Howling in Unison: The Soviet Writers' Union

Agreed. We're not there yet, and perhaps (hopefully) we'll never be - that's why I alluded to the times before October Revolution, back when USSR itself didn't exist yet, but the culture that gave rise to it did.

> but maybe I’m mistaken and not able to notice a coordinated manipulation of public opinion by some hidden force. It smells of a conspiracy theory, though.

I'm not claiming that either. You're right - it would be a conspiracy theory. I don't believe there's any large-scale coordination at play. But I do believe in lots of small-scale coordination in fierce competition - another similarity to pre-revolution Russia. Much like back then (and always, in general), people aspiring for power and/or money try to get ahead on the platform of whatever is the most heated social issue. They co-opt the movement, adopt the banners, and compete against both the establishment / countermovers and other upstarts ostensibly on the same side. I think we can see this today, with how politicians, media and corporations get involved. It's not because they want to achieve the original goals of the movement - they want to use it to gain power and/or money.

I think the above is somewhat obvious and universal point - politics and economy seems to always work like this. The banners change; the behavior, not so much.

Thinking more about it, I see one similarity between current "culture war" and the USSR, which may be why 'Andrew_nenakhov compared the current situation to USSR, and not to Russia at the turn of XX century. Even in USSR, the censorship and behavior policing wasn't binary - either you're a Good Commie or on a train to a gulag. More commonly, if you weren't red enough, you would find yourself denied opportunities and dignity. Not in the Party? Your kid won't get into the university. Someone said you're not fully committed to the Fatherland? That job in the factory is not for you anymore. Oh, and your neighbors don't want to talk with you now - mostly because they're afraid to be tarnished by association. Yes, there was a lot of violence and torture and death involved in policing the citizens, but also a lot of such softer pressure. Perhaps even more of it in the Soviet satellite states.

Where it connects to the modern "culture war" is that the same social policing seems to be using the market instead of top-down state control. In the USSR, your foreman would kick you out because they're afraid of the head of local Party branch, who was afraid of their political officer, and so on, all the way to Stalin, in a top-down hierarchy of threat. Today, people fall in line because they're afraid of getting fired because of a Twitter mob; their employers are afraid of the Twitter mob causing the company to lose investors or market share.

This is a new factor. A distributed, stochastic, persistent threat. Arguably not possible before social media. There's no central coordination required, but the effects are as predictable as if there was an actual dictator on top of things.