Navalny on Soviet Deception

Perhaps I'll post some more on Alexei Navalny's memoir when I've read more of it. (I'm about a hundred pages in at the moment.) But I thought it worth noting his memories from his childhood about how the Soviet government responded to crises. This is in the third chapter, which is the first chapter that narrates his childhood. Chapters 1–2 are on the poisoning he suffered in 2020. 

Navalny was born in 1976, and when he was ten years old part of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. Chernobyl is a couple hours' drive north of Kiev. 

The standard and completely moronic response of the Soviet—and subsequently of the Russian—authorities to any crisis is to decide that it is in the interests of the population that they should be lied to endlessly. Otherwise, the reasoning goes, people are sure to run out of their homes, rush around in a state of anarchy, set buildings on fire, and kill each other!

The truth of the matter is that nothing of that sort has ever happened. In most cases the population is prepared to behave in a rational and disciplined manner, especially if the situation were to be explained to them and they were told what needed to be done. Instead, as I have since seen on a less dramatic scale many times, the first official reaction is invariably to lie. There is no practical benefit to the officials doing so; it is simply a rule: In an awkward situation, lie. Play down the damage, deny everything, bluff. It can all be sorted out later, but right now, at the  moment of crisis, officials have no option but to lie, because the imagined idiot population is not yet ready for the truth. 

In the Chernobyl affair, it is pointless to look for even a scintilla of rationality. God forbid the people should have been told to stay indoors for a week and not go outside unless absolutely necessary. In Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine with a population in the millions, a May Day parade was held just five days after the explosion, for the same propaganda purposes—to pretend that all was well. We know now how those decisions were made. The leaders of the Communist Party, sitting in their offices, wanted foremost to ensure that neither the Soviet people nor—horror of horrors—foreigners should know anything about the atomic disaster. The health of tens of thousands of people was sacrificed in the cause of a grand cover-up that was ridiculous, because the radioactive fallout was so extensive it was registered by laboratories all over the globe. (p. 31)

He also describes how his parents were afraid of Soviet agents listening in to their conversations in their house through the telephone, so when they started talking about anything that might be construed to be critical of the government, his mom would hide the phone under a pillow. “Here were grown-ups talking about completely ordinary matters, like the impossibility of finding Bulgarian ketchup in the shops and having to get in the queue for meat at five o’clock in the morning. I could not see what there was to be afraid of. … That meant there must be people not allowing you to say what was obviously true” (p. 43).