Alone In The New Russia

In 1947 Hans Fallada wrote
one of the first anti-Nazi novels
to be published after World War Two.

It was a fiction based on the experience
of real life couple Otto and Elsie Hampel,
who filled anonymous postcards with comments
that were factual and critical of the Third Reich
which they left anywhere they could leave them
without being traced. They left the postcards
as acts of resistance against a government
that believed in it's own omniscience.

'Alone in Berlin' broke the author,
who was driven to be an alcoholic
through fifteen years of struggling
to write fiction worth reading
that got past the Nazi censors.
with them gone, both he and his country
were broken, seemingly beyond repair.

He had to see what was still there,
what was good, and was still intact,
and in 'Alone in Berlin' he found it.

Now Russia is at war,
it's citizens live under censorship,
but some citizens have taken a leaf
out of Hans Fallada's
handbook of quiet resistance;
on some supermarket shelves
where there should be descriptions
of the goods on the shelf above,
there are one sentence reports
that say more about Ukraine
than the media are permitted to share.

Some citizens have been caught
in the act of changing the price tags
for news they can believe,
because in the Hans Fallada book
there were no security cameras.

But modern Russian citizens
know, just like Fallada did,
that freedom of information
has no price - which is why
their government disallows it.