Live Not By Lies and Estonia’s Singing Revolution

One of the most powerful documentaries I have ever watched is The Singing Revolution, a 2006 film that chronicles the extraordinary struggle of the small Baltic nation of Estonia against Soviet occupation. From 1987 to 1991, thousands of Estonians expressed their defiance by gathering to sing the songs of their people, galvanizing resistance movements and leading to the restoration of Estonian independence. “Until now, revolutions have been filled with destruction, burning, killing, and hate,” Estonian journalist Heinz Valk famously proclaimed, “but we started our revolution with a smile and a song.” 

Since 1869, people had traveled from all over Estonia every five years to attend a music festival called “Laulupidu,” uniting the nation in the face of occupiers for over a century. Up to 30,000 singers would take to the stage at once. Estonia has one of the largest collections of folk songs in the world, and the Soviets recognized this inheritance as an arsenal. The festival became the source of a power struggle. The Soviets demanded propagandistic songs praising Communism; Estonians resisted by concluding with their own. These musical acts of defiance kept hope alive during fifty brutal years of oppression.

When Gorbachev announced Glasnost, cautious protests began. First, in 1987, against a Soviet strip-mining plan. The Heritage Society was founded, and dissidents began to openly talk about the history of the occupation. Thousands showed up at a demonstration; it was the first time in fifty years anyone had spoken up and got away with it. In April 1988, 10,000 came to a protest. A summer music festival featured Estonian songs at festival grounds where, for several consecutive nights, tens of thousands arrived to sing—and wave the national flag. The demonstrations grew.

On September 11th, 1988, an estimated 300,000 people—roughly 20% of the population—poured into Estonia’s Tallinn Song Festival Grounds. It was one of the largest mass gatherings in the country’s history. Key figures in the independence movement gave rousing speeches; Heinz Valk, who coined the phrase “Singing Revolution,” made his famous declaration: “One day, no matter what, we will win!” People wore folk costumes sewn by their grandmothers; thousands waved flags. They sang banned anthems, traditional songs, and the independence movement’s “Five Patriotic Songs” series. Many feared a Soviet crackdown and a bloodbath. It did not come. Instead, it set off a chain of political events that would culminate in Estonia’s freedom. 

Three decades after the collapse of the Evil Empire, writer Rod Dreher traveled to nations of the former Soviet bloc to interview dissidents and study their tactics of resistance. According to Dreher, the West—the victors of the Cold War—is now post-Christian, and slouching slowly but inexorably towards the type of totalitarianism once endured by those who lived behind the Iron Curtain. The result was the runaway 2020 bestseller Live Not By Lies, which has just been released as a four-episode documentary series by Angel Studios.

The series opens with examples of the crackdown on social conservatives unfolding across Western Europe, including  UK pro-lifers being arrested for silent prayer. One particularly sinister scene shows a police officer asking, with a distinctly menacing undertone: “Are you here to pray for the lives of unborn children?” Dreher explains the origin story of the book and documentary: people who had lived behind the Iron Curtain telling him, time and again, that what is happening in the West gave them a keen and disturbing sense of déjà vu.

The series weaves a potent analysis of totalitarianism with stories of heroes who lived lives of quiet defiance behind the Iron Curtain, maintaining their faith, their dignity, and their morality while the torture chambers of the state yawned at them. Kamila Bendová, the Catholic den mother of Czechoslovakia’s dissident group Charter 77, who was left with five children when her husband Václav, the spokesman, was imprisoned. Richard Wurmbrand, the Evangelical Lutheran pastor who endured fourteen years of torture in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romanian prisons. The stories of breathtaking courage alone make the documentary worth watching.

In the West, Dreher notes, comfort is the new gulag. The hellholes of Communism have given way to chosen chains: pornography, perpetual entertainment, ubiquitous digital addiction. This functions like the drug “soma” described by Aldous Huxley in his dystopian novel Brave New World, which provides surges of happiness and thus suppresses dissent. Dreher is right. If anything, the point is understated. In a decade of working with porn addicts, I can say that while the chains might be chosen at first, they are cripplingly difficult to shed. 

Watching Live Not By Lies, I could not help thinking about The Singing Revolution. Contrasting the two documentaries, both of which examine the fight against Communism, illustrates how dramatically our post-modern, hyper-digital age has damaged our capacity for collective resistance. I wonder: Would a “Singing Revolution” be possible today? I doubt it. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (who Dreher has often referred to) observed in his 2000 book Liquid Modernity, we live in an age where much of “solid modernity” has vanished.

“Liquid modernity,” Bauman explained, describes our era, in which once-solid social institutions are impermanent, weak, and constantly evolving; where stable norms have vanished, impacting every relationship. Pervasive hyper-individualism puts crushing pressure on people to create their own identities and construct their own lives without reference to fixed frameworks, producing both freedom and constant insecurity. A consumer culture of disposability, driven by ruthless market logic, encompasses even relationships and identities.

The digital world—which Paul Kingsnorth calls “the Machine”—is not the source of these shifts but has been a devastating force multiplier, reducing relationships and personal connections to the ephemeral and introducing unprecedented social precarity. Globalization has eliminated historic boundaries, flattened traditional cultures, and ensured that ways of living that lasted for centuries (or millennia) survive only in small cultural islands. For the young to inherit the culture of their ancestors takes a herculean effort against these forces. 

All of this has culminated in the much-discussed “loneliness epidemic” plaguing the West. As Dreher documents in grim detail on his Substack, the Western world is coming apart at the seams. Christianity, the heart of the West, has been cut out; the body is crawling with diverse diseases. Demographic collapse and mass migration are accepted as inevitable. Talk of revolution and even civil war has spiked over the last decade—but who, in our soma-soaked culture, would fight? Who even could, against the forces Dreher describes in Live Not By Lies? Internet cosplay is not the same thing as real violence which, aside from hidden atrocities like abortion, most Westerners are utterly unfamiliar with.

Episode 1 of Live Not By Lies features the powerful observation of dissident novelist Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” And so: What now? The Machine has swallowed entire cultures and traditions whole, regurgitating a conveyor belt of atomized individuals fixated on the infinite scroll. Which peoples still hold on to the heritages hard enough to make a “Singing Revolution” possible? We are drowning in liquid modernity, and most have forgotten the songs and stories and poems of their forebears. How can the young return to what they never knew?

In Live Not By Lies and his other work, Dreher provides one answer: In the sea of liquid modernity, we must create islands. Islands on which the old books are read, the traditional songs sung, the ancient faith clung to. We must do what the seemingly insignificant dissidents of the Soviet empire did and remember that counterrevolutions can be launched from living rooms where cultures are preserved. Some are waking up to the misery of life in the post-Christian West, asking questions, and groping in the dark. They know what is wrong; they do not yet know what is right.

But when I see prominent atheists returning to church, secular writers penning potent polemics against the sexual revolution, and the LGBT movement pushing so far past the public that they trigger a backlash against transgenderism even in passive England, I wonder what might rise from the ashes. The much-vaunted “vibe shift” is certainly overstated. But it is not nothing.

I asked Roger Scruton once if he thought there was any hope for the West. “It is a general truth, I think, that people only wake up to a situation when it’s too late to remedy it,” he replied. “That is something Hegel once said: The owl of Minerva only flies in the dusk. I think we’re in that condition. People are waking up to some very important truths about the nature of human communities and what is necessary to survive and propagate, but they’re waking up to it at the eleventh hour.” 

But the eleventh hour, after all, is by definition almost too late. New communities are being established. Young people are hearing old songs and feeling, if not vague familiarity, an inexplicable longing. A new breed of counterrevolutionaries is rising. They are, like the heroes in Live Not By Lies, few. Very few. But when people begin the desperate hunt for answers, there will still be those who have them. For as Chesterton once observed: “So strong is tradition that later generations will dream of what they have never seen.”