From Stalin to Trump: A Literary Essay on How Power Unmakes the World

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In her classic memoir of Soviet state terror in the 1930s, Hope Against Hope , Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts the last years of her marriage to the poet Osip Mandelstam as they flee from city to village to town, dependent on handouts from a few brave friends and strangers, exiled from their Moscow home as enemies of the state. Osip’s chief crime had been to recite a poem at a dinner party that he never wrote down, let alone published, mocking Stalin and exposing his brutal regime.

The final couplet: “And every killing is a treat / For the broad-chested Ossete.” (Stalin was rumored to be of North Georgian, or Ossetian descent, not an ethnic Russian.) Osip is finally arrested and deported in 1937, the year of the “Great Purge,” which took his life along with those of almost a million other Soviet citizens deemed disloyal or simply “not needed.”

Writing from a perspective of relative safety in the 1960s, Mandelstam looks back on the early years of widespread belief in a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” to which she and her husband initially subscribed, and traces the gradual erosion and then swift abandonment in Soviet society under Stalin of “humanist” values—respect for “the fate of every individual.” “There is a moment of truth,” she writes, “when you are overcome by sheer astonishment: ‘So that’s where I’m living, and the sort of people I’m living with! So this is what they’re capable of! So this is the world I live in!’”

This astonishment, or “stupefaction,” she writes, “and the consequent loss of all criteria, standards and values,” were the frequent—and surely intended—results of the imprisonment and torture her husband and so many others endured. The psychic numbing spread to families, friends, and neighbors of those arrested, as well as to the survivors of the many millions killed in Soviet prisons and labor camps by execution or starvation during the decades of the 1930s and 40s: “[I]t looked as though time had stopped, the world had come to an end and everything was lost forever. The collapse of all familiar notions, is, after all, the end of the world.”

The collapse of all familiar notions is the end of the world . I’ve pondered that sentence during the past year as, under the Trump administration’s unrelenting siege on virtually every presumed governmental safeguard or safeguarded institution, I’ve felt my familiar world fall away. There are the evident signs in my neighborhood, not far from Harvard Square, where posh hotel restaurants are often empty, the babble of many languages spoken by visiting scholars has dwindled, and I see mostly white faces on the street. A neighbor who used to enjoy renting an apartment in her two-family home to foreign students and faculty is selling the place as a condo.

During the past year as, under the Trump administration’s unrelenting siege on virtually every presumed governmental safeguard or safeguarded institution, I’ve felt my familiar world fall away.

But even on trips to still-bustling, definitionally diverse New York City, or simply waking up in my own apartment to the same bedroom furniture, framed pictures on the wall, and paper-strewn desk I knew before January 20, 2025, I’m unnerved.

The neurologist Pria Anand writes in The Mind Electric that the feeling of familiarity originates in the limbic system, a region of the brain where “memory and emotion are intimately intertwined.” It takes very little sensory input—a scent, a glimpse—to kindle the “inkling of recognition” that reaches us as familiarity “in the moment before explicit memory kicks in.” Arriving on a street in your old hometown, you’ll feel familiarity before you lay eyes on your childhood home and know you’re there. Indeed, “familiarity can exist without recognition,” Anand writes, as déja vu .

I don’t know if there’s a term for feeling unfamiliar in a familiar place, a French phrase that sums up what it’s like to recognize the landmarks of one’s daily life, one’s home country, and feel unmoored. Whatever you call it, that’s what Donald Trump has done to us.

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The Trump administration is not Stalin’s overtly murderous regime, but Trump’s policies have cost and will cost many lives: the hundreds of thousands, eventually millions, worldwide no longer served by USAID; the ICE raid-induced deaths in Minneapolis; the war dead in the Middle East, in abandoned Ukraine; mounting losses to measles, COVID, and influenza due to federally sanctioned anti-vaccine propaganda. There will be more lives lost to scaled back state-sponsored health insurance programs and Medicaid, shuttered clinics that once offered prenatal care, terminated medical research, unchecked climate change. This is only the beginning of a lengthening list.

To lose one’s job—one’s livelihood and professional identity—is another kind of death. During his years in exile, Osip Mandelstam was denied the right to work for any publication or publishing house; translation jobs were canceled, his writing went unpublished. Isolation, malnutrition, and untreated illness left him vulnerable to harsh prison conditions after his arrest, hastening his death at age 47.

Donald Trump, as Terminator in Chief, has brought the misery of job loss to hundreds of thousands of civil servants whose employment was meant to be secure, whose jobs held profound meaning for them and whose daily efforts, often for modest wages, supported the well-being of the country. These are deaths too; they shatter our fundamental expectation that government functions for the public good. They tell us we can’t rely on our government to safeguard its workers, or its citizens.

During his years in exile, Osip Mandelstam was denied the right to work for any publication or publishing house; translation jobs were cancelled, his writing went unpublished.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne lost his federal appointment as Surveyor of Salem’s Custom House in 1849, after the election of a Whig president, Zachary Taylor, he referred to his firing as a decapitation. Although many readers today skip over the “Custom-House” preface to The Scarlet Letter , it was Hawthorne’s bitterly satirical account of his ejection from office that sold the book when it was first published in 1850. The writer considered himself “an inoffensive man of letters”; Hawthorne performed the job of surveyor with such diligence he never found the spare time to write that his friends in the Democratic party had promised when he accepted the position. After Taylor’s election, he was told that “qualified men wouldn’t be removed from office for purely partisan reasons,” Hawthorne’s biographer James Mellow writes. The promise wasn’t honored.

Hawthorne’s firing became a cause célèbre . Boston and New York newspapers issued editorials in his support; Harvard’s president, the former Massachusetts governor Edward Everett, rose to his defense. Nothing helped. Hawthorne’s wife, the artist Sophia Peabody, began peddling hand-painted lampshades and fire screens to support the family of four while her husband took to his desk to see what his pen could earn. The Scarlet Letter , an otherwise parochial tale of sexual transgression in colonial Boston, sold out its first printing in ten days thanks to readers nationwide, who warmed to the tell-all send-up of the spoils system Hawthorne attached in hopes of capitalizing on the controversy. Critics today agree that the novel itself—Hawthorne’s scathing portrayal of the Puritans’ newly founded “city upon a hill”—was fueled by the writer’s resentment over his own unfair treatment two centuries later, at the dawn of the American experiment in democracy.

The battle over protections for federal employees raged for another three decades until Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which required most federal jobs to be filled based on merit and made it illegal to fire such employees for partisan reasons. Nearly a century later in 1978, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, a second Civil Service Reform Act was passed providing further protections, including for whistle blowers.

The CSRA has been in Donald Trump’s sights since his first term in office; from the start of his second term he’s acted as if the legislation were already repealed. The Supreme Court’s June 2026 decision in Trump v. Slaughter, giving the president power to fire independent agency chiefs, suggests that future cases filed on behalf of fired federal workers will not fare well in the highest court. Already, with a July 2025 emergency order in McMahon v. New York , SCOTUS overturned a lower court’s ruling that had blocked Department of Education Secretary McMahon’s mass firings of DOE employees in obedience to Trump’s order that she dismantle the department. (Along with eviscerating the DOE, established in 1979 to combat bias in public schools, the Trump administration has put the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a stranglehold, according to a July 6 New York Times report, by issuing an executive order to “deprioritize” cases defending minority applicants.)

With a population well over three hundred million—fifteen times that in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s time—can the United States function without the skilled civil servants Trump has long vilified as operatives of a “deep state”? A February 2026 Boston Globe study found that, during Donald Trump’s first year in office, the federal workforce shrank by ten percent; firings extended to 489 federal agencies. Employees who had served the government for twenty years or more were targeted for job termination or pressured to resign. Texas A&M law professor Nicholas Handler commented on the crippling effects of the “rapid brain drain”: the government’s “ability to do sophisticated things is badly diminished because you can’t convince good people to come. And even if you do convince good people to come, if they can be fired every four or eight years, you just don’t build up the institutional capacity and the institutional knowledge to do the kinds of things that we expect a twenty-first century government to do.” Former Office of Personnel Management acting director Rob Shriver observed, “You’re looking at like four million years of experience that walked out the door.”

Four years after Hawthorne’s novel was published, Henry David Thoreau delivered a lecture on the meaning of work, later published as “Life Without Principle,” one of his best-known works after Walden and “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau was thinking on the village level, but his insight speaks to our moment:

It would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

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I wake unnerved. Fearful. I open the morning paper, rush through the grim headlines, and locate the crossword puzzle. For the past two decades, since I’d endured a painful divorce, the New York Times daily puzzle has been my source of comfort. No more. Governmental acronyms are the meat and potatoes of crossword constructors:

54 A: Fair-hiring inits. since 1964 [EEO] April 10, 2025

30 A: Vaccine-approving org. [FDA] June 16, 2025

28 A: Law with “individual mandate” provision, for short [ACA] March 20, 2026

82 A: Org. founded to fund foreign projects [USAID] April 12, 2026

15 A: Defense grp. since 1949 [NATO] April 14, 2026,

8 D: Fuel economy org. [EPA] May 13, 2026

30 A: Flu-fighting org. [CDC] June 11, 2026

Each time I fill in a correct answer, I think of jobs lost, faith lost, lives lost. The collapse of the familiar sure feels like the beginning of the end of our world:

40 A: Part of the government that includes the presidency [Executive branch] March 23, 2026

17 A: Classic flowering locale adjacent to the White House [Rose Garden] Jan. 26, 2026