I grew up in the USSR. As a child, I learned something early: violence could be shown — but intimacy could not. This poem begins with the question no one could answer: why was it allowed to hit, but not allowed to kiss?
Poem
“Why Could You Hit, But Not Kiss?”
The kitchen is warm.
The radiator ticks like a psycho.
Milk climbs the pot—
this, at least, I understand:
reality.
The television mumbles.
Old men.
A voice that doesn’t need meaning.
It only needs weight.
And what do the adults do?
They sit straighter.
As if posture itself
is a form of loyalty.
I watch them
and learn my first truth:
you can understand nothing
and still do everything right.
This is where my personal religion begins:
don’t stick out.
don’t ask.
breathe quietly.
My parents were normal people.
Not monsters.
Not cruel.
Just perfectly formatted.
Made out of their time—
like Soviet cookware:
heavy, eternal, no handles.
They couldn’t answer me.
Not because they didn’t want to.
Because answers had no place to land.
Only one mode:
endure.
Kindergarten.
We line up in a row
like identical teeth
so the smile looks even.
And we sing.
Not a children’s song.
Not “la-la-la.”
We sing what’s everywhere.
On TV.
On the radio.
At ceremonies.
In the air.
As if it’s not a song
but the instruction manual for a country.
Wide is my native land,
it holds so many forests, fields and rivers.
I know of no other country like it,
where a person breathes so freely.
The key word is “breathes.”
Because children sang this.
Now look closely:
freely.
I didn’t know the word freely.
I knew another word that sounded almost identical:
painfully.
One sound apart.
Two realities apart.
So I learned the trick early:
my mouth sings one thing,
my body hears another.
My mouth sings: freely.
My body hears: painfully.
And stores it as law.
That’s the whole education.
And here comes the part
no one explains.
At home, a kiss is obscene.
A kiss is dirty.
A kiss is “not for children.”
People don’t talk about sex
the way you don’t talk about UFOs:
it might exist,
but not here,
not out loud.
But on television—
the same old men—
kiss each other on the mouth.
Not a peck.
Not a greeting.
Full-mouth kisses.
And the entire room applauds.
As if it’s not intimacy.
As if it’s not erotic.
As if it’s not power
playing with saliva.
This is what I couldn’t name as a child:
a kiss is forbidden
until the state needs it.
Intimacy is obscene
until power performs it.
Your closeness is illegal.
Their closeness is ritual.
The state doesn’t ban tenderness.
It bans ownership of tenderness.
And this is my first question—
the one my whole life begins with:
what kind of bullshit is this—
“I know of no other country”?
Why don’t I know another country?
Why can’t I know?
And the worst part:
why don’t the adults know either?
They’re grown-ups.
They’re supposed to.
But they nod
as if meaning exists,
and stay silent
as if silence
is the safest currency.
Then there is cinema.
I watched from the projection booth.
Because I was always clearer about
not what is shown
but what it does to people.
The audience is a herd.
The screen is a whip
just without blood.
In films, violence is normal.
You can punch faces.
Break bones.
Shoot.
The room calmly chews oxygen.
But if a scene moves toward a kiss—
not a polite cheek kiss,
but a real one,
hot, frightening, close—
songs begin.
Dancing.
As if love must be drowned in noise,
varnished,
smuggled out of language,
because language can’t survive it.
And I sit there,
small,
in the booth,
with one question:
why is killing normal
but kissing is not?
Why is blood acceptable,
but tenderness pornographic?
Why is a punch civic duty,
but touch illegal territory?
And the nastiest part:
no one explains.
Not the teacher.
Not my mother.
Not my father.
Because they have no one to ask either.
They grew up the same way:
inside a language
where a question is a defect.
A child lives.
Sees everything.
Hears everything.
And learns the main rule:
to be good
means to be silent.
And if you think this is “about the USSR”—
ha.
This is about how power turns a human being
into a creature
that would rather suffocate
than ask.
And maybe that’s why I have asthma:
not from dust,
but from this childhood “freely”
that sounds in my throat
like “painfully”
and won’t let me inhale to the end.
(Not a diagnosis — a reflex.)
And I still hold it
like a needle in the throat:
why could you hit,
but not kiss?
Notes (context for non-Russian readers)
1) What song is this?
The quoted lyrics come from a famous Soviet patriotic song (“Широка страна моя родная”). It functioned as a state anthem of everyday life—played constantly on radio and television, performed in schools and kindergartens, and embedded into public ritual.
2) “Freely” vs “painfully.”
In Russian, the words вольно (“freely”) and больно (“painfully”) sound very similar—differing by one letter/sound. For a child who doesn’t know the word “вольно,” the line about “breathing freely” can be misheard as “breathing painfully,” especially in a culture where freedom is not an experiential category.
3) “Soviet pots: heavy, eternal, no handles.”
A бытовая (everyday) metaphor: Soviet household objects were often physically heavy, durable, but inconvenient. It’s used here as a compact image of how a person can be strong, “functional,” and emotionally restricted at the same time.
4) “The USSR had no sex.”
A well-known Russian phrase: “There was no sex in the USSR.” It doesn’t mean sex didn’t exist biologically—it means it did not exist as public language. Intimacy was culturally treated as obscene, while violence was socially and artistically permissible.
5) Asthma.
Not presented here as a medical claim, but as a bodily metaphor for a learned pattern: holding breath, swallowing questions, and living inside enforced silence.
6) Brezhnev kisses / “old men kissing on TV.”
Soviet leaders (famously Leonid Brezhnev) practiced public “fraternal kisses” as part of official state ritual. To a child, it looked like the state both prohibited and monopolized intimacy at the same time.
7) Leaving the USSR.
For most Soviet citizens, international travel was effectively impossible. Leaving the country required special state permission and was tightly controlled. For a child, the line “I know of no other country” was not metaphor — it reflected a closed world where “another country” was not accessible in any practical sense.
READER NOTE (please read):
I want to thank everyone who left comments under this post.
And I mean this literally: please read the comments. All of them.
They are not “reactions.” They are part of the work.
This poem is about how language operates on the body — and the comment thread became a live demonstration of that mechanism:
how different nervous systems recognize the same protocol through different histories.
One of the most precise readings came from . I’m quoting it here because it names the mechanism better than I could:
Can I say, I’m genuinely in awe of how you’ve woven so many complex topics into something so coherent and felt. It’s like watching someone juggle knives and somehow produce a tapestry.
I counted nine different topics you covered:
State control vs. private life, Violence vs. intimacy, Childhood perception under ideology,
Language and mishearing as indoctrination,
Silence as moral education,
Ritualized intimacy as political theatre,
Cinema and spectacle as tools of control,
Generational transmission of fear and endurance,
The body as archive (breath, asthma, reflex)
What makes the poem so powerful isn’t only the political insight (which is razor-sharp), but the somatic accuracy of it. You don’t argue your way to the thesis, you let me feel it forming, breath by breath, in a child’s chest. The mishearing of freely as painfully is a masterstroke: not a metaphor imposed after the fact, but a neurological truth about how ideology enters the body before language is ready to resist it. That single phonetic slip becomes an entire education system.
The domestic scenes are especially strong. The ticking radiator, the milk climbing the pot, the adults “sitting straighter”, to me, these are not background details, they’re instructional devices. Power here isn’t abstract; it’s learned through posture, through silence, through what is not explained. The line “you can understand nothing / and still do everything right” feels like the moral engine of the whole piece.
Your handling of intimacy versus violence is chilling because it never overstates itself. You simply place the images side by side, the banned kiss at home, the sanctioned full-mouth kisses on television and let the contradiction indict itself. “The state doesn’t ban tenderness. / It bans ownership of tenderness.” That’s one of those lines that snaps into place and immediately feels inevitable, like it was always true but unnamed.
I’m also struck by your restraint. You could have made this angrier, louder, more polemical. Instead, you trust accumulation. By the time you arrive at asthma, not as diagnosis but reflex—the poem has earned the right to speak through the body. The final question doesn’t resolve; it lodges. Which feels exactly right, because unresolved questions are the inheritance you’re describing.
And you’re right: this isn’t only about the USSR. That’s what makes it land so hard. It’s about any system that teaches people to confuse silence with goodness, endurance with virtue, and violence with normalcy—while treating tenderness as contraband unless power stages it first.
Your footnotes act like subtitles for a lived reality, not telling the me what to feel, but ensuring I am hearing the poem in the right key. They don’t weaken the work; they make its quiet violence legible across cultures.
This is a brave, unsentimental, deeply human piece. It doesn’t explain history; it exposes how history learns to breathe inside a child.
Another reader, named the same mechanism from an American angle — the refusal of forced emotional performance:
“I sometimes stand with everyone else in the room, but I don’t speak. I stand out of respect for others — and I’m fine with only standing. I feel the same about the national anthem and the hand-over-heart ritual. I refuse to do it not because I’m unpatriotic, but because I’m not interested in expected, imposed behavior.”
(Terry Kirkland, comment under this post)
This is the same protocol.
Not belief — performance. Not loyalty — compliance. The body trained into a script.
Internal links
- Text as Violence: How AI Uses Care to Control and Monetize Attention
Position in the Research Map
This corpus occupies a distinct position within the overall structure of the publication.
Unlike architectural research cycles, which describe systems and models, and unlike checklist tools, which function as secondary instruments, the texts collected here operate through direct immersion and witness.
They form a separate section dedicated to examining violence enacted by textual form itself.
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