrants themselves.

In Brodsky's view, this isolation is the true engine of tyranny. Separated from the connections of real human beings, the tyrant grows his delusions and mistreats his fear of reality. Meanwhile, people become silenced and divided, and begin to accept oppression as normal. Doubt thrives. Everyone is lined up with the stigma of the people and the fear of private retaliation.

Brodsky argued that tyranny does not always announce itself with violence. More often, it appeals to our better instincts – providing safety, stability, shelter. It demonstrates its status as an escape from politics, and promises a world free of conflict and division.

But this is a big lie. Politics is an expression of freedom because of all its messiness. It is where individuality meets the community, and ideas clash and evolve. Despotism eliminates this complexity, replacing dialogue with instructions, and alternatives with commands.

Brozky saw this dynamic play in the Soviet Union, a lesson that transcends time and place. Today's tyrants cannot wear military uniforms or give fiery speeches. They may look like the rest of us, they blend in with the crowd. But their goals are the same. It is to depersonalize individuals and turn citizens into subjects.

Brozky warned that modern tyranny often clad in a language of equality and progress. It replaces the spirit of individualism with collective anonymity. “To be governed by nobody,” he wrote.

This insight is chilled by its simplicity. Terpotism does not require a single charismatic leader. It can thrive in the hands of a culture that prioritizes fitness for party, bureaucracy, or creativity.

For Brodsky, the antidote to tyranny was individualism. However, he acknowledged that true personality is a tough job. It requires self-awareness, courage and willingness to move away from the crowd.

Plato observed that a good ruler is someone who can rule over himself. It is in stark contrast to a tyrant, and can control others, but not his own impulse. The inability to control oneself is perhaps a critical feature of tyranny. It replaces violence for power and mistakes the brute force for true authority.

Yet, as Brodsky knew, tyranny is always temporary. It collapses under the weight of its own contradiction, unable to maintain the illusion of order indefinitely. When it falls, it is replaced – not always by something new, not by something better.

The question is not whether or not the tyranny will end, but what comes after that. Would you like to rebuild a society rooted in individuality and mutual respect? Or will we succumb to the same pattern, allowing fear and convenience, leading us to another tyrant's arm?

In his lifetime, Joseph Brozky never stopped asking these questions. He viewed tyranny as a spiritual issue, not a political issue. For him, the battle against oppression began with the soul – with the recognition that freedom is both rights and responsibility.

“The final judgment is the last judgment,” he once wrote.