Joseph Brodsky: The Soviet poet who loved America — and distrusted ‘equality’

“Illness and death are, perhaps, the only things that a tyrant has in common with his subjects. In this sense alone a nation profits from being run by an old man.”

Those words, penned by Joseph Brodsky in 1986, drip with irony.

‘To be governed by nobodies,’ Brodsky wrote, ‘is a far more ubiquitous form of tyranny, since nobodies look like everybody.’

Brodsky, the exiled Russian poet, knew tyranny firsthand. Born under Stalin, shaped under Khrushchev, and later expelled under Brezhnev, he lived through the mechanical cruelty of the Soviet regime. It was a world where dissent wasn’t just suppressed — it was criminalized.

Dropping out

From his earliest years, Brodsky rebelled against the omnipresent symbols of state control. He hated Lenin, tired of seeing his face staring down at him from banners and posters. At 15, he dropped out of school and drifted through a series of odd jobs, including a stint sewing corpses in a coroner’s office. This was no teenage rebellion; it was a rejection of a system that demanded total submission.

His poetry, initially apolitical, became his quiet form of resistance. But tyranny has no tolerance for neutrality.

By 24, Brodsky was branded a “malicious social parasite.” A state-run newspaper dismissed his work as “pornographic and anti-Soviet.” Arrest followed. In 1964, he stood trial in a courtroom packed with secret police. The judge mocked him as a “pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers.”

Sentenced to five years of hard labor, Brodsky found himself shoveling manure and breaking rocks in subzero conditions on a northern Russian farm. He served 20 months of this sentence before being released, battered but unbroken.

Returning to Leningrad, he moved into a cramped communal apartment with his parents, their portion a mere 100 square feet. Two blocks away, a young Vladimir Putin grew up in similar conditions, breathing the same stifling air of state control.

In 1972, Soviet authorities raided Brodsky’s apartment and declared him a “non-person.” They exiled him, shoving him onto a plane bound for Vienna. He would never return to Russia.

Go west

Joseph Brodsky found refuge in America, a land he embraced with gratitude and affection. Over the next two decades, he rose to prominence, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987 and serving as the U.S. poet laureate in 1991. His essays and poems grappled with the themes of tyranny and individuality, dissecting power with the precision of a scalpel.

“Tyranny,” he once said, “will make an entire population into readers of poetry.” It was a statement both bleak and hopeful, suggesting that oppression might, at least, awaken the human spirit.

In “To a Tyrant,” Brodsky described a figure both sinister and mundane: an aging dictator, limp-wristed and stoop-shouldered, sipping coffee while fantasizing about raising the dead to bow before him. Tyrants, Brodsky believed, are inherently boring — driven by fear and self-preservation rather than imagination or vision.

But he also recognized the peculiar efficiency of tyranny. At first, it brings order, security, and stability. People embrace it not because they love oppression but because they crave simplicity. Tyranny structures life for you, sparing you the chaos of democracy’s competing voices and the burden of choice.

Yet this order comes at a cost. Tyranny stifles individuality, replacing it with sameness. Over time, even the illusion of participation disappears. Public discourse fades into whispered compliance. Isolation sets in — not just for the people but for the tyrant himself.

In Brodsky’s view, this isolation is the true engine of tyranny. Cut off from genuine human connection, the tyrant grows paranoid, mistaking his fears for reality. Meanwhile, the people, silenced and divided, begin to accept oppression as normal. Suspicion flourishes. Fear of public disgrace or private reprisal keeps everyone in line.

Our better instincts

Tyranny, Brodsky argued, doesn’t always announce itself with violence. More often, it appeals to our better instincts — offering safety, stability, and refuge. It presents itself as an escape from politics, promising a world free of conflict and division.

But this is the great lie. Politics, for all its messiness, is the expression of freedom. It’s where individuality meets community, where ideas collide and evolve. Tyranny erases this complexity, replacing dialogue with directives, choices with commands.

Brodsky saw this dynamic play out in the Soviet Union, but it’s a lesson that transcends time and place. The tyrants of today may not wear military uniforms or deliver fiery speeches. They may look like the rest of us, blending in with the crowd. But their goal is the same: to depersonalize the individual, to turn citizens into subjects.

Brodsky warned that modern tyranny often comes dressed in the language of equality and progress. It replaces the spirit of individualism with the anonymity of the collective. “To be governed by nobodies,” he wrote, “is a far more ubiquitous form of tyranny, since nobodies look like everybody.”

This insight is chilling in its simplicity. Tyranny doesn’t require a single charismatic leader. It can thrive in the hands of a party, a bureaucracy, or even a culture that prioritizes conformity over creativity.

The antidote

For Brodsky, the antidote to tyranny was individualism. But he acknowledged that true individuality is hard work. It requires self-awareness, courage, and a willingness to stand apart from the crowd.

Plato observed that a good ruler is one who can govern himself — a stark contrast to the tyrant, who can control others but not his own impulses. This inability to govern oneself is, perhaps, the defining trait of tyranny. It substitutes violence for power, mistaking brute force for true authority.

And yet, as Brodsky knew, tyranny is always temporary. It collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, unable to sustain the illusion of order indefinitely. When it falls, it’s replaced — not always by something better, but by something new.

The question, then, is not whether tyranny will end but what will come after it. Will we rebuild a society rooted in individuality and mutual respect? Or will we succumb to the same patterns, allowing fear and convenience to guide us back into the arms of another tyrant?

In his lifetime, Joseph Brodsky never stopped asking these questions. He saw tyranny not just as a political problem but as a spiritual one. For him, the fight against oppression began with the soul — with the recognition that freedom is both a right and a responsibility.

“The Last Judgment is the Last Judgment,” he once wrote, “but a human being who spent his life in Russia has to be, without any hesitation, placed into Paradise.”