The Worst Day of the Year
Contributed by George Mellinger
Monday will be a day for contemplating all that is best, most noble and perfect in our world. But today is the day to contemplate all that is ugly, criminal and thoroughly demonic. It behooves us to remember from time to time all the worst of which we are capable, and today is the most fitting day of all. On December 22, 1879, in the Georgian village of Gori was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin.
Born into a seriously dysfunctional family, and preserved from conscription by a withered arm, Stalin cast his lot with Lenin’s Bolsheviks, but did little of significance beyond a few bank robberies for the cause in prewar Tbilisi. In 1917, he was metaphorically absent during the Bolshevik coup, being one of those Bolsheviks who initially argued against the coup and in favor of cooperating with the "bourgeois" Provisional Government. During the civil war he began to compensate for his slow beginning by exemplary cruelty to prisoners and class enemies.
By the end of the civil war, Stalin was still a footnote and a piker at crimes against humanity, but already showed traits which led to Lenin including in his will a warning to the Communist Party Central Committee that they should "remove Comrade Stalin from positions of power". But since Lenin also warned that Comrade Trotsky should be removed too, Stalin and Trotsky cooperated for the first and last time in their lives to suppress Lenin’s Testament. Besides, all the other Bolsheviks thought Stalin thuggish but harmless. He did not ask for a position of prominence and importance. he took the seemingly unimportant post of Commissar of Nationalities (i.e. minority groups) and volunteered for the thankless and boring task of General Secretary. It would take only a few years to turn that unglamorous and insignificant job into a position of unprecedented power. He who controls the records controls the agenda; he who controls the agenda controls everything. Stalin leveraged this modest position to become the greatest mass murder probably of all time, at least of the last five hundred years. Yes, Mao Ze Dong killed more in terms of sheer numbers, but he had so much larger a potential victim base to work upon. And Pol Pot’s one third of Cambodians is a larger percentage, but of a very smaller group, and thus a lower total. And in any case, they were both conscious acolytes of Stalin, as were all the other Marxist tyrants following him. Even Hitler, who comes close, must yield place, and was also inspired in his methods by Stalin’s example. If Stalin is to be topped by anyone, it could only be by his mentor, Lenin. Lenin deserves recognition for having invented the concepts of mass extermination and the death camp. And late in his life, Molotov, himself another leading practitioner of pure evil, proclaimed that next to the tiger Lenin, Stalin was just a pussycat. But Lenin lived only briefly, and never had time to establish what sort of a peacetime murderer he might have become. Stalin has a dramatic record.
Stalin slew for about 25 years. The total number of his victims is still under dispute, but still gradually growing. When Robert Conquest wrote his book "The Great Terror" in 1967, he estimated the death toll of the 1930s as probably about 20 million, and perhaps as high as thirty million. During the 1980s, when I referenced these figures in lecturing undergraduate classes, I marked myself as a fascist. Many of the tenured, popular revisionist historians asserted that not more than a few thousand, at most, were ever killed. In a classic example of kettle pleading, they argued that the killings were the fault of local officials, and were minimal in number and justified by their resistance to collectivization, and that Stalin had done it to strengthen the country. After 1990 the mass grave began to be discovered. Outside most of the major, and some minor cities. Mass graves containing the remains of several hundred thousand victims each. Each and every mass grave containing several times the number of victims the revisionists were willing to admit for the entire USSR. These "Soviet Holocaust" deniers continue to enjoy tenure and perks at American universities.
Even today, people considering the losses need to consider the circumstances. Different authoritative sources give different figures for those executed. One figure I recall seeing quoted is 865 thousand tried by tribunals and executed. But that is only the beginning of the story. Such a figure does not include the numerous untabulated thousands (?) who died under interrogation. Nor those who committed suicide when they heard the early morning knock on the door. Yan Gamarnik, chief of the Red Army Main Political Administration was one of these; and Molotov has testified that he slept with a revolver under his pillow every night. Nor does the figure include those victims who were executed without even the pretense of a formal trial; that group would include anyone who would not confess. Nor does it include the millions who were sentenced only to terms in the labor camps which they failed to survive. Shot while escaping, or falling over into a snowbank during a forced march does not count as "execution". Nor do prisoners retried in the camps and sentenced to death by GULag officials.
There was a an incident of surpassing evil which occurred in the late 1940s. The Communist Party decided the numerous disabled veterans littering Leningrad were most unsightly and a poor face for socialism. So these disabled, armless or legless veterans were all arrested on charges of "parasitism" and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. But upon arrival in camp, it was found that they were no more capable of productive work there than in a city, so they were all re-arrested, re-tried, and shot.
Perhaps the largest category of GULag deaths may have been those who died of hunger, exhaustion, cold, or disease. Scholars such as Conquest have tired to calculate from the general size and population of the camps, from the volume of transports, to the number of prisoners and their annual turn-over. Some estimates are that there was a one third turn-over per year in the camps - and considering that the sort sentences were "fivers", that indicates a lot of deaths. A Soviet statisticial, Iosif Dyadkin, has tried to use seeming inconsistencies in census data to calculate the USSR's "missing population", and arrives at a figure of maybe 70 million, though that also included wartime losses as well, and is unsatisfying for other methodological questions.
Then there were the other losses of the collectivization campaigns. In 1932 Stalin unleashed the campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture. the peasants resisted across the Soviet Union, but particularly in Ukraine and in South Russia north of the Caucasus Mountains. School kids from the Komsomol (Young Communist League) and the army were called in to use force. Some peasants even killed their livestock and burned their farms rather than submit. Sometimes the resistance was so stout that the party used artillery, tanks and bombers to crush resistance. The next year there was a famine, and not only because of the devastation and disruption of collectivization. Stalin was also trying to fund his Five Year Plans, and confiscated the crops to support his efforts, partly to feed the new city workers, but mainly to sell abroad for credits for industrial machinery. And also, to punish the Ukrainians and break their spirit. Police patrols surrounded all pats in or out of Ukraine, and between eight to ten million Ukrainians died of starvation during the period of about two years. In many cases, entire villages died. While Ukraine suffered worst, many areas in south Russia, near Rostov on Don, Maikop, and the North Caucasus region suffered nearly as badly, losing more millions. This was the first occasion when the Western Progressive intelligentsia disgraced itself. George Bernard Shaw was given a trip through Ukraine sponsored by the Soviet government, and returned to report that since he had dined regularly on caviar and champagne, the famine must be a myth. Walter Duranty ace correspondent of the New York Times confided to friends that he knew better, but still lied to discredit reports of the famine, in order to help the Soviet cause. Seventy-five years later, the assholes still have not changed!
During the 1930s there also continued a number of low-intensity "bandit campaigns" in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Many of these campaigns were against minority peoples, and are on of the roots of today’s Chechen problem. Some of these campaigns involved using airpower against the resistance.
In 1939-1940 the USSR reclaimed chunks of Poland, Romania, and the Three Baltic Republics. In each case, the first Soviet order of business was to round up and shoot or send to the camps all "class enemies", followed by the "political enemies", in each country, this constituted about ten percent of the population. In the Baltic Republics, they arrested everyone listed in the phone books on the presumption that anyone with a telephone was a bourgeois.
During the war there was yet another great wave of losses. Numerous ethnic nationalities in the southern USSR were accused of collective treason for collaborating with the Germans. In truth, some individuals from these groups did welcome the Germans as liberators from the plagues of atheism and collectivization and famine and mass murder. But many other member resisted. And many ethnic Russians also collaborated fro the same reasons. But certain nationalities were punished, even before the war ended. In 1944 the entire population of Crimean Tatars was rounded up and exiled to Central Asia. Men, women and children separated and loaded onto railroad boxcars and shipped off to the deserts of Kazakhstan with no provisions for food or anything else. Several hundreds of the luckiest were shot immediately. Of the others, about a third of the population died of bad conditions in about two to three months. Nor was it just the traditionally hated Tatars. other nationalities suffering the same exile and genocide included the Kalmyks, Karachai, Kabardians, Balkars, Ingush, and significantly, the Chechens, each of which suffered equivalent losses. Incidentally, this huge task engulfed vast numbers of troops and railroad resources which otherwise could have been used against the Germans at the front. The people of German descent brought by Catherine the Great in the 1760s, or the ancestors of Baltic Germans in Russia since the middle ages suffered most of all. Though population losses are not given, it must involve a couple more millions.
Also during the war there were needless losses among returned prisoners. According to Soviet military law, being taken prisoner for any reason constituted treason and could be punished by death - and death or imprisonment of the surviving family. And while there were instances when prisoners escaped and returned and were cleared of blame and returned to their units, the great majority of such individuals either went to labor camps or to penal battalions (so lethal that one month’s service therein was officially equivalent to three years in the GULag.) At the end of the war prisoners returned by the western Allies were shipped directly to the camps - or shot. And civilians taken away by the Germans as slave labor were given no greater consideration - traitors too.
After the war there was a further round of purges beginning in 1948. It is true that Jews had suffered less than other Soviet groups during the 1930s, but now it was to be their turn. Anti-Semitism ceased to be unfashionable. Also, many of the greatest wartime heroes were marked for take-down lest they outshine Stalin, the Great Coryphaeus, Greatest Genius of All Times, Father of Nations. the only saving grace was that Stalin died on March 5, 1953 just before the latest round of killings reached its stride.
This is the way it was, a million here, a hundred thousand there, and another couple hundred thousand, a big ten million...eventually it adds up. Guessing the toll is difficult, but I figure between 30-40 million is approximate, mainly in the 1930s, but also including wartime purges and postwar murders. In recent years I have heard several Russians place the figure at 70 million. That may be a little excessive, but who am I to blame their bitterness?
This short history also helps explain a lot of the bitterness and controversy remaining in the ex-Soviet republics, where some people can still remember personally the Stalin years. And it may help explain why some of us right-wingers do not think that Marxism is cute, trendy or fashionable, and have so little patience with its apologists. And also why some of us are alarmed when we see the Soviet apologists’ intellectual descendants making such similar excuses for the bloodthirsty Islamists of today, several of whom appear to have set their hopes to challenge Stalin’s record.
-Rurik
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