When I was ten years old, my father became ill. For a whole year, the Soviet medical system — the system that promised "free and the best in the world healthcare for all" — misdiagnosed him. They treated him for something he did not have while the real disease consumed him.
Finally, in 1962, the diagnosis came: ALS. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. A death sentence.
I must be clear about something: There was no cure for ALS in 1962. There is no cure today. No system — Soviet or American, socialist or capitalist — could have saved my father. This is not an accusation against Soviet medicine.
But what happened during the two years my father was suffering and dying — that is the accusation.
Our flat was forty square meters — about four hundred thirty square feet for Americans. Smaller than most studio apartments. In this space lived my father, my mother, my sister, and me. There was no privacy, no running water. We carried water from outside. There was no toilet — we used facilities in the courtyard. We heated our home with wood and coal through Ukrainian winters.
This was not poverty as Americans understand it. This was not a failure of my family. This was the standard. And even well above the standard by Soviet definitions applied to the town where we lived. This was what the declared socialist victory, the promised workers' paradise, provided for the middle-class minority of its citizens — everyone except the ruling class. This is what collectivism always delivers: equality of misery for the masses, privilege for the elite who support and enforce the system.
And in this space, for two years, I watched my father suffer and die.
Not from a distance. In forty square meters, there is no distance. There is no buffer. There is no room for a ten-year-old boy to look away. Every day. Every hour. Every minute when I was home. I watched his body betray him piece by piece while his eyes stayed the same. Aware. Present. Suffering.
I watched my mother exhausting herself trying to care for him. I watched my older sister sacrifice her youth to help. I watched them search desperately for medicine, for anything — because the state that had declared victory and promised paradise had given us forty square meters and little else.
When central planners control resources, they decide who gets what. Not you. Not the market responding to your needs. Bureaucrats. And bureaucrats have priorities — military, industry, party officials. A dying man in Ukraine and his desperate family? Not a priority. This is the knowledge problem and the incentive problem that collectivism can never solve: central planners cannot know what millions of individuals need, and they have no personal stake in providing it.
The only mercy was my ignorance. I did not know that ALS is always fatal. I had hope — a child's hope. I believed he would recover by the last day.
My father died on July 22, 1963. He was fifty-four years old.
One day before my birthday.
His funeral was on July 23, 1963 — my twelfth birthday.
Every year since my birthday has been fused with my father's death. Celebration and grief occupy the same date. This is not pathology; it is reality. For sixty-two years, I have lived with this fusion. July 23rd is not a day I celebrate — it is a day I remember.
The system could not cure him — no one could. But the system could have provided conditions fit for human beings. It did not. It had declared victory in 1936. It had promised communism by 1980. It delivered forty square meters with no running water, and a twelve-year-old boy was burying his father on his birthday.
This is what the destination looks like. Not the promise — the destination. Remember this when you hear beautiful words about "transformation," "equity," and "the common good." Ask yourself: Who decides what the common good is? Who enforces it? And what happens to those who disagree?