Lessons from My Years in Soviet Russia

In 1983, when I first stepped off the plane in Moscow with the Association for Humanistic Psychology Exchange Project, I was entering a world tightly bound by the machinery of a one-party state. The Soviet Union was still under the command of an entrenched Communist Party, its borders guarded, its people monitored, its dissenters silenced.

Our 30 person delegation boarded a Soviet train in Helsinki headed to Moscow. When we crossed the Finnish-Soviet border, about 20 Soviet immigration officers boarded the train. We were told to stay in our rooms on our coach. One or two officials entered our rooms, and for the most part went through our luggage. In my case they found a letter from my Russian teacher in Atlanta. She asked me to go to her sister’’s home in the Leningrad area with the letter to introduce me. Amazingly, the Soviet official that found the letter let me keep it. Later, when we traveled to Leningrad, I located her sister and had a short and wonderful visit.

Over the next 17 years, I would make more than 20 working trips to six different Russian and Georgian cities—Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yaroslavl, Puschino, Chelyabinsk, and Tbilisi—witnessing the arc of history from the final years of Brezhnev through the Gorbachev thaw, the collapse of the USSR, and the turbulent rise of the Russian Federation. We developed relationships with Soviet/Russian schools in each city. In Moscow, Tbilisi, and Leningrad (later St. Petersburg), we signed agreements with research institutes that were part of the Pedagogical Institute of Russia.

A Watchful Eye

I came as an educator, not a spy or a politician. However, after I had made 5 trips to the USSR, I received a call at while in my office at Georgia State University. He said he was from the agency. Foolishly I asked which one. He said the CIA. He also asked if I could get a parking pass for him.

I greeted him the next day in my university office. He said he was there to find out why I had made five trips the Soviet Union. I explained the goals of the AHP exchange program and my desire to foster collaboration between American and Soviet schools and teachers. I had to leave my office for a couple of minutes.

When I returned he asked me about the books I had written that he saw on a book shelf. He asked if I brought them to Russia to put in hands of the people I met. I said that I took copies over the years. He seemed concerned. He asked if the the books would influence and have an effect on Soviet education. I said my books have had little effect on American schools. So, I don’t think you’ll have to be concerned. We shook hands and he left. Two years later I got another call from the same CIA officer. He asked me would I write him a recommendation for our university’s MBA program. Of course I did.

Crossing Borders

With the Global Thinking Project, I led about 20 delegations of American teachers—and later students—into the Soviet Union and Russia. In 1989 we carried a half-dozen Macintosh computers onto a Delta jet from Atlanta. After arriving in Moscow, we traveled to schools in Moscow and St. Petersburg and installed them ( with printers and 2400 baud modems) into six Soviet classrooms, connected schools across continents through one of the first U.S.–USSR telecommunications networks, and forged bonds between students who had been taught to see each other as enemies. Later we used federal grants to exchange hundreds of middle and high students.

The same happened when about 14 Russian delegations visited our schools and homes in the Georgia. American communities throughout the state embraced them in the same spirit. These human connections, forged in the shadow of state control, remain among the most enduring memories of my professional life.

Yet, in the background, there was the constant presence of state authority—permits, surveillance, handlers—reminding us that education and communication in a police state are always conditional, always monitored, always subject to sudden reversal.

In 1988 we planned for a delegation of 7 researchers and 3 teachers from Moscow and St. Petersburg to travel to Atlanta for two weeks. I received a phone call from the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences telling me that the teachers would not be traveling. To say the least, I was furious. I told my Soviet colleague that if teachers are not allowed to travel to us, I will consider stopping the exchanges. On the Soviet delegation the next year, half the people getting off the plane in Atlanta, were teachers. The Russians that traveled to Atlanta, and those who met us in Russia became our friends and colleague. When people interact person to person, barriers are broken and communication becomes open. Hundreds of Americans and Russians joined with each other for a long period of time.

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Echoes in Today’s America

Reading Lucian Truscott IV’s latest Substack, with its blunt talk of “mass arrests, purges, show trials, our very own homegrown Gulag,” I highly recommend this post of Lucian’s. It should be published far and wide. I know I’ll be sharing it.

I couldn’t help but feel a chill of recognition. In today’s United States, immigrants—documented and undocumented alike—are being rounded up in raids reminiscent of the Soviet-era oblava, (sweeps or round ups). ICE now wields a militarized enforcement budget of $178 billion, detention centers sprawl across the country such as Alligator Alcatraz in the Florida Everglades, and some deportees are shipped to offshore holding sites, echoing the Soviet practice of sending “undesirables” far from public view.

Today’s America, as Lucian Truscott says, is very different than we’ve ever seen here. He writes:

Coming on the heels of armed, masked, unnamed agents in full camo combat gear rounding up tens of thousands of people on the streets, out of schools, the hallways of court houses, and workplaces, this is Soviet style full-on political repression on steroids. I’ve seen the word “purge” a dozen times over the last week in stories about Trump’s “government.” I use scare-quotes around that word because it’s not a government that resembles anything we’ve had in this country over the last 250 years. It’s a political organization in the manner of the Communist Party of the 1930’s and 1940’s and 1950’s that took over a country and jailed opponents, subjected them to false charges in show-trials and either executed them or confined them in a country-wide Gulag of harsh concentration camps. Excerpt from Lucian Tuscott’s Newsletter, August 7, 2025.

The justifications differ—Moscow spoke of “protecting socialism from subversives”; Washington now speaks of “protecting the homeland from illegal aliens”—but the architecture of control feels hauntingly familiar:

• Mass surveillance, profiling and arrest based on language, skin color, or place of work.
• Indefinite detention without timely due process. Held in concentration-like camps (Alligator Alcatraz in the Everglades Swamp).
• Public intimidation through highly visible raids meant as deterrence.
• Delegitimizing dissent by branding critics as unpatriotic or enemies of the people.
• Indicting and prosecuting “enemies of the people.”

Here in America Trump’s political appointees from Homeland Security to the Department of Justice are breaking the law, and going after so called “enemies of the people.” Trump’s appetite for revenge insatiable according to Peter Wehner in an article in The Atlantic.

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The Soviet Playbook

My years in the USSR taught me that authoritarian systems rest on three intertwined pillars:

1. Monopoly on force – the police, military, and intelligence services operate not as public servants but as protectors of the regime.
2. Control of information – the state’s narrative dominates, while independent media is muzzled or co-opted.
3. Targeted repression – groups are singled out, both to neutralize perceived threats and to send a warning to the rest of society.

In the Soviet Union, the targets were dissidents, ethnic minorities, and those suspected of Western sympathies. In America today, immigrants—especially those from the Global South—are at the sharp end of these tactics. But immigrants from other parts of the world have been targeted by ICE and deported. And, as we learned in the USSR, repression rarely stops with the “undesirable” group; the machinery, once built, expands its scope.

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Why This Moment Matters

The fall of the Soviet Union taught me that even deeply entrenched systems can crack under the weight of public pressure, economic strain, and moral exhaustion. But it also taught me that transitions are fragile—and reversals are always possible. Russia’s own slide from the hopeful openness of the 1990s into Putin’s dictatorship should be a cautionary tale for Americans who believe “it can’t happen here.”

It is happening here. The early 21st-century American experiment in mass deportation, racialized policing, and loyalty-based governance is not a glitch; it is an intentional restructuring of power. And once these structures are normalized—militarized raids, vast detention networks, the erosion of due process—they will be available to any future administration, regardless of party.

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The Responsibility of Witnesses

Those of us who have lived under or studied authoritarian regimes carry a special obligation: to recognize the signs early, to speak plainly about the dangers, and to document the patterns before they harden into permanence. My years in Soviet classrooms taught me that human connection—across borders, ideologies, and languages—is the most powerful antidote to dehumanization. But connection alone is not enough; it must be paired with a vigilant defense of democratic norms.

In Moscow, I watched teachers and students marvel at their first unfiltered conversation with American peers. Over the nearly two decades that we worked hand in hand, Russian and American people knew how valuable trust and love made the difference in crossing borders. In America today, I watch as fear and division threaten to replace that sense of wonder with suspicion. The Trump administration is repeating, but with more cruelty, than what they did in their first term. You can read my version of Trump’s first term here.

The question before us is stark: will we allow the tools of a police state to become the default machinery of American governance, or will we dismantle them before they dismantle us? Will we act? Will be speak up, even to our friends and family? And will we join with others to fight the tyranny that has swept across this country.