Comment: Soviets were the original snowflakes. They couldn't even take a joke, let alone a novel they didn't like.
Last night I finished watching the 12-part TV series adopted from Life and Fate (Amazon Prime; Russian with English subtitles). As you might expect, life in Soviet Union under Stalin was a dystopian nightmare where political persecution was so commonplace that various slang terms developed around it. For example, one character warns another "Don't you know you could get a 'tenner' [ten years in the gulag] for telling that joke?"
Comment: "Who built the White Sea Canal?" - "The left bank was built by those who told the jokes, and the right bank by those who listened."
It is easy enough to imagine how fortunate we are not to live in such a time and place. But as I watched the show, it dawned on me that such optimism may not be entirely warranted. There are disturbing parallels between life under Stalin and life under "progressive" ideology today, and maybe we are in the incipient stages of a revolution that will push us every closer to Uncle Joe's way of doing things.
Two examples will suffice to demonstrate my point. Cancel culture is Soviet-style denunciation writ small. Nuclear physicist Viktor Shtrum is the main character in the series. Viktor protests when his superiors fire a secretary in his office because she is Jewish. Despite his brilliant scientific work, his colleagues denounce him as an enemy of the state, and put him on the road to losing his livelihood, exactly like a victim of cancel culture today.
Comment: See also: Dead or alive? Washington ups bounty to $10M on Daesh leader Mawla