ECHOES OF EXCEPTIONALISM: Refusing to Live by Lies

History rarely announces itself. Sometimes it arrives boldly leaving little doubt; other times it requires a second look to convince yourself that what you are seeing is real.

In Moscow, Russia, on August 19, 1991, history arrived on a gray morning in a steady late-summer rain in the form of a column of tanks moving through ordinary Moscow traffic.

Commuters still moved along their routes. Buses hissed at stops. Trolley lines crackled. And then the armored columns appeared—more tanks and personnel carriers grinding toward the city center. The weight of the moment began to dawn on those witnessing the spectacle.

Morning radio news announced that Mikhail Gorbachev had been removed as the leader of the Soviet Union for health reasons. A self-appointed State Committee for the State of Emergency claimed authority. Under Gorbachev’s reforms—glasnost, meaning “openness”—the truth began to surface for the first time in decades. Censorship loosened. Previously banned books reappeared. Small reform movements independent of the Communist Party began to speak openly. The air, previously heavy with suspicion and fear, became lighter.

And then the tanks came.

When people demand liberty, communism answers with tanks. Two years earlier, in Beijing, students and citizens gathered in Tiananmen Square calling for reform, an end to corruption, and greater openness. They constructed a Goddess of Democracy, modeled after the Statue of Liberty. The Chinese Communist Party answered with tanks, guns, and lethal force. The government cut all satellite feeds and poured munitions into the peaceful students. To this day, we don’t know the death toll – undoubtedly hundreds, perhaps thousands.

They had the blood cleaned off the square by morning.

The Communist Soviet Union also answered liberty with tanks—tanks that subdued, suppressed, and killed. Tanks, guns, power, informant networks, terror, and torture shaped daily life in the Soviet Union for over 70 years. The human cost was staggering. Under Stalin alone, historians estimate 20 million deaths through execution, engineered famine, and the vast network of prison camps known as the Gulag Archipelago.

Millions more were imprisoned, exiled, or broken in labor colonies stretching across 11 time zones. Families disappeared overnight. Entire ethnic groups—Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ingush, Volga Germans—were deported in cattle cars to barren lands where many perished.

Beyond the borders of Russia, the Soviet grip strangled the freedom of nations that had once been vibrant and independent. East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine—all lived under brutal suppression imposed by Moscow. Their churches were monitored, their newspapers censored, their elections scripted, their economies drained to serve the empire. An empire built with blood and maintained by fear where its people wondered if today the secret police would knock on the door because a neighbor turned informant.

In this world, the truth did not matter, for it was never spoken aloud, only whispered.

The Iron Curtain of Soviet oppression descended across Eastern Europe and threatened much of the globe. The surveillance state reached into every corner of life long before modern technology made communist China’s oppression of its population much easier. In East Germany, the Stasi maintained files on one in three citizens, recruiting neighbors, coworkers, even children to inform on their families. In the Soviet Union, people learned to lower their voices in their own kitchens, to avoid certain words, to distrust telephones, to assume every conversation might be overheard. Fear became a habit of mind.

Such willingness to participate in informing on others is not unique to Russia and China, although it is inherent in every communist government ever formed. Its beginning point, however, is human fear. Tyrannical governments generate fear to use to the benefit of the government.

The United States is due a severe self-examination after COVID-19. Many politicians here used fear of COVID—in some cases real, in other cases manufactured by overstated dangers—to suspend liberties and curtail freedoms. They justified this deception and grotesque assault on democracy by suggesting that Americans could neither handle the truth nor act responsibly without dramatic coercion.

That power crushed small businesses, isolated dying family members, and encouraged citizens to report on one another—not to help, but to accuse. The same lockdown rules produced one of the largest wealth transfers in recent American history, shifting economic power from small businesses to large corporate chains and Big Tech firms—companies that in many cases publicly supported the very restrictions from which they benefited.

In August of 1991, the citizens of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev were just beginning to step out on their front porch rather than huddle whispering in their bedrooms. The weight had lightened.

And then the tanks.

Despite the rain, despite 70 years of fear—the people began to gather. And then they began to walk. Together. They walked toward the Russian parliament building. Some brought food and tea. Others simply stood. They were not armed with anything but conviction. They were not certain of anything except that the lie must not return.

Gorbachev, the President of the Soviet Union and General Secretary of the Communist Party, had been detained by hardliners and isolated from all communications.

Boris Yeltsin, a blunt, forceful, and unpredictable reformer, had recently become the first democratically elected leader in Russian history. With Gorbachev detained, Yeltsin acted. He walked out of the Parliament building, walked directly toward a tank, climbed onto its turret and declared the coup unconstitutional.

The soldiers, young and unsure, paused. Then slowly, some began to turn their tanks around facing outward—to protect that which they were sent to destroy. The people refused to disperse. Within 48 hours the coup failed. In December, the Soviet Union dissolved.

Flesh and bone backed by truth can stop iron.

For decades, the United States had stood firm against Soviet communism with moral clarity. From Truman’s containment, to Kennedy’s defense of Berlin, to Reagan’s naming of the “Evil Empire,” America insisted that human beings possess God-given dignity no state can erase.

That long, patient commitment helped sustain dissidents, embolden reformers, and weaken the ideological confidence of the Soviet regime. When the tanks rolled in August 1991, the world knew where America stood: with liberty, with conscience, with the truth.

Thirty-five years later, the lesson remains urgent. Totalitarian regimes still exist. They still surveil, still censor, still imprison, still demand that citizens repeat slogans they know not to be true. They still rely on fear. They still rely on lies. And they still hope that free nations will lose their resolve.

But so long as America remains exceptional—so long as our people have the courage to stand up for the truth—there is hope. More than bullets or bombs ever could, those exceptional, radical, world-changing ideas that America was founded on exposed the lies of Soviet totalitarianism and brought it crumbling down.