https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...
The "Handmaid's Tale" TV series has a great variation on that moment, which chokes me up every single time.
(spoilers in video title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oKZgXvpm0c
Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.
This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.
That being said, the timeline is remarkably short for such a hardware project.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Ocean-Slava-Kurilov-S/dp/965555...
> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.
People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.
Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.
I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left.
Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them...
This was in the late 80s.
Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony looks impressive, but in the background sycophancy rules while expertise is wasted, and people who could be improving harvests and preventing floods are slaving away in the "Office of Subversive Objects" trying to figure out the source of the googly-eye scourge being traitorously installed on Dear Leader's statues.
I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and claims like this really bother me. As if it is somehow comparable to being forced to serve in the army of a dictatorship. What is wrong with working on optimizing conversion and engagement metrics? It can be interesting and useful. People are not forced to do it. It is just one of many jobs that one can do in a free society.
I believe that one of the reasons why authoritarianism seems to be on the rise in the US and around the world in general is that it has somehow become fashionable to belittle and disparage what we have in the West... and how good it is, despite its imperfections. I fear that we will only realize this once we have lost it.
Engagement metrics = making entertainment that's popular rather than what's mandated by the state's culture committees.
Optimizing them is a virtuous and noble profession.
A security circus and a waste of time. Look at the Korean People's Army. Their main areas of expertise are marching in synchrony, digging trenches, construction and agriculture.
It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.
With these definitions, you can have a democratic or non-democratic system, and both can give rise to libertarian or authoritarian societies.
Democracies tend to produce more libertarian systems than dictatorships, but only to some extent, and in fact, they are often authoritarian in various aspects. All it takes to oppress some people in a democracy, even when they are not causing harm, is the majority of people wanting to do so.
Vice versa, a dictatorship with some enlightened, incorruptible, and perfectly mentally stable dictator that acts as a night-watchman so that individual freedoms are respected would be more libertarian than a democracy, but it's unlikely you'd get such a dictator.
"Do whatever the F you want as long as you don't challenge the state" isn't that incompatible at first glance and might work ok if you have a low touch state. Where it gets obviously incompatible is when you have eastern european style oligarchs and western style administrative state and state favored businesses and industries that leverage state violence to stifle competition.
I don't think it's possible to have an authoritarian government in a modern society that doesn't trend in one of those directions.
Perhaps the least recognized example is America. The Constitution imposes libertarianism on the population against majority will. You can't change the constitution with a 50%+1 vote, so it forces freedom of speech and other rights on people who might otherwise easily vote to get rid of them. There's no one man enforcing the constitution, just a general agreement to obey SCOTUS.
Authoritarianism is the oldest form of effective government. Just as curious note, dictatorship was introduced during the Roman epoch and was used as temporary measure during war times. Look for example in Ukraine where the same ruler is avoiding elections since some time due to war, in the root sense of the government-style it is possible to describe it as a dictatorship today, if it hadn't been for the negative connotation of that term in the last 100 years.
There was a lot of contact between West and East Germans due to the awkward nature of the division of East and West Germany and East and West Berlin. In contrast, that contact doesn't exist between North and South Korea.
(Remember, West Berlin was an enclave inside of East Germany, and West Germans were allowed to travel through East Germany in order to travel in and out of West Berlin.)
Lichtenstein and Singapur found their niches, which do not scale to larger countries, Dubai was just lucky.
Happy slaves don’t dream of freedom.
I wonder what would happen to Lichtenstein if the EU would pull a Trump on them and block trade and airspace until the adjust their tax policies…
Not that this would ever happen.
Sharia law. Beat your wife. law. Fine rape victims. Use slaves, flog gay people.
Name a regressive and disgusting way of treating humans - it’s probably done there.
They all have a very solid industrial base, like 30% to 50% of the economy, with ~50% of workers living abroad (not fully part of the welfare state). Comparatively high R&D. Low taxes.
And plain tax evasion is now illegal, but those countries are still an important stop to hide money elsewhere.
But the main secret sauce is a flexible fast legal system. Stability, low crime, and less gridlock in the legislature when the need for change is realized.
Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was
Eg: Shall we improve public healthcare?
Way too often, connected ("powerful") people manage to escape proper punishment, sometimes in the name of a "peaceful transition of power".
There should be things you don't come back from.
For example, if you imprison people for political reasons, the time they spent in prison should be added up, multiplied by a punitive constant (2-3) and given to the offenders. And if that is a just punishment (I believe it it), then not doing that to them is unjust. Simple as that.
2) We should be looking for ways how to have both a peaceful transition and just punishment for the offenders.
Look at Unit 731 as an example ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 ).
The people most responsible got away for free by skillful negotiation (immunity in exchange for data).
Instead, the proposition should have been a) you give us the data and graciously accept your death penalty b) we repeat the experiments on you, nonlethal first. That's harsh and will make many people today recoil (because they've been indoctrinated into a 1-step moral system which seems to correlate with stability but injustice), but it's fair and just. They think those experiments were OK to perform on innocent people, so they are very much OK to perform on them (guilty people) by their own logic.
There ws a great cost to a "peaceful transition". The entire judiciary was basically full of extremely corrupt people, half of the political class. Even today when the old judges are almost all gone the horrible culture they had still corrupts many younger ones (although today it is more towards incompetence and indifference rather than corruption).
Would it be better to have half a million (or possibly entire million if you count inevitable victims on the other side) die to avoid it? We are still paying the price.
There is an argument that had we sorted the communist problem successfully back then we wouldn't have politicians later that let themselves be corrupted by Putin into funding his army. And perhaps there would never be an invasion of Ukraine.
Or if we done away with the peaceful transition, the communists in other neighbouring countries would attempt to hold on to power with everything they got. Who knows.
There has been prison time and the careers of anyone important connected to the Stasi ended.
Obviously, if you intend to abduct ("imprison") or kill ("execute") somebody as punishment, then you should have very high certainty they deserve that punishment. One of the methods of achieving that is giving them a chance to defend themselves ("court process").
I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
That silliness is how you get Jim Crow, it's how you got Trump 2.0
In a civilized country I can believe jail time would be good enough, but the US still uses capital punishment, so seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously some of those responsible have to be executed
In practice I remain doubtful that such an orderly transfer is likely. If there's chaos, for even a few days, that's how you get France's "Wild Purge" in the period when German withdrawal and Allied liberation are happening one town at a time. The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
The film The Lives of Others should give folks a pretty good idea of what the Stasi was.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesbeauftragter_f%C3%BCr_di...
There is actually gunfire in it and a teenager dies in the beginning but it still feels less intense due to the 80s pace IMO.
For the East there were 2 citizenships. They had no adjectives, they only talked about "citizen of the German Democratic Republic" and "citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany".
The occupation view was not official politics after 1970. The West had recognized the East as a state. But citizens of both states were assumed to have the same citizenship.
Edit: recognized as state should maybe recognized as some kind of state. Like the citizenship there were numerous differences compared to other foreign nation states.
Do they put the persecution and threat on so thick intentionally to encourage them to leave, so that if democracy did return in some way socialist ideology would be all but certain to win? I don't know.
At that point I leaved Venezuela inmediatly with my 2 minor aged kids, because for me it was a NO BRAINER that the first thing they will do was to limit the emigration and the free ciruculation. My train of tought was very simple. As any other Socialist Dictatorship before, this one needs to halt the staggering loss of skilled proffesionals like Medics, Engineers or whatever they deemed of National Security, I mean, you still need Doctors, you still need the Electricity and Water to get into the industries and houses, and specially for Venezuela, you need to keep the Oil flowing off the earth...
BOY WAS I WRONG, they never put a formal limit to the emigration and at least another 5 million people leaved Venezuela (so far). It did not matter at all that the already in shambles Public Health system collapsed, they doctors that stayed were private and they attended only the capacity that could pay for the scarse services, the basic services did not matter that much either, as people got use to get them once or twice per week, and even a country wide blackout of 3 weeks was not the end of the regime, and the Oil, well, does not matter either because what was once 3.5 million barrels per day went to be as low as 300.000 bpd.
So, what was the difference? well, for all its downfalls, it seems to me that the XX century Communist/Socialist dictatorships were guided by Ideology, they really thought theirs ideas were for the better of their people, so having no Healthcare was a REAL PROBLEM, having no public services was a REAL PROBLEM. Of course, their recipes were doomed as their political ideals, but at least they tried.
The Venezuelan Regime has no Ideology (it has some in form of propaganda, but that is different that actions) as the latest news can attest, They couldn't care less about the people and the wellness. They did not use any "Natural Resouces" to keep any level of living conditions, they just let loose the ruins of the economy they had messed so badly to let the most savage neoliberalism to correct the course while they stayed in power to keep leaching two sources of income, whatever oil they could produce and the drugs operations revenue, alongside their cut on any business their allies (AKA "Enchufados) could come up in the "liberalized" economy.
All the people that leaved the country (including me) just made them easier to keep control of whatever was left. Ever decreasing political or social opposition, less pressure of the shambles public services and so on and on...
The Natural Resources is just a part of their Income, it does not affects the hability to control or to even extract richness from the system.
I agree though that it is more complex, but for some reason, Czechoslovakia wanted to keep all the people and exploit their work, while Venezuela and Iran seems to let the people go in exchange for the regime stability.
When I talk about Ideology, I am not referring to the people, but the regime hiercachy. I would guess in the case of Czechoslovakia the regime had some Ideology alignment with the Soviets, but I truly don't know. But yes, they modern approach seems to favor the exile instead of the reclusion or so it seems
Czechoslovakia in that period had one party politics, justified because multiparty democracy was "bourgeois deviation". It was a state run centrally planned economy, because the left wing don't believe in capitalism or free markets. Officially unemployment didn't exist, because only imperialist capitalist right wing economies had unemployment. Party membership and associated ideological compliance was required for any important role. Culture was censored, people were imprisoned by ideology police.
It is bizarre to claim that the USSR was not ideological. It collapsed because it was pure ideology in defiance of reality.
The reason the USSR kept people behind a wall is because they were able to mentally justify it to themselves within the framework of their far left ideology. They viewed the west as corrupt and, more importantly, full of corrupting ideas. They were just much more committed to winning the propaganda war than a place like Venezuela is because their worldview was formed at the end of the Victorian era when travel and communication was much more easily restricted. Maduro's socialist worldview was formed much later, when the idea of preventing Venezuelans having access to capitalist ideas would have seemed much more ridiculous.
They built boats to sail down the Salt River, to the Colorado River, and to Mexico. Of course the salt river is almost always just a dry river bed. It's shocking to me that no dramatization of this escape exists
The thing that makes this balloon escape story is so enthralling is that it actually worked.
To see a bigger picture let's juxtapose these escapes with the life of Luke of Simferopol (N. F. Voyno-Yasenetsky). He was a surgeon and a bishop of the Orthodox church. He opposed the anti-church policies of the Soviet government, was sent into an exile into Siberia and nearly died there. Then the war came. So he wrote a letter to Soviet officials asking to be sent to work in a hospital near the front, where his surgical skills would be of much use. At the end he added: "When the war is over I'm ready to go back to exile".
I met a guy in the East Bay who escaped Vietnam in 1978. Family sold everything to bribe the government to look the other way.
Boat trip lasted a week - people died, mostly the youngest and oldest, their bodies thrown overboard. Thai pirate came and stole anything of value they had left and raped the women. Boats passed by and did nothing.
They finally make it to Malaysia and spent almost a year in a refugee camp before coming to the US.
Now multiply that story by 2,000,000 with 200,000-400,000 dying along the way. A total of 4-5% of the entire population tried to escape by boat. The lucky ones fled before 1975, some later one.
A massive human tragedy that few people know much about.
Had a chance to ask a Russian / Soviet historian how one could spend a million rubles in the late 70s, early 80s. He just shrugged and laughed about it. Almost no way to spend that much. Nothing cost very much and there wasn't much of it.
Anyways, fantastic story. First time reading despite living relatively close.
Vibe-coded an online calculator for future escapists: https://balloon-lift-calculator.pagey.site
Tbf they probably didn't do all these calculations, but should have. They risked their lives by getting some of these things wrong.
Thanks..
Ironic. Still quite an adventure. Thanks for sharing!
Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)
Pretty much all the highest % immigration countries are monarchy that I can think of, since in those country another tax payer is an easy win and immigrants that cause problem can be instantly booted so there is very little downside to taking anybody with $1 or a job who cares to come.
Top Countries by Percentage of Immigrants (approximate recent figures):
Qatar: Around 77% (or 76.7%).
United Arab Emirates (UAE): Around 74-88% (some sources show higher figures for earlier years).
Kuwait: Around 69-73%.
Bahrain: Around 55%.
It confuses "this is a good place to resettle" with "here I can arbitrage higher wages in order to send money back home."
If the person has no issue that people have to be kept by force INSIDE for the country to function, then we have a fundamental disagreement on what is good and what is bad and any further discussion is a waste of time.
That's the reason the first attempt was just the Strelzyks...
The repressive state apparatus was moving too slow. Maybe they hoped there won't be a second attempt after the first one failed, maybe it wasn't promptly reported to the appartchikhs and handled internally by the Stasi to avoid backlash.
Children put in serious situations are capable of much more serious behavior, than children who have only known comfort and safety.
Ha. Someone does a thing and the state moves in to regulate. Same as it ever was, apparently.
Item registration… not used to prevent crime, just to make it easier to document after it happens.
Wouldn't "registration" as used in the article mean the purchase details were sent to the authorities, so they could investigate/stop a potential escape attempt?
Even if the devices were registered, you might be up and away before they figure it out. But if another family flew away, that registration list would be handy door to door.
I think I saw the film in the late eighties/early nineties round about the time the Eastern Bloc was falling apart so it had less impact.
It is a powerful book, quite chilling as it describes life under the totalitarian puppet government of East Germany. I also often found it eerily reminiscent of our current times.
I can highly recommend it, both for the suspenseful narrative and great visual storytelling. A great read for HS/college kids that are into history too.
[1] https://store.bookbaby.com/book/time-zones
[2] Authors website: https://www.svensiekmann.com/bio
Europe is obviously very old e.g. I go to a pub back home that's 500 years old, but you can still sort of feel the concrete setting in some parts of Germany. Although saying that it might be that they haven't changed much since and I don't like the future chosen much elsewhere.
Or it's just the light temperature... In places that have kept their old street lighting I find it interesting to find angles that look the same now as they did in 1981 (or '71, etc).
And then to build a working hot air balloon that even looks pretty cool, entirely in clandestine conditions with improvised materials. In a museum in Germany you can even see a homemade twin-engine airplane that was planned for an escape attempt (that didn't happen, maybe just as well) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_DOWA_81 ). Just incredible technical competence everywhere, that fades when the need is gone, when absolutely everything you could want is just an Amazon order away.
But not that surprising when you look at Russian history.
That's faster than most professionals by a substantial margin. I guess when it matters you make it work.
It’s astounding to me that this was a thing. The fact that it’s so rare now is one of the quiet ways we have in fact progressed.
And much of the public library books were a couple generations old, plus there was the Cold War, which meant lots of exposure to anti-fascism messages, and to anti-Soviet-like messages.
So, today, people of a certain age, who paid attention in school, have been programmed that the secret police saying, "Your papers, please" and sending people off to concentration camps, are obviously the very bad guys, and America is the good guys who don't do that. People with that upbringing would see certain textbook political maneuvers and tactics coming from a mile away, and be concerned.
To counteract that IMHO great programming, you'd need something extreme, like Rupert Murdoch and others pounding large swaths of the electorate with propaganda for decades -- to get them to support some politicians that are stereotypes we were told for decades before are outright evil.
It may not have always been for the most noble of reasons (e.g., a very wealthy person not wanting to be disrupted), but the fascism-is-bad messages are still great messages.
For example, "Don't Be a Sucker" (long, but worth a watch sometime for anyone who hasn't seen it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4
There are fascists in the former DDR today.
So I guess it worked.
And I take the definition of fascists as anyone who prioritizes their political system, State or political view to a point of depriving any other citizen of their basic freedom.
Not officially although in reality the Stasi quite happily reused Gestapo files, and there were numerous National Socialists who ended up east of the border.
The GDR had a series of fake political parties, besides the Communist, in order to pretend they were a democracy. I believe they did have one that pretended to appeal to such people.
"There are fascists in the former DDR today."
Much more so than the west which did not have years of Communist rule.
That was certainly the party line of the DDR at the time. Do you honestly believe it?
It’s no coincidence that Vladimir Putin, a former KGB man who served in East Germany, claims that his war in Ukraine is justified in the name of denazification. It’s an easy rhetorical trick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_...
Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia due to human nature. We are nearly all motherfuckers who if given the chance will try to obtain more power or more wealth than our peers in a group of any size. Thus you can't have all citizens of a given country agree on abandoning private ownership and sharing wealth, work and power in equal terms. Any government that pretended to do that was just faking it and forced their citizens to pretend.
dystopia ?
That’s actually the point of libertarianism, anarchism: do what you want, but you will only do well if you get along with the rest of the society by providing something helpful to them, as no one is forced to help you. And that’s why free market capitalism works. Even the most selfish individuals have needed to cooperate, work for others or open businesses with useful products for society in order to be able to accumulate wealth.
Definitely a "character", even if medically sound enough to stand trial.
PS: He was dumb as hell too of course, and it was only due to incredible laxness of the air force that he was never shot down.
You're more likely to get hassled when you land like the Ethan Guo guy (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04rql923kdo)
However there is a spectrum between it. I don't think either extreme is great, neither American unrestricted capitalism nor full-on communism. A balance of both is needed. I was a lot happier in the 80s when Holland was a lot more socialist. Less things to worry about, a safety net, cheap housing and schooling, still the ability to run your own business if you really wanted to. We had a great combination.
However the VVD neoliberals (who idolize America) have destroyed it over the last decades and there are so many huge problems now because they always went for the quick fix.
With full-on capitalism you get lots of disenfranchised people angry at not having any upward mobility, corporations just dump all over the citizens, and differences in wealth get insanely high. With full-on communism you end up with a surveillance hellscape and inhumane processes. The secret sauce is in between IMO.
https://www.damninteresting.com/up-in-the-air/
Also an audio podcast available for the article, that's more thrilling.
And yet even with the high (in comparison to other communist states) quality of life people in the GDR enjoyed, people still risked life and limb to escape. You could leave Brazil under its various juntas, Chile under Pinochet, Portugal under Salazar, and Spain under Franco, yet the only option for citizens of the GDR and other communist states (in some cases, still today, e.g., Cuba and the DPRK) was escape and defection.
yawns
There were a lot of things in the USSR but leaving by "escape and defection" was not the only option.
- Make communism look good.
- No poor people; everyone supported by the State; Everyone works for the common good; shared resources no matter how lucky or unlucky you are…
From an intentional and moral perspective, nothing can beat it.
However it fails and will always fail because of a couple of important reasons:
- it requires the sacrifice of freedom and individuality. - it needs to suppress any other political alternative - it’s finally always implemented by humans (flawed by default) that have their own benefit as a goal.
Even with constant examples of countries demonstrating why communism always ends up being a perverse system, many people still romanticize the system. Interestingly usually only people in free capitalist societies.
Just on the face of it: extending the idea of company towns to an entire _nation_ seems bad to me on paper.
In the end there is an awkward question. What separates Communism from a bronze age god-king's palace economy where everyone is a slave of the ruler?
Where did you get those numbers? I remember reading about one survey where the number of people with previous regime ‘nostalgia’ was around 50%. That survey had flawed methodology, and the results were probably mostly about nostalgia related to the times when we were young, and our backs did not hurt (obviously, Russian bots in my country keep blabbering about it ad nauseam as if it were actually about the quality of the old regime).
Let’s focus on the numbers that matter - the election numbers: in the 2025 elections in my country (Czechia), communists did not even get over the 5% necessary to get to the parliament. So, I guess what people actually remember here is communism not being better.
> Peter Strelzyk, aged 37
> Doris Strelzyk
> Frank Strelzyk, aged 15
> Andreas Strelzyk, aged 11
> Günter Wetzel, aged 24
> Petra Wetzel
> Peter Wetzel, aged 5
> Andreas Wetzel, aged 2
Was/is it common practice to omit the ages of adult women in Germany?
People in Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis, are all saying, "How can I rise above this? -- where's my balloon?"
Too many morons. Too few balloons.
Man, you really went ahead and tried to compare Minneapolis with Teharan. This is got me laughing out loud.
It would help if you could spell "Tehran". Then notice that in either place you can be killed for annoying authority figures, without due process or recourse.
> This is got me laughing out loud.
I suspect that by 2028 you won't be laughing quite so loudly -- or at all.