... On our first meeting, Alek told me that there would be a lot less evil in the world if people did not lie. Then he went on to define the word lie: It's not a lie when a man onstage says he is Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, when everyone knows that he is not. It's not a lie when someone introduces himself as Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, because everyone knows that Pushkin is dead. It's not a lie when someone makes a mistake, or misspeaks, or says something that isn't true while knowing that no one can hear him. And, finally, it's not a lie to prove a mathematical problem ad absurdum, by ruling out all unlikely solutions. A lie is told when you say that something is true while knowing that it isn't (or vice versa) and your interlocutor has not given you consent, implied or otherwise, to be told something that isn't true. Alek's was not a puritan ethic. "Feel free to cheat on your spouse, drink in places where you aren't supposed to, inject narcotics, or whatever else you wish to do," he said. "Do whatever you want to do - as long as you don't have to lie to be able to continue doing it." I am reasonably sure that on our first meeting Alek told me what he thought of the Soviet Union's constitution. At that time he rarely talked about anything else. The constitution, Alek said, was a good document, as was the Soviet legal code. The idea was to get the state to live by its own laws. Soviet citizens had been conditioned to act as if they had no rights, Alek argued. The state had come to encroach on individual rights because individuals had yet to band together to defend those rights. As a result, Stalin was able to murder millions of law-abiding citizens without so much as a hearing. But what would happen if citizens acted on the assumption that they have rights? If one person did it, he would become a martyr; if two people did it, they would be labeled an enemy organization; if thousands of people did it, they would be a hostile movement; but if everyone did it, the state would have to become less oppressive. One major point was to force the state into conducting all trials openly, under the conditions of glasnost, said Alek. His words registered, as they did many times thereafter. But all of it seemed too logical to be applicable to real life. The word glasnost had been in the Russian language for centuries. It was in the dictionaries and lawbooks for as long as there had been dictionaries and lawbooks. It was an ordinary, hardworking, nondescript word that was used to refer to a process, any process of justice or governance, being conducted in the open. The word had no political meaning, and until Alek Esenin-Volpin pulled it out of ordinary usage, it generated no heat. Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1990
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