Monday, September 30, 2019
Politics and Society Essay
ââ¬Å"There was an old bastard named Lenin Who did two or three million men in. Thatââ¬â¢s a lot to have done in But where he did one in That old bastard Stalin did ten in.â⬠ââ¬â¢ Robert Conquest[->0] According to the historian Robert Conquest, Joseph Stalin ââ¬Å"gives the impression of a large and crude claylike figure, a golem, into which a demonic spark has been instilled.â⬠He was nonetheless ââ¬Å"a man who perhaps more than any other determined the course of the twentieth century.â⬠ââ¬Å"Any adult inhabitant of this country, from a collective farmer up to a member of the Politburo, always knew that it would take only one careless word or gesture and he would fly off irrevocably into the abyss.â⬠(The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p ââ¬Å"Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition.â⬠(Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, ââ¬Å"According to some reports, entire groups of men were taken in one swoop by the NKVD. ââ¬ËAlmost all the male inhabitants of the little Greek community where I lived [in the lower Ukraine] had been arrested,ââ¬â¢ recalled one à ©migrà ©. Another reported that the NKVD took all males between the ages of seventeen and seventy from his village of German-Russians. â⬠¦ In some stories, the police clearly knew they were arresting innocent people. For example, an order reportedly arrived in Tashkent to ââ¬ËSend 200 [prisoners]!ââ¬â¢ The local NKVD was at its witsââ¬â¢ end about who else to arrest, having exhausted all the obvious possibilities, until it learned that a band of ââ¬Ëgypsiesââ¬â¢ (Romany) had just camped in town. Police surrounded them and charged every male from seventeen to sixty with sabotage.â⬠In the city of Zherinka, ââ¬Å"ââ¬ËIvan Ivanovichââ¬â¢ â⬠¦ had his wife sew rubles [Soviet currency] into his coat because the NKVD was taking all the men in his town.â⬠(Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalinââ¬â¢s Russia, 1934-1941
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.