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Joseph Stalin Died 50 Years Ago Today, March 5, 1953
"He was nothing more than a tyrant, nothing less than evil"
"Ukraine Report 2003," Number 10Ukraine Market Reform Group
Kyiv, Ukraine; Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, March 5, 2003
Become conscious of the enormity of the national tragedy suffered and
damage done Ukrainians as a nation. By Professor James Mace,
The Day, Kyiv, Ukraine, March 4, 2003
On March 5th, I intend to say a prayer for Stalin's victims.
Perspectives, by Andrew Fedynsky, The Ukrainian Weekly
Parsippany, New Jersey, Sunday, March 2, 2003
A pastoral address by Archbishop Ihor (Isichenko) of Kharkiv and
Poltava in March of 2003 to the God-loving pastors and devout laity of
the Kharkiv and Poltava eparchy of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox
Church on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the man-made famine
in 1932-1933
It is 35 years since Conquest's ground-breaking book, The Great Terror,
revealed the full depth of Joseph Stalin's crimes to the world. By Richard
Waters, Financial Times, London, UK, February 28, 2003
Lena Stuyrcevich. Teacher from the Ukraine. 1929 sent to Solovki. 1930
shot. Solovki basics. By Harriet Crawley, The Telegraph, London, UK
Sunday, March 2, 2003
So many people suffered in so many ways, by starvation, deportation, and
execution, that it is hard to give a complete tally of the human cost of
the three decades when Stalin ran the Soviet Union. Story from Moscow,
Russia, by The Economist, London, UK, March 1-7, 2003
By James Mace, The Day, Kyiv, Ukraine, February 18, 2003
In 1945 Galina Doll was seized in Ukraine. Mrs. Bugaenko is less forgiving.
"When Stalin died in 1953 one of my workmates asked why I was not crying.
I replied, 'I cried for years in the gulag because of that monster' I had no
tears left," By Tom Parfitt, The Telegraph, London, UK, March 2, 2003
Millions died in his mass purges and millions more in famine
"He was always playing these games with nationalities. He moved peoples
around so that they would lose any sense of their own nationhood,"
Radzinsky told Reuters. "He followed a single formula: a day without
repression was wasted for the country." By Richard Balmforth,
Reuters, Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 4, 2003
Agence France-Presse (AFP), Moscow, Russia, March 2, 2003
March 5, 1953-is just a brief entry: "Comrade I.V. Stalin died.''
By Steve Gutterman, Associated Press, Moscow, March 2, 2003
By Geert Groot Koerkamp, Radio Netherlands, The Netherlands
Tuesday, 04 March, 2003
"He was nothing more than a tyrant, nothing less than evil." By Robert
Manne, Professor of politics at La Trobe University, The Age.com.au,
Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, March 5, 2003
Kyiv, Ukraine.........................Ivan Dziuba - once a model for the
movement to defend human and national rights in the Ukrainian SSR,
now full member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, and
still the conscience of his nation - wrote in Dzerkalo tyzhnia that fifty
years after Stalin is not the same thing as being without Stalin.
As Dziuba rightly pointed out, today's Ukraine is still with Stalin in the
sense that it continues to bear the attributes that he forced upon it.
Khrushchev might have removed the deceased dictator's mummy from
its place next Lenin's, but he could only ameliorate the system he had
inherited from his predecessor, not fundamentally alter its essence.
For all the worship with which Stalin liked to surround himself, he remained
fond of modestly portraying himself as Lenin's pupil. He was a follower of
the Lenin of 1919 when the state first tried to control everything: taking
over industry, forcing peasants into communes (Stalin ameliorated this at
least in name to collective farms), viewing all who wanted to exercise their
officially proclaimed right of national self- determination as class
enemies, and keeping the whole thing going by means of the Red Terror,
which Stalin adapted as what one scholar once called a permanent purge.
Of course, it is impossible to control everything, and the system evolved
into one whose demands could not be met without breaking the rules of
the system itself. People evolved the survival strategy of thinking one
thing, saying another, and doing yet a third.
Law was rehabilitated in name and destroyed in fact. For what is law, if
not a set of rules compulsory on everybody and backed by the punishment
of those who violate these rules by the state?
Yet, when everyone is forced to be guilty of something and in theory
deserves punishment, who gets punished in reality (at least at the top)
ceases to be a matter of enforcing rules and becomes a matter of sheer
arbitrariness. Once Khrushchev stopped Stalinist mass terror and the
resultant universal fear, the structures and interests molded within the
confines of the system Stalin created could congeal into powers immune
to any official injunctions.
Under such circumstances it becomes misleading to even speak of
corruption and criminality, for when practically everybody breaks the
rules, the rules themselves lose any reality. In this way Stalin
accomplished what Lenin in 1919 could not.
Stalin's success in creating a Soviet people to supplant individual nations
has also left the Ukrainians (and not only them) with a deep crisis of
identity. Last week I took part in a memorial soiree marking seventy years
since the Great Manmade Famine. More and more are beginning to become
conscious of the enormity of the national tragedy suffered and damage done
Ukrainians as a nation.
Still, most Western scholarship of the period continues to view the period
of a single Soviet history just as nineteenth century German nationalists
condemned the Czechs and other "small" nations as being without histories
and thus without any future. In the Soviet context, this was called the
great friendship of peoples. Friendship is fine, of course, but when it
involves the loss of one's own identity it becomes transformed into
something else.
In short, while Stalin has long since ceased to be canonized and his corpse
gone from the Lenin Mausoleum, his legacy is still very much a part of
postcommunist reality, and the period of convalescence will remain long
and painful.
Danylo Shumuk, now nearly 90 years old, was 19 when he was first
arrested and imprisoned in 1934. Eventually, he became the longest-serving
prisoner of conscience in the former Soviet Union, spending 42 years in
prison or exile. I met him for dinner in Cleveland in 1988, soon after his
ultimate release. He told stories and rendered opinions in a
straightforward, unsentimental way. Shumuk is one steely individual.
Having listened to several accounts of how resolute principle confronted
cruelty in the prisons and the camps, our host asked Mr. Shumuk if there was
any one moment that was worse than all the others.
That's easy, Shumuk said. It was in the Norilsk labor camp north of the
Arctic Circle in 1945. In the early morning darkness of the Siberian
winter, he and his newly-arrived fellows were mustered to watch as the
guards dragged two bodies from the disciplinary cell, deposited them in
front of the assembled prisoners and sank their bayonets into the
half-frozen corpses.
"Smotriti!-Watch well," the commandant shouted at the inmates, who ached
from weariness and cold. "This is the only way you'll ever get out of this
place!" That, Shumuk said, was the low point of his life. Understood.
Memories of that conversation come back to me as March 5th approaches,
the 50th anniversary of Joseph Stalin's death. It was Stalin, really, who
perfected the political system that Lenin invented, although actually Lenin
got the idea from observing how a narrow class of aristocrats numbering no
more than a quarter million, controlled the Russian Empire with its 125
million peasants and workers. A disciplined corps of Communist Party
members could do the same, he reasoned.
Lenin's Bolsheviks styled themselves as the "dictatorship of the
proletariat" and promised "the people" a future of brotherhood and bounty, but first, they said they had to eliminate all opposition-so-called "enemies
of the people," otherwise known as "vermin." There were millions of them.
To deal with those, Lenin created a secret police force to identify and
arrest them. He called it the "All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for the
Struggle Against Counterrevolution and Sabotage-CHEKA" for short. The
CHEKA build lots of prisons and labor camps to accommodate all the
"enemies;" except, obviously, those who were executed or died under torture.
Once the "enemies" were eliminated, the state could move forward to the
"perfect society," where poverty and inequality would be banished. So was
God, by the way. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" took His place,
using force to shape the future according to their utopian vision.
In the mid-1920s, Joseph Stalin assumed control of this diabolical system.
He had started his career in the Caucasus organizing bank robberies and
strikes. Lenin, who called him that "wonderful Georgian," was so impressed
with Stalin's understanding of the hundred or more peoples of the Soviet
Union, that he made him Commissar for the Affairs of Nationalities. Then,
while others grappled for power within the walls of the Kremlin, Stalin
used his office to develop a broad network of activists loyal to him.
This proved decisive after Lenin's death.
Once he became dictator, Stalin saw "enemies of the people" everywhere he
looked. Some, like his rival, Leon Trotsky, or the Ukrainian nationalist,
Evhen Konovalets, were assassinated. Vast populations, like the "kulaks" in
Ukraine, he dealt with on a macro-political scale. They were to be
"liquidated as a class"-Stalin's euphemism for genocide. Millions of
farmers were starved to death; millions more arrested and sent to Siberia,
along with purged Party members, military officers, nationalists of all
stripes, suspected saboteurs, dissident intellectuals, ordinary criminals
and many who were swept up just to meet arrest quotas.
The enormous labor camp population suited Stalin's larger purposes. The
Party had promised "the people" a future of prosperity and happiness.
Failure to achieve that was blamed on the "enemies of the people," who were
then put to work building Siberia's infrastructure, where much of the
country's lumber, coal, copper, gold and other minerals were located.
Stalin's slaves dug the White Sea-Baltic and the Moscow-Volga Canals, laid
railroad track, constructed strategic roads, factories and hydroelectric
stations. Danylo Shumuk was in Norilsk to work in the mines, which were
supplying the Soviet arms industry with nickel, molybdenum and chrome.
Life outside the camps was better only by degree. Soviet citizens suffered
from crowded living quarters, a shortage of consumer goods, oppressive and
dangerous labor conditions, and no freedom whatsoever. Social discourse,
artistic expression, everything was monitored by the state. Even children
were taught to inform on their parents. The CHEKA morphed into the GPU,
then the NKVD and finally, the KGB, but it was always the same organization,
which existed to terrorize and control.
To complete the monstrous system, Stalin encouraged people to worship him:
Today and forever, Oh Stalin be praised
For the light that the planets and fields emit.
Thou art the heart of the people, the truth and the faith
We're thankful to Thee for the sun Thou hast lit!
A collective of 13 writers composed, "To the Great Stalin from the Ukrainian
People," in 1944. It was delivered over the signatures of nine million
Shumuk didn't sign it, I'll tell you that. When Stalin died in 1953, Shumuk
was one of the leaders of prison uprisings in Norilsk. Outbreaks like those
throughout the GULAG led to a wide-ranging release of prisoners; except for
those who remained defiant and therefore free, barbed wire notwithstanding.
That included Danylo Shumuk.
On March 5th, I intend to say a prayer for Stalin's victims: for those like
Shumuk who survived and those like my Uncle Slavko, who died;
no one knows where or when exactly. For all we know, he might have
been one of the unfortunate victims who froze to death so the Norilsk
commandant could make an impression on that morning in 1945.
Slavko Fedynsky, my father's brother, was studying for the priesthood.
That made him an "enemy of the people," but it's a title he didn't deserve.
Instead, let's give it to those who actually earned it: Lenin, Stalin and
all their Politburo comrades.
Joseph Stalin has been dead for fifty years. The nations that once
constituted the Soviet Union are still trying to overcome his legacy. May
we never see his like again.
It is a bright Californian spring morning as I arrive at Robert Conquest's
apartment for lunch. The eminent Soviet historian and Stalinologist has
lived on this grassy edge of the Stanford University campus for two decades.
In the placid suburban setting, workmen groom the lawns. A young mother
stands by her front door, near an abandoned child's bike.
Inside Conquest fusses about, a courteous host. He has the quaintly
antiquated mannerisms of the distinguished English man of letters. It is
easy to see here the close friend of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin:
precise in his words, an eclectic interest and love of talking, a subversive
wit that breaks through frequently. At 85, he still writes poetry and is
only too eager to discuss other poets and show off his own work. He
promises his next-but-one book will be his memoirs.
The tranquil Californian morning and the English manners add to the
incongruity, a sense of unreality that develops as Conquest warms to his
subject. In the sitting room before lunch, talk has turned quickly to the
subject that has preoccupied him for so many years. "Why did he want to
shoot so many people? You could understand why he would want to
shoot his colleagues - they were rivals. But why did he shoot so many?"
It is 35 years since Conquest's ground-breaking book, The Great Terror,
revealed the full depth of Joseph Stalin's crimes to the world. If he is
still apparently absorbed by the subject, it seems to have two sources: a
powerful sense of vindication and an abiding fascination with one of the
20th century's darkest episodes.
Conquest's right-wing political leanings - he still drops in on Margaret
Thatcher, an admirer, on annual trips to the UK - have long made his
work a target of criticism on the left. Dubbed the "witch-finder general of
anti-Sovietism" by the Morning Star, the British communist newspaper,
his work still arouses strong passions.
Yet even the opposition from the left that persisted in the years after The
Great Terror was published has dissipated in the face of the mass of
According to Martin Amis, Conquest had a tart answer for his publishers
when it came to picking a title for an updated version of his classic work:
I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. ("I may have said that," the historian
concedes, "but I didn't say that to my publisher.")
Lunch is smoked salmon, brown bread and boiled eggs, eaten around
the dining table in the small apartment. Conquest's wife - his fourth,
Elizabeth - is away with her grandchildren and the eminent writer affects
a degree of elderly helplessness. But the apartment is well organised and
clean and he has cleared the table of books - they sit on side tables and
on the floor, hand-written notes protruding.
He eats carefully, picking pieces of salmon to drop into his mouth and
wiping his fingers on a napkin tucked into the pocket of his bright yellow
In this genteel retirement, Conquest can allow himself the satisfaction of
having outlasted most of the doubters and the Soviet apologists.
"They've given up on what you might call 'Gulag denial'," he says of his
critics. But he adds: "They're still working on keeping the numbers as low
as possible."
The numbers, in this context, concern the dead. Adding those who died
from Stalin's purges and the famines of the 1930s, Conquest came up with
a figure of 20 million.
Like the elder Amis, Conquest dabbled in left-wing politics in his youth
before swinging to the right. It is a surprise when he reveals he was once a
member of the Communist party: his writing shows a barely-suppressed
contempt for an ideology he considers an intellectually inferior form of
Utopianism. With a shrug, he says now he was never politically active and
felt only a brief interest in Marxism.
Vindication seems to be only part of what drives him now. To Conquest, the
depravities of the Stalin era and the wreckage of the Soviet Union resonate
like some terrible comedy. He dwells with relish on new anecdotes that have
emerged recently - he keeps a close watch on the new research, much of it
being published in Russia and Italy - as if discovering afresh the
abominations of Stalin's rule.
"It's a curious thing: Stalin comes out worse than we thought," he says.
"You wouldn't think it possible."
The way he sees it, it is hardly surprising that the Soviet empire after
Stalin should have disintegrated under a succession of mediocrities. "They
had got rid of such a lot of the bright guys. They shot everyone. It was
absolutely unbelievable."
But this horror also had its comedy. He chortles over the aberrations of
Soviet mismanagement: the way, for instance, that excessive irrigation
caused a large part of the Aral Sea - once the world's fourth largest lake -
to dry up. "When your seas start drying up, there's something wrong with
your planning," he says, the mirth making his face wrinkle.
His scorn is reserved for the incompetent and the stupid. Academics take
much of the baiting - a reflection, perhaps, of the lasting resistance in
some parts of academia to his work. He lays the blame on Vietnam-era
students whose lost faith in America manifested itself, when they grew into
positions of power, in an unthinking leftist politics.
At one point, as I flick through a volume of his poetry, Conquest points out
a scathing piece ridiculing academics. One line reads: "Where education and
psychology meet/A terrible bullshit is born." The parody of Yeats clearly
gives him pleasure. "Philip Larkin laughed at that," he says, proudly.
But along with the mirth, Conquest is still struggling to come up with an
explanation for the appalling events of the Stalin era.
He brushes off a question about whether Stalin can be described as evil:
such metaphysical classification has little value. And he resists easy
psychoanalysis, at one stage describing the Soviet leader as paranoid before
disparaging his own pop-psychology.
In conversation and in his books, Conquest turns repeatedly to the question
of Stalin's character and motivation. His conclusion: a "profound
mediocrity" combined with a supercharged will-power created a monster.
Having invested his faith in a half-baked ideology, only to see it fail
before his eyes, Stalin distorted the reality of the entire Soviet empire to
make it seem a success. "They all had to confess they were agents of
Hitler," Conquest says of Stalin's supposed enemies. "Why did he have to do
that? He wanted to create all this detail. Now you had a different reality.
He managed to produce a new reality contrary to what was really going on."
To Churchill's description of Stalin as unnatural, Conquest adds his own:
unreal. His will-power proved strong enough to project the illusion around
the world, blinding the west to the true situation. It also created a habit
of self-denial that came to characterise - and eventually help to
undermine - the Soviet Union.
In the end, it is Stalin's almost pointless cruelty, and the stupidity of
his apologists in the west, that lingers.
Conquest recounts a recently-attributed comment in which Stalin explained
why he had lowered the age for the death penalty to just 12. "He said it was
to discourage adults running children's gangs," he says, the incredulity
making his eyes widen. At the time, he adds, French communists justified
capital punishment for children "because in Russia, they said people mature
so much quicker".
As I leave, the great writer is solicitous. Do I have everything I need?
Surely there is something more he can do for me?
Three hours have gone by. It is a relief to be out in the sunlight again.
The mother has gone, but the child's bike still lies on the bright grass,
abandoned, as I head back to my car.
There are parts of Russia that few visitors get to - or, under Stalin, came
back from. Harriet Crawley takes her Russian aunt to a monastery with a
terrible history and together they confront a nation's ghosts in a story
published on The Travel Site of the Telegraph in London on Sunday,
March 2, 2003.
Strashna [ghastly]," Galia murmurs periodically as we look at photographs of
the victims; below the alert sensitive faces their fate is typewritten: Lena
Stuyrcevich. Teacher from the Ukraine. 1929 sent to Solovki. 1930 shot.
Solovki basics.
Mist rises from the White Sea, revealing a skyline of extraordinary beauty
and lightness. The onion-shaped domes of the Solovetsky monastery gleam
silver through the watery sunlight, jostling for space next to the pointed
round towers and turrets of the Kremlin walls built by monks and anchorites
in the 16th century. This jumble of medieval shapes is flanked on all sides
by a black pine forest stretching to infinity. The sun comes out and the
massive fortress monastery turns gold. It is perfect. It is diabolical.
Solovki was the most beautiful and the most damnable of Stalin's gulags.
As the ship docks I can't help thinking what a cruel deception this ethereal
sight must have been for those hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners
who, in the 1920s and 1930s, were sent to this remote archipelago, strewn
across the Bay of Onega in the White Sea just south of the Arctic Circle, to
be shot, tortured, or worked to death. No one knows how many people
perished. Walk through the pine forest of the Solovki islands and you walk
on bones.
It is a precious moment for my Russian aunt, Galia, diminutive with bright
brown eyes and a bird-like face, who has dreamt of coming to the Russian
north and standing on the shores of the White Sea for more than 30 years.
She set her heart on Solovki in 1996 when President Yeltsin declared this
desolate archipelago with its great monastery and dozens of smaller churches
built in stone and wood to be a historical and cultural area of Grade A
national importance.
His successor, Vladimir Putin, came here in 2000 and the Russian tourist
office stepped up its campaign to promote this wonder of the White Sea,
although getting there has never been easy.
By Russian standards it is a short train trip from Moscow: only 20 hours,
not even a coutki (24 hours). I pick up some Russian bubbly for њ2 a bottle,
while Galia produces a copious picnic of smoked salmon, pickled cucumbers
and jam jars of red caviar. The daughter of a Jewish army officer and an
iron-willed mother, Galia trained as a chemist, then switched to Russian art
and culture, which she teaches with relentless enthusiasm in Moscow. Her
whole youth was overshadowed by Stalin; he died when she was 16 and she
remembers vividly her despair.
Daylight stretches across the sky as the train rumbles north through a white
night of midsummer until it can go no farther: we have reached the White
Archangel - such a beautiful name for such a forlorn place; there's one
skyscraper, one espresso bar, a White Sea that is slate grey, and in the
wide, empty streets no sign of the raw richness of Moscow: no blacked out
Mercedes with blue flashing lights, just banged-up Ladas and Nivas and
battered buses.
Severodvinsk is worse. I've never been to a "closed" city before, but as we
approach the port in a bus held together by safety pins we and the other 60
Russian tourists who are also heading for Solovki must hand over all cameras
and mobile phones to a woman naval officer with a strong, chiselled face.
Hearing my Russian, she asks to see my passport, explaining that this area
is banned to foreigners. I produce a smart red passport of the Russian
Federation (the legacy of a failed marriage to Galia's nephew) and my aunt
purrs and says those words that give me so much pleasure: "Ana nasha" (She
is one of us).
None of us can work out what we were not supposed to photograph. The
derelict docks with rusting cranes? The black submarines half submerged in
water like basking whales? The absence of any sign of life? None the wiser,
we board the converted frigate that will be our home for the next three days
and steam north all night through the White Sea into the Bay of Onega. It is
a long, long way to Solovki.
Amazonian Olga with heavy bags under her sad eyes is in charge of Keeping
the Tourists Happy. She wakes us via the Tannoy that is relayed to every
cabin and broadcasts in excited gulps the day's menu. Breakfast, she
announces, is better than in any restaurant and consists of no fewer than 10
Eventually I find her. Olga, I say, the prisoners in the gulag got no bread,
no butter and no honey. Why don't you tell us about that? And I hold up the
book that has kept me awake for most of the night, the autobiography of
Dmitry Likhachev, a Russian scholar who rotted at Solovki for
four-and-a-half years. "Read this. He'll tell you what it was like."
"That is a very good book," Olga says quietly; her tone throws me. "An
important book. There's more about him in the museum."
But as far as I am concerned, he is everywhere, this young, intellectual
prisoner who came here in 1928, aged 21. His memoirs are my guide, and I
hardly listen to the solemn-faced young woman with a scarf tightly wrapped
around her head - she is pravoslavnoya, Russian Orthodox - who leads us past
wooden dachas, television antennae and kitchen gardens, and talks about the
British bombardment of the monastery during the Crimea War. I whisper to
Galia that I might hive off.
"Nelzya," she snaps. Wandering about unaccompanied on Solovki is not
allowed. Solovetsky is more than a monastery, it's a fortress: several
churches, two cathedrals, cookhouses, a refectory, dormitories, a laundry,
tailor's shop, a mill, in fact all the paraphernalia of the Russian Orthodox
medieval world is encased inside massive kremlin walls, more than 25 feet
thick, made of enormous white and grey stones now dusted with a red moss,
punctuated by bulky round towers with grey wooden roofs that point to a
sullen sky.
The size of the local boulders that make up the kremlin walls is astonishing
and at this moment I wish I had listened to our pious guide: how on earth
did men move these stones more than 500 years ago? I pass under the one
entrance gate, the only way in and the only way out; executions were carried
out near the lake in the monastery cemetery, a bullet in the back of the
Inside, the atmosphere feels oppressive. I am in a small village that has
gone to sleep. No one is about; there's a line of dirty white buildings with
red tin roofs, stone churches made from blackened boulders, broken
flagstones slicing through patches of unhealthy grass.
Most of the gulag buildings have gone (Likhachev went back in 1966 and
already they had disappeared) but there's still the trapeznaya, the dining
hall which, he says, was crammed with not hundreds but thousands of
prisoners sleeping on the floor, in lice-ridden filth, with no heating. Now
it's empty, whitewashed; the cool lines of a vaulted ceiling have a defiant
Finally we get to where I want to be: the gulag museum; it's housed near a
monk's dormitory and the laundry. There are hundreds of photographs of
inmates with the barest of information: name, profession and date of death
(almost always "shot"). Now and then a relation has placed a flower beneath
the photograph.
It was Lenin who turned Solovki into a prison camp in 1922 for
"undesirables" - political opponents such as mensheviks and socialist
revolutionaries, as well as Jews, gipsies and ethnic minorities.
But it was Stalin who gave Solovki the status of gulag, filling it with
kulaks, peasants and the intelligentsia of post-revolutionary Russia. The
brightest and the best were sent to Solovki - scientists, engineers,
teachers, writers, painters and poets. All summer typhus raged in the
mosquito-infested swamps where the prisoners cut logs and peat; all winter,
when the sea froze solid, half-starving men and women battled against
blizzards in temperatures of -50c.
"Strashna [ghastly]," Galia murmurs periodically as we look at photographs
of the victims; below the alert sensitive faces their fate is typewritten:
Lena Stuyrcevich. Teacher from the Ukraine. 1929 sent to Solovki. 1930 shot.
I couldn't help noticing the photographs of Likhachev's camp commander, the
proud Degtyarev who rode about on a white horse and was followed everywhere
by a dog called Black that sniffed out runaways and barked enthusiastically
when the executions started. In the 1930s it was Degtyarev's turn to be
arrested and shot.
That evening on the boat I can hardly eat supper. Galia reads my thoughts.
"You must understand that many people believed absolutely in the revolution.
My father said it gave him everything. He was Jewish, and when the
anti-semitic purges started he expected to die, but he always remained a
communist." "How could he support such inhumanity?" I protested. "He must
have known." Galia looks at me steadily. "Of course he knew that something
was terribly wrong." "And he did nothing," I say aggressively. "What could
he do? I told you he expected to die."
I go out on deck, take deep breaths, curse the horrible white night with its
sickly, half-hearted daylight, and wonder if my 21st-century rage is
justified. I was not there. I did not have to make those terrible choices. I
meet a gangly teenage boy who is brandishing the latest digital camcorder.
I ask him what he thought about the museum. He shrugs his shoulders and says
nothing. Does he know about Stalin? Of course, he says coming to life.
Stalin beat the Nazis. Russia saved the world from fascism.
The boy's father, overweight and smoking, joins us on deck, looking at me
suspiciously. I am wondering what a gulag means to the young, I explain. It
means to them what it means to us, the father snapped. "Strashna." Is that
why you are here? I ask. To teach them? "My grandfather died in a camp," the
father says firmly, stubbing out his cigarette. "We came for a holiday."
That evening on our boat, Misha, a bald singer from Archangel, plays his
guitar and sings beautiful, sad songs. Over late-night vodkas he tells me
that his grandfather was a priest who did three years' hard labour on
Solovki. He tried to help the hundreds of children who somehow got trapped
there, non-persons with no rations who scavenged like rats.
The priest survived the camp, only to die from hunger in the first years of
the war when a sixth of the population of Archangel starved to death. Horror piled upon horror, but nothing makes such a deep impression as our afternoon
excusion to Sekirka hill.
We are ushered on to a bus by our guide, Andrei, a bespectacled man in his
early thirties who lives on the island. We bump along a dirt road for more
than five miles, past lakes and forest, now and then glimpsing the sea.
Eventually we leave the bus and head for a small white church on a hill. The
stillness is broken by beautiful Orthodox chanting.
From the church a priest emerges in full black robes, followed by a choir of
men and women who follow him down a steep flight of wooden steps, singing
all the way.
Inside the church, surrounded by bare walls, a cross and flickering candles,
Andrei explains that in the late 1920s and 1930s this church was a
punishment block, a torture chamber, where people were beaten and slowly
killed. No one survived for more than three months. Solemnly he invites us
to light candles to the dead. With tears in his eyes, Misha places his
candle in a holder.
Outside the church we have a magnificent view over the forest and a distant sea. Andrei points to the wooden steps. "That used to be a wooden chute for
logs. When a prisoner could no longer work he was tied to a log and pushed
down the chute."
A pretty young woman from Moscow who had been reading Russian Vogue
muttered something in disbelief. Andrei swivelled and faced her. "It is
absolutely true, and you should know it, and everything else that happened
here. We all have to know. It is part of our strashnaya historia (terrible
Someone mentions another death in another camp and suddenly people are
talking to each other, sharing family histories, swapping stories of
starvation, deportation and death. I look at the eyes of the young; they are
At the bottom of the wooden steps is a large wooden cross with boulders at
its base. This, says Andrei, is the monument to the victims of the gulag.
"Why no headstone, no plaque?" I ask. Andrei sighs. "We shall raise the
matter with Patriarch when he comes here next year."
Still I cannot shake off the terrible sense of gloom until Galia points out
that at least Russian tourists have not turned their back on Solovki; they
are here when they could be on a beach in Cyprus or Turkey.
More than 300 people live here permanently while young students get paid
work as guides and go on bicycle trips round the island. Tourism brings
revenue, and there's even an airport, so no one is imprisoned either by ice
or by ideology.
We pass the teenager with the camcorder. He shouts out to a young man
who is plunging a spade into the soft earth of his kitchen garden: "Do you
have a television?" The gardener looks up and nods. "Can I watch the
So many people suffered in so many ways, by starvation, deportation, and
execution, that it is hard to give a complete tally of the human cost of
the three decades when Stalin ran the Soviet Union.
Anne Applebaum, author of an encyclopaedic new study of the Gulag
(and former Economist writer), reckons 18 million people passed through
the camp system, a further 6 million were exiled, and 6-7 million died in
the artificial famines of the 1930s.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, legendary chronicler of Soviet tyranny, puts the
death toll at 20 million-plus and reckons that Stalin's brutality deprived
Soviet Union of 100 million people who would otherwise have been born
in conditions of normality. Yet, extraordinarily, many Russians still look
back on the Stalin years as a golden era.
One reason is that much of the period is still cloaked in mystery. After a
brief period following the collapse of Communism in the early 1990s,
journalists and historians were able to get into the KGB archives. But
since then it has become increasingly hard for outsiders to gain access to
While most Russians accept that Stalin, who died on March 5th 1953, was a
blood-stained oppressor, many still admire him for making their country
great. Did he not fulfill the dream of another magnificent tyrant, Peter the
Great, by dragging a country of peasants into the industrial and even space age? Some nostalgists even cite the White Sea canal, linking Russia's
Arctic coast to the Baltic Sea and built in just 20 months, as a monument
to his genius--even though more than 100,000 people perished in the effort.
Viktor Anpilov, head of an avowedly Stalinist party, says that foreigners
used to treat Russia with the respect it deserved. It was--he
proclaims--the first country to put a man into space, the first where
doctors performed open heart surgery, the top of the league of
mathematicians and physicists. Now, he moans, outsiders are only interested
in Russia's mineral wealth. "They are laughing at us and despise us for our
fall," he says.
Such views, and the xenophobia they reflect, are still common, in public
attitudes and protectionist, inward-looking laws and rules on everything
from foreign ownership to visas. Other surviving features of the Stalin era
include the presumption of guilt in the legal system. Reform is painfully
slow. Russia's top prosecutor recently boasted that last year the acquittal
rate had doubled--to the grand total of 0.8% of those on trial.
After stalling for 12 years, in January Russia's parliament passed a law
granting Stalin's victims and their children compensation, albeit of a
symbolic kind: 92 roubles ($2.9) a month, one free train ride a year,
half-price medicine, and free false teeth. Recently, in Warsaw, Russia's
prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, took a more daring step and floated the
idea of paying compensation to Stalin's Polish victims.
But there has still been nothing like the Germans' painful and candid
acknowledgement of the enormity both of crimes committed then and of
collective responsibility now. It may be years yet before Russians face up
to the full horrors of the Stalin era, both inflicted and suffered.
In 1981, as I embarked on studies of the Great Famine in Ukraine, there were
still many unpublished Party documents. After studying national communism
within the context of the Ukrainian history of the period, along with
documents, speeches, and editorials carried literally every day by the
official press of Soviet Ukraine, the main features of the Soviet official
policy toward Ukraine became completely clear to me.
At this point a digression is in order. Why should I, a born and bred
American, take up such a topic? What did I need it for? I have been asked
this question very often and I have often been tempted to ask in turn: Why
should millions of Russians, Jews, Armenians, and Ukrainians travel across
the ocean to that faraway godforsaken country, my America? I did it because
Ukrainian Americans required such research, and fate decreed that the
victims chose me. Just as one cannot study the Holocaust without becoming
half Jewish in spirit, one cannot study the Famine and not become at least
half Ukrainian. I have spent too many years for Ukraine not to have become
the greater part of my life. After all, Martin Luther said, "Here I stand, I
can do no other."
The perpetrators' motive was simple, and all the documents and later
research have not changed the overall portrait of the events I first
presented in 1982 International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide in
Tel Aviv. I remain convinced that, for Stalin to have complete centralized
power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second
largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian
peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as
understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as
such. The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore,
no separate country, and thus no problem. Such a policy is GENOCIDE in the
classic sense of the word.
Until the end of war communism in 1921, the Bolsheviks cultivated an almost
pathological hatred what they called bourgeois nationalism. The essence of
Lenin's formula, "rapprochement and merger of nations," can itself be
interpreted as progenocidal, since imposing a single national pattern was
proclaimed "historically progressive." During the first Soviet occupation of
Kyiv, Bolshevik forces shot anyone they found in the streets speaking
Ukrainian. The famine of 1921-23, killing millions in Ukraine, was obviously
exacerbated by Moscow's economic policy with regard to Ukraine. Food was
pumped out of that country in an openly discriminatory manner. In 1919 the
head of the second Soviet Ukrainian government, Khristian Rakovsky, in 1919
formally branded Ukrainian a counterrevolutionary language. In 1921, the
Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Federative Soviet Socialist
Republic (RFSSR) asked for help only for the starving populace in Volga
Basin and the New Economic Policy (NEP) that ended the forced seizure of
foodstuffs delayed in Ukraine six months to prolong the prodrazverstka
campaign of requisitioning farm produce. It was only with the start of NEP
in 1921 that an attempt was made to have Soviet power coexist with
non-Russian languages and cultures (resolution On the National Question of
the Tenth RKP{b} Congress). In the course of Ukrainization (or
"indigenization" proclaimed by the Twelfth Party Congress), in 1923-32,
Communists in Ukraine attempted to gain control of the Ukrainian national
cultural process by directly participating in it. Halting this policy during
the Holodomor of 1932-33 had all the hallmarks of genocide. To enforce his
direct rule in Ukraine, Stalin restored to terrible repression and, finally
to famine. In late October 1932, the All-Union Communist Party (VKP{b}) took
the grain procurements campaign under its direct control through Vyacheslav
Molotov, Chairman of the USSR Council of People's Commissars, who was
appointed chairman of the grain procurements commission in the Ukrainian
SSR. (Lazar Kaganovich headed an analogous commission in what was then the
South Caucasus Territory, including the heavily Ukrainian Kuban.) On
November 18 the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of
Ukraine (KP{b}U) , presided over by Molotov, instituted a system of fines
payable in kind. This was actually a directive aimed at making collective
farmers return to the state grain received as advance payments on crops, and
confiscating other foodstuffs in the absence of grain. All this could only
be interpreted as a policy meant to cause a famine, the Holodomor.
The CC VKP(b) Politburo resolution of December 14, 1932, signed by Stalin
and Molotov, accusing the Ukrainian SSR government and leadership of the
North Caucasus Territory of Ukrainian nationalism, this being allegedly the
main reason for the unwillingness or inability of the local Communists to
comply with the procurements quotas for mythical grain, along with a January
24, 1933 VKP(b) reprimand of the entire KP(b)U, were graphic evidence that
the leadership in Moscow sought to end any independent activity by the
KP(b)U and Soviet Ukrainian government. The mass terror unleashed against
Ukrainian culture in 1933 was additional evidence that Moscow wanted to
destroy Ukrainian national identity as the basis of such independent
activity. In 1988, the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine, relying on such
evidence, determined that the Holodomor was an act of genocide. In 1990, an
international commission to study the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine, set up
by the World Congress of Free Ukrainians, failed to arrive at an unequivocal
conclusion because certain members erroneously considered genocide a matter
of legislation (droit) rather than unchanging law (loi), contrary to the
basic international instruments. The commission explained its decision,
saying the Manmade Famine in Ukraine was organized 15 years before the said
documents were adopted, and that an act of genocide could be claimed only
the then Soviet government; that none of the actual organizers of the
Holodomor were among the living, except Lazar Kaganovich. The nature and
scope of the Holodomor in Ukraine remain subject to dispute by foreign
We investigated the issue as best be could. It seems to me that the
documents we collected, including eyewitness accounts and our Report to
Congress, have played their role. The further work with this material we
leave to posterity. We simply could not endure the pain and horror. Stalin's
sociological scorched earth policy maimed Ukraine to such an extent that it
created a discontinuity in the normal development of the Ukrainian people,
producing a unique situation. While in countries such as Poland, the Czech
Republic, Hungary, etc., the collapse of communism could and did result in
the restoration of independence lost by the previous states, in Ukraine,
except for its western territories, the Ukrainian nation - as a community
possessing a broad consensus regarding its identity, history, and cultural
values - has remained in a sense a national minority in its own country. In
other words, the people as such was so deformed that when Ukraine finally
became independent there was no broad consensus concerning its future. All
that remained was the surviving structures of Soviet Ukraine. In 1991, all
of us made a fundamental albeit unconscious error in assuming that the newly
independent states were new independent states. Now it is clear that in fact
hitherto extant but dependent states merely became independent with the same
people remaining in basically the same positions, doing basically the same
things, and the course of events evolved from there. Postcommunist Ukraine
already no longer just an independent Ukrainian SSR, but it is also not a
Ukrainian Ukraine, in the subjective sense - with people sharing the same
national values and understanding of their identity - in the sense in which
Poland is Polish and the Czech Republic is Czech.
All broad historical narratives are to some extent artificial, yet this is a
natural process of self-understanding for any given people. In the case of
the Soviet Union, there was the artificial incorporation of Ukrainian
history and those of other peoples, imposing a different national identity,
as seen fit by those in power at the time. In 1950, the late Anna Pankratova
made a discovery in the nineteenth edition of her History of the USSR,
writing that the Cossack revolution, which began in 1649, was the "Ukrainian
war of national liberation war led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky." The apparent
subtext was that for Ukrainians "national liberation" meant "reunification"
with the big brother, Russia; they were to distinguish between the "Great
Patriotic War" from World War II, meaning that they won that war as a
"little brother" under the big one's able guidance and not as a full-fledged
member of the United Nations taking part in a world struggle against Nazism.
Works in Russian by, say, Mikhail Bulgakov were generally available, but a
whole generation of Ukrainian literati known as the rozstriliane
vidrodzhennia, the renaissance that was executed, was "erased," although its
representatives were as talented as all those representing Russia's
coterminous silver age (Mykola Khvyliovy, Yury Yanovsky, young Sosiura and
Tychyna, along with Mykola Zerov's neoclassicist poetry and translations
from ancient literature). The Soviet regime did its best to "root out and
destroy nationalism" (Bilshovyk Ukrayiny, 1933, No. 7) in the language
itself, purging the very vocabulary of the language as the intellectual
building blocks of the cultural development in any human community. What was
left remained too little to make Ukraine an equal member of the world
community of nations.
As I have often said, the late émigré Prof. Ivan L. Rudnytsky saw the roots
of what would grow as today's Ukraine as early as 1962: the republic
nomenklatura and those beginning to look for and sow the seeds of current
national values. Previously, I have referred to these forces as Ukraine's
territorial and the national elites. The tragedy of independent Ukraine is
that the territorial, rather than the national elite became the dominant
force, its members retaining all the hallmarks of the traditional
nomenklatura (think one thing, say another, and do yet a third). The actual
Ukrainian economic model remains triangular. This triangle was discernible
even in the 1970s: corrupt members of the nomenklatura Є illegal
entrepreneurs Є criminal organizations. Except that narrow professionals
were now the hitherto illegal entrepreneurs are being replaced by
"businessmen" who are more interested in politics than business, while the
other sides of the triangle could always be used to get the better of the
more productive competitors, causing the productivity of labor to remain low
and the people poor. In fact, the situation is the same in Russia. So long
as this situation remains, all talk about Ukraine's European choice will
remain just so much empty talk, for the European Union is an above all an
economic organization, and this post-Soviet economic model is incompatible
with the European one, while all the fine phrases about zlahoda (harmony or
accord) actually serve to conceal the absence of any national convictions in
most of those who wield power in Ukraine. Members of the territorial elite
will do provide everything asked of them in the national sphere, because
they themselves have nothing to lose here, no national values, nor do they
have any real state ones. Much has been written about the inferiority and
lack of competitiveness among Ukrainian-language print and other media
outlets. Yet who wants to read a hundred times over how much we love
Ukraine - and this using slang rather than literary Ukrainian, when most
translations of foreign authors read better and are more interesting in
Only the Ukrainians themselves can decide how they should speak and write.
Yet how can they decide this, not knowing the words once banned (again, see
Bilshovyk Ukrayiny, 1933, No 7!)? I wish that someday someone would sit, as
I have done, over the suppressed works from the 1920s of the Academy of
Sciences Institutes of Scientific Language and Living Language. When will
the results of their work will be published, so that one all can examine
what was done by that lost generation and then be able to make the most
basic building blocks of the nation's thought?
The main thing is that Ukrainians will never become a full-fledged people
and an equal member of European civilization until power flows from the
state to a self-organized people able to force those in power to do what the
people want. This is precisely what makes us often fail to understand the
actual meaning of the concept, civil society. It is not an ideal system, not always completely democratic, but no one has discovered anything better thus
far. No state will ever make Ukraine Ukrainian. Only self-organized
Ukrainians can do this, and I am deeply convinced that they will.
LONDON.......Fifty years to the week after Stalin died, gulag survivors
remain stuck in bleak outposts of the former Soviet Union.
As Russians debate the legacy of the man who ruled for a generation,
former prisoners in towns such as Vorkuta have little to celebrate.
Twelve-hundred miles north-east of Moscow, train No 42 crosses the Arctic
Circle and bursts from the forest into the blizzard-swept wasteland of this
mining town - a huddle of smokestacks and apartment blocks - where the
winter temperature falls to minus 50C.
It was once the heart of Stalin's gulags, built by men and women banished
for "crimes against Soviet power". Today, a few hundred gulag survivors live
among miners and engineers, forgotten by the authorities.
An estimated 18 million Soviet citizens entered the gulags during the 50
years they flourished; a network of about 500 camps where at least seven
million died.
Coal was found in Vorkuta in the 1920s and by 1934 prisoners from all over
the USSR (including Ukraine) were sucked into its pits and factories.
Scattered on the town's fringes are the smashed remains of barracks,
isolation cells and watchtowers.
Thousands died here from disease, starvation and hypothermia. Those who
survived their sentences were often too poor to return home.
Most of the few still marooned have given up hope of return. "I think I will
never see my motherland again," said Anastasia Bugaenko, 76, a former
prisoner from western Ukraine. "I grew up in green countryside but I will
die here in the snow."
Like many, Mrs. Bugaenko was a victim of Soviet paranoia. She was
sentenced to six years' hard labour in 1949 after young communists
denounced her brother for wearing a black armband. He was mourning
his father, killed in Auschwitz.
"All my life, I had never so much as swatted a fly," she said. "From the
moment I was sent to the gulag, I burned with desire to kill Stalin."
Her life was consumed by a daily struggle for survival. Prisoners toiled all
day underground and at night huddled in wooden barracks or zemlyanka -
moss-lined bunkers carved from the permafrost.
Rations were limited to soup and 14 ounces of bread a day, a quantity
increased by two ounces if production targets were met. "It was almost
unendurable," said Olga Olshevskaya, 93, from St Petersburg, who was
arrested for political agitation at the height of Stalin's terror in 1937.
He died on March 5, 1953.
The survivors were mostly women, said Mrs. Olshevskaya. "The food was
enough for women but men lacked the nourishment they needed."
Mrs Bugaenko was freed in 1952 but had nowhere to go. "They gave me 200
roubles [now worth less than њ4] and pushed me into the tundra." She found a
job on the local railway, married, and saved enough money for a short trip
to Ukraine five years later.
Under Soviet law she had to return to Vorkuta. It was the last time she saw
her family. She is now free to travel but can't afford it on her pension.
Although Vorkuta's last camps closed in the early 1960s, more than 300
surviving former political prisoners are stranded in the town, shackled by
their pensions from the local authority.
As Vorkuta dies a slow death - half its mines have closed - thousands of
inhabitants are clamouring for homes elsewhere in Russia but victims of
political repression do not get preferential treatment.
One gulag survivor, however, is convinced she will finally leave soon.
Galina Dall lives alone in a two-room apartment decorated with trinkets from
her native Germany. In 1945 she was seized in Ukraine - where her family
had fled on the outbreak of war - and sentenced to 10 years because she had
bowed to pressure to work as a translator for Nazi troops. "Now the sound of
my language calls to me," she said.
She cultivated condemned artists and singers in the Vorkuta camp and since
her release in 1955 has been reading Shakespeare and Goethe.
Mrs Dall's two sons worked as miners and have raised enough money to take
her to Stuttgart. "I want to see museums, discuss religion and talk with
cultured people in my native tongue," she said. "I want to go home."
Like many in Russia, she refuses to blame Stalin for her suffering. "He
didn't know about my imprisonment. The system was to blame, not Stalin.
He did the right thing for the Soviet Union."
Mrs Bugaenko is less forgiving. "When Stalin died in 1953 one of my
workmates asked why I was not crying. I replied, 'I cried for years in the
gulag because of that monster'. I had no tears left."
MOSCOW (Reuters) - He died half a century ago, but the world is still
trying to defuse the time-bombs Soviet dictator Josef Stalin left behind.
Almost every Russian past retirement age recalls where he was when news
broke on March 5, 1953, that the Soviet Union's "man of steel" had breathed
his last.
His death ended nearly 30 years of iron-fisted rule, unparalleled in 20th
century European history, marked by mass purges, arbitrary arrests by the
secret police, executions and deportation.
"It meant for us that my father might be coming home," said 64-year-old
Olga Trifonova, referring to Roman Khiroshychenko who was later freed
after eight years in the camps.
Later "de-Stalinization" drives only partly dismantled the myth of the
mustachioed Georgian who enjoyed god-like status thanks to a huge
personality cult whipped up by his henchmen.
Even today, many Russians of the older generation, marginalized in the new
capitalist Russia and with rosy memories of a well-structured, if bleak,
childhood, react ambivalently to mention of his name.
They argue that his role in leading Soviet forces to victory over Nazism
and turning Russia into an industrial world power outweigh the terror he
waged against the Soviet population.
"He was the greatest statesman not only of the 20th century but of all
Russian history," declared Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov.
But as the drama of Chechnya and unresolved conflicts elsewhere in the
former Soviet Union show, history is still picking up the pieces.
Russia's planners bump up against his legacy daily in their attempts to
restructure industrial behemoths left over from a world of five-year plans
and well-massaged production statistics.
His forced collectivization ripped the peasant heart out of Russia. Small
wonder that President Vladimir Putin's reformers find little rural
tradition to tap into as they seek to turn the clock back to land
Stalin was born Josef Dzhugashvili in Georgia in 1879 and trained briefly
for the priesthood before joining underground revolutionary movements. He
took over the communist leadership on the death of Soviet state founder
Vladimir Lenin in 1924.
In the years following, millions died in his mass purges and millions more
in famine and the forced collectivization of farm lands. Arbitrary arrests
and mass deportations of ethnic groups to distant reaches of the Soviet
Union turned lives upside down.
Stalin surrounded himself with the immoral and the weak.
Take for instance Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's dreaded secret police lieutenant
and a serial rapist who preyed on young women snatched from the streets of
There was Mikhail Kalinin, nominal head of state from 1919 to 1946 whose
face beams from thousands of photographs alongside Stalin. He stood by as
the dictator sent his wife to a Siberian labor camp.
Despite the havoc wrought by Stalin, his long period in power and
reputation as a strong wartime leader meant many Soviet citizens genuinely
felt the loss of a father-figure when he died.
At his lying-in-state in central Moscow there were scenes of near hysteria.
Stampedes, caused by bad policing, led to hundreds being killed in the
crush, city residents say.
As a teen-ager, Trifonova took the advice of a kindly stranger on the
streets and turned back home that day. "The police caused the deaths by
trying to channel people," she said.
But Trifonova, author of a book on Stalin's luckless second wife who died
in a bizarre shooting incident in the Kremlin in 1932, disputes accounts of
universal grief.
"My mother was a teacher. She said she cried just like everyone else at
school. When I asked 'Why?' she said 'Because I knew others were watching
A Moscow exhibition shows the aura that surrounded him. One exhibit is a
set of large dolls presented to him by factory workers in 1949. The dolls
-- all radiating chubby-cheeked health that jars with the deprivation of
the post-war years -- hold aloft a banner thanking Stalin for a happy
Hundreds of public monuments and busts of the dictator were destroyed after
his successor Nikita Khrushchev launched the first tentative moves to
"de-Stalinize" society.
But his mark is still plain to see on the streets of the old Soviet Union.
When it came to buildings, big was beautiful. Gargantuan structures still
dominate the skyline of many Russian cities. The distinctive "wedding cake"
skyscrapers make night-time Moscow look like Batman's Gotham City to an
The wide multi-laned highways of today were built by Stalin when virtually
no Soviet citizens had cars, but they were perfect channels for communist
demonstrations. His mark can be seen too in the ornate Moscow metro
stations, decorated with stone reliefs of epic communist moments.
But there is a more intangible legacy in Russia today.
In the provinces, a suspicion of foreigners lingers on in the older
generation, a hangover from a time when to know outsiders was dangerous and
to be "cosmopolitan" meant you were selling out the Motherland to the West.
"The main aim of Stalinism was to surround the country with a wall not to
allow in foreign influence," said Eduard Radzinsky, a historical
commentator on the period, arguing this struck a natural chord among many
The survival instincts from an often cruel age translate today into a
subservience to hierarchy and officialdom, and a respect verging on
obsession for bureaucratic red-tape that foreign investors find maddening.
Many older Russians hanker after the "poryadok," or order, a virtue
fostered by Stalin's regimented society but which often had a sinister
sub-text of repression.
Meanwhile, the world wrestles with the fall-out from his ruthless
re-engineering of the Soviet map.
He played a hand in giving the Armenian-populated region of
Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan in the early 1920s in a gesture motivated
at the time by a desire to appease Turkey.
It was Stalin too who sowed the seeds of the secessionist crisis in
Georgia's Abkhazia region, by transporting thousands of Abkhazians to
Siberia in the late 1930s and 1940s.
Both breakaway regions now have de facto independence after wars in which
tens of thousands were killed, but both conflicts defy a long-term solution
despite big power mediation efforts.
And then there is Chechnya, the bugbear of the Kremlin.
The mass deportation of Chechens to Kazakhstan in February 1944 by Stalin
who saw them as Nazi collaborators lighted the fuse in the separatist
dispute that haunts Russia to this day.
The Chechens were not alone. Among other ethnic groups, he deported Crimean
Tatars, Ingushis, Volga Germans. Many such groups have been able to return
but some, like the Meskhetian Turks, are still in exile.
"He was always playing these games with nationalities. He moved peoples
around so that they would lose any sense of their own nationhood,"
Radzinsky told Reuters. "He followed a single formula: a day without
repression was wasted for the country."
Fifty years have passed since Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, but many
Russians still revere him as a great leader who defeated Hitler and made
the Soviet Union a superpower, despite his devastating purges which killed
millions of people.
Opposite Moscow's Lubyanka, the headquarters of Stalin's secret police
where political prisoners were tortured and interrogated before being
herded like cattle onto trains to labour camps in Siberia and the far
north, stands a small black-stone memorial to his victims.
But Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov provoked liberal fury last year by
proposing to restore in the same place a huge statue to Lenin's secret
police chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, who also carried out mass executions,
which was torn down by pro-democracy crowds in 1991.
Inside the Kremlin walls, President Vladimir Putin, a career officer in the
KGB who later headed its present-day successor, the Federal Security
Service (FSB), has spent the last three years trying to bring back his
ideal of a strong state inspired by the Soviet past.
"Putin has sympathy for the view that Stalin made this country great
although the repressions were unfair," said Arseny Roginsky, whose father
was shot under Stalin and who now heads the Russian human rights
organization, Memorial.
"Russia will not be able to reconcile itself to this period of history
anytime in the near future. It will take decades in the best-case
scenario," he added.
A dictator who cast a shadow over the 20th century comparable to Hitler in
world history books, Stalin's nearly 30-year reign of terror reached a peak
in the late 1930s, when mass trials were held to liquidate all opposition.
There were 800,000 people officially recorded as shot during the Soviet
But up to 30 million people are estimated by Western historians to have
died between 1918 and 1956 in Stalinist repression, civil war, famine and
collectivization, although the true figure may never be known.
Yet today in Russia, the "father of the people" is widely remembered not
for the staggering human cost of his brutal methods but for making Moscow a
leading world power through rapid industrialization and victory in World
War II.
Stalin should be praised for pulling off a monumental task in dragging his
vast backward country into the modern era, said Communist historian
Alexander Senyavsky, who pointed out that at the start of the 20th century
in Russia, 85 percent of the population were illiterate peasants.
"Without collectivization and industrialization at this forced pace, we
couldn't have defeated Hitler. You cannot equate Nazism, which tried to
make one race dominate the entire world, with a regime which pursued, even
with harsh methods, justifiable aims," he said.
After a decade of turmoil and economic hardship since the break-up of the
Soviet Union, Stalin's time also represents a nostalgic memory, according
to sociologist Boris Dubin.
Russia's Public Opinion Foundation found in a recent poll that 36 percent
of Russians thought Stalin "did more good than bad for the country," while
just 29 percent disagreed with the statement.
Another poll conducted in 1994 showed that only 26 percent had a favourable
impression of the Soviet leader.
"If you go away from Moscow and Saint Petersburg to the provinces, you will
hear only good things about Stalin," said Yury Zhukov, a historian from the
Moscow Institute of Russian History.
"For ordinary people, the 1930s is a period when life began to improve.
They don't think about the victims of repression. It didn't affect them,"
he added.
The Russian government has shown a reluctance to condemn Stalinism, despite
his successor Nikita Khrushchev's famous speech in 1956 before the 20th
Party Congress criticizing the excesses of Stalin's rule and the
free-wheeling public debate during Glasnost in the late 1980s.
It has never granted any proper compensation to the surviving victims of
Stalinism and relatives of those who died in the repression, although
Russians who served as slave labour under Nazi Germany have got payouts
under a German compensation fund.
And under Putin, the attitude towards the Stalinist past has taken a step
He has restored a number of Soviet symbols, including Stalin's national
anthem set to new lyrics -- the tune was played to wake up prisoners in
Stalinist labour camps.
If Russia is to overcome its ambivalence about the crimes of Stalin, the
government must lead the way by publicly condemning Stalinism, making
schools teach about it, funding nationwide exhibitions and erecting
memorials to the victims across the country, said Memorial's Roginsky.
Until this is done, the damaging legacy of Stalin will continue to haunt
Russians and keep them submissive towards a state which cynically
disregards its citizens' rights, he warned, pointing to the authorities'
handling of the Moscow hostage crisis last October.
Of the 800 hostages seized by Chechen guerrillas in a Moscow theatre,
129 died during the three-day siege, all but two killed by a powerful
sleeping gas used by Russian special forces in a rescue operation hailed
as a success.
"Stalin and the Stalinist mentality is everywhere. The idea that the state
is everything and the individual nothing is still all-pervasive," said
Susana Pechuro, 69, who spent five years in prisons and labour camps,
says the lesson of totalitarianism is that the individual has to earn his
own freedoms.
"I think that Stalin was unavoidable for us, like Hitler in Germany. It
wasn't some external evil, it was a reflection of our system and mentality.
"People say Stalin was guilty for everything but that takes away society's
responsibility. There's no point in demonizing him. You have to think about
how to change this country," she said.
MOSCOW (AP) - The typewritten letters on a yellowing page spell out
the end of an era in striking shorthand. Next to the time - 9:50 p.m.,
March 5, 1953 - is just a brief entry: ``Comrade I.V. Stalin died.''
So ends a medical report detailing Josef Stalin's last four days, as he lay
dying in his Moscow dacha. It is part of a new exhibit at Russia's federal
archives, whose officials hope it will help dispel decades of speculation
that the Soviet dictator was done in by a Kremlin intrigue.
If mysteries about Stalin's demise persist, they are dwarfed by the
conflicting views and emotions that surround his life - and his role in the
troubled history of a country that seems unable to break his spell 50 years
after his death.
"There may be no other figure in Russian history of the last century who
has provoked such different evaluations, from fierce hatred to
consecration," said historian Yuri Polyakov, a member of the prestigious
Russian Academy of Sciences.
For some, Stalin was a giant who bore the Soviet Union on his shoulders to
victory in World War II, hauled it onto the front line of the industrial
age and kept ironclad order at home while turning the country into a
superpower with the clout to make its Cold War foes shudder.
"He was the best - as a chief, as a leader. He lifted the country out of
the ruins," said Natalya Vekshina, 64, who took her grandson to a separate
exhibit, across town, focusing on Stalin's cult of personality - the
propaganda that portrayed him simultaneously as a god and a good guy.
"We need a leader like him now,'' Vekshina said.
Larisa Tsvizhba, at the archive exhibit, disagreed. She said Stalin left a
"sinister markz"' on the Soviet Union and stunted its growth by decimating
a generation. "When millions of people die for no apparent reason - the
best people - what kind of progress can there be?"
Stalin's repressions "touched if not every person, then every other person
in the country," said Tsvizhba.
Russian officials have said they believe more than 20 million people were
victims of communist purges before Stalin's death. More than 10 million are
said to have died.
Like many of Stalin's ardent admirers, Vekshina is from a generation that
mostly suffered from the Soviet collapse. She lost her engineering job,
while her scientist husband is "a big man in his field - but now he's
But it's not only the elderly who yearn for Stalin's strong hand.
"He is the symbol of a healthy nation,'' said Alexei Fedyakin, 27, a
political science graduate student who came to see the "Stalin: Man and
Symbol" exhibit and wrote a diatribe in the visitors' book complaining
about material showing Stalin in a bad light.
Those items - records of executions, and artwork depicting Stalin holding
the keys to a prison cell stretching across the Soviet Union - reflect the
backlash that came in two waves, one soon after his death and another in
the late 1980s, with Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost.
In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's cult of
personality, and his body was removed from its place next to Lenin in the
Red Square mausoleum in 1961. But it was buried nearby, alongside the
Kremlin wall, and much of the truth about Stalin's excesses did not emerge
until the Gorbachev era.
The sharp criticism of Stalin that held sway as the Soviet Union collapsed
waned along with the euphoria of Russians hoping for a swift, smooth
transition to democracy. Stalin's star has brightened for those angered by
lawlessness, economic uncertainty and their country's decline on the world
Oleg Orlov, head of the human rights organization Memorial, said that
frustration helped fuel the rise of President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB
colonel who has restored some Soviet-era symbols and has been careful in
his criticism of Stalin.
"Putin arrived on this wave - on promises of stability and pride for one's
country as a great power, and of a restoration of order - and a major part
of this ideology was pride in the past," Orlov said.
According to poll results by the Public Opinion Foundation last week, 37
percent said Stalin did more good than bad for the country - compared to 29
percent who believe the opposite. The organization contacted 1,500
respondents across Russia on Feb. 22-23. No margin of error was given.
In the visitors' book at the ``Man and Symbol'' exhibit, one person mused:
"I wonder, will our country live to see the moment when Stalin is
perceived as an ordinary person, instead of as either the devil incarnate
or the Father of the Peoples?"
The power of Stalin's personality and the scale of the suffering that
marked his rule suggest that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.
On one wall in the exhibit stands a large diorama presented to Stalin on
his 70th birthday, in 1949. Inside, a row of dolls marches in Red Square,
bearing a banner reading "Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy
Under glass in another room is a book listing victims of Stalin's terror.
Many names are matched with photographs, and each brief biography
notes the date and cause of death: shot July 28, 1938; shot Oct. 18,
1937; shot Sept. 1, 1938.
Polyakov, the historian, said there is one thing he has never really
figured out about Stalin: why he killed so many people. "There's no
answer," he said.
Opinion polls in Russia show that 50 years after his death, Soviet dictator
Joseph Stalin is more often remembered for the good things he supposedly did
for his country than for the fact that he is personally responsible for the
death of millions of people. On March 5th, half a century has passed since
he died after 30 brutal years in power.
Soviet people were stunned to hear the news of Stalin's death on the 5th of
March, 1953. The announcement came after three decades of a regime that
had cost millions of innocent lives, a regime which had set up a network of
concentration camps on a scale never seen before: the Gulag.
Maya Kukharskaya, now 78, heard the announcement in a labour camp
somewhere in the steppe of Kazakhstan, during the final part of a ten-year
"There was some sort of a projector," she recalls. "They switched it on.
Many cried, because he had been in power for so many years. Others
thought differently. I listened and watched. But there were those who cried
a lot. I did not cry."
In 1942 she and her sister were deported from Kiev to Germany by the
advancing Nazi troops. For three years they were forced to work for the
Germans. But the victory over Hitler's Germany brought no relief: when the
girls returned to Kiev, they were arrested, severely beaten up, and sent to
the Gulag.
"I was 20 years old. I was considered an enemy of the people and a traitor
of my country, a German spy. They accused me of everything, arrested me
and put me in prison for ten years," says Maya Kukharskaya.
Today, she is one of 3,000 patients at the Medical Rehabilitation Centre in
Kiev. The centre was set up six years ago to give medical and other
assistance to victims of the totalitarian regime. Semyon Gluzman, the
director and one of the founders, spent ten years in prison during the rule
of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The centre, he says, is unique. But it may
soon have to close down, when financing by the European Union stops.
"I cannot demand from the West to help these old people. They are not
victims of the West, they are victims of Stalin," says Mr Gluzman. "But
unfortunately they still remain victims. They have not been rehabilitated,
they are poor, they cannot afford normal medical care. This is the only
place where these 3,000 people can get help."
One of the oldest patients at the centre is Nina Rudik. Born in 1906, she is
still active as a translator of Russian texts into Ukrainian.
In the early 1930s, Mrs Rudik witnessed the results of the terrible famine
that Stalin forced upon Ukraine in an attempt to quell Ukrainian
nationalism. At least seven million people died, a catastrophe that is still
remembered in Ukraine as a clear act of genocide.
"In the early morning, trucks would drive around the city to collect the
bodies. I didn't see them when I went to university to work, because at dawn
they were taken away. Such terrible famine. It is even difficult to remember
it," says Nina Rudik.
For her, the worst was still to come. In 1937, at the height of Stalin's
regime of terror, her husband, a writer, was arrested and disappeared. Soon,
Mrs Rudnik also found herself in a Kiev prison, as the wife of a so-called
'enemy of the people'. She was put on a train and sent to a camp in
Kazakhstan, with 6,000 other women. It was an attempt by the Kremlin to
eradicate the Ukrainian intelligentsia, says Nina Rudik.
"I believe there hasn't been a family in which somebody was not killed,
shot, arrested, or whose life was ruined," she says. "I myself lost
everything, my family, my beloved profession. Everything was smashed at
once, just like that."
She lost her husband and her father. Her only daughter died when she was
just one year old. The death of Joseph Stalin, in 1953, was a relief, but at
the time it was still dangerous to show that.
"He was a tyrant. I cannot find any other words to describe this monster,"
says Nina Rudik. "He has destroyed so many people, so many. If I only look
in my own circle, that of writers. He has killed the flower of the nation."
He was nothing more than a tyrant, nothing less than evil. Robert Manne
examines the legacy of Joseph Stalin, who died 50 years ago today.
In November 1940, during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Soviet foreign
minister Molotov visited Berlin. "I know that history will remember Stalin,"
Hitler told him, "but it will also remember me."
Hitler was right. Both he and Stalin were destined to be remembered as the
20th century's two most consequential political figures and the two most
terrible tyrants known to history.
Stalin died 50 years ago today. He was born, as Iosif Dzugashvili, of
poorest Georgian peasant stock. The family was not close. Stalin's father
was a cobbler, a wife beater and a drunk. From the time he left the Orthodox
seminary to join the Bolshevik party in 1904 to the year of her death in
1937, Stalin met his mother on no more than four occasions. With the partial
exception of his first wife, who died in 1907, Stalin appears to have
experienced throughout his life no attachment to any human being.
The Bolshevik party was the most extreme tendency of Russian Marxism.
Before the abdication of the tsar in February 1917, Stalin worked as a
professional revolutionary, and he was arrested and exiled several times.
By the time he was voted onto the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912,
he had become the party's expert on the problem of the empire's non-
Russian minority nationalities.
While Stalin's personal role in the almost bloodless seizure of power in
Russia in October 1917 was considerably less glorious than he would later
pretend, he did play a significant part in the military victory over the
White Armies in the unbelievably savage civil war of 1918-20.
Yet, at that stage, even his more brilliant comrades continued to look down
on him as a nonentity, as the "grey blur", or as Leon Trotsky put it, the
"outstanding mediocrity". Stalin never forgot a slight. For their
condescension, Stalin's comrades would later pay a high price.
Lenin suffered a series of strokes between November 1922 and his death in
January 1924. During these months his misgivings about Stalin grew,
because of his brutal administrative style, and the unheard of insolence he
displayed towards Krupskaya, Lenin's wife.
In his final political will, Lenin suggested removing Stalin from the
general secretaryship. Because they feared Trotsky and not Stalin, and
because Lenin had been less than complimentary about all of them, Stalin's
colleagues helped to suppress Lenin's will.
During the 1920s, the members of the post-Lenin Politburo became absorbed
in a fierce and complex political struggle. The stakes were high - not
merely the Lenin succession but the very future of the revolution, which all
accepted was the most important historical event in the movement towards
ending class oppression and emancipating humankind.
In the first phase of the struggle Trotsky was isolated and defeated by all
his colleagues. In the second phase the "Right-Centre", led by Bukharin and
Stalin, routed the Zinoviev-Kamenev "Left". In the third phase, Stalin
detached himself from, and politically destroyed, the Bukharin "Right".
Why did Stalin triumph? In part, he triumphed because his opponents took
each other far more seriously than they did Stalin, until it was too late;
in part because Stalin had an unparalleled capacity to separate questions of
power from questions of ideology; in part because, as general secretary,
Stalin possessed vast resources of political patronage, which he dispensed
with great skill; and in part, it must be said, because in his cunning and
unscrupulousness, and also in the sensitivity of his antennae to the mood of
the Bolshevik rank and file, Stalin proved to be far superior politically to
his more theoretically gifted colleagues.
By the late 1920s Stalin's victory over his rivals was complete.
Stalin now lurched violently to the policies of the ultra-Left. In the space
of a few months in 1929-30, in conditions of indescribable chaos, the Stalin
leadership used an iron broom to sweep the entire peasantry from their
ancestral communes onto vast state-controlled collective farms. As part of
the collectivisation drive, millions of slightly more prosperous peasants,
the so-called "kulaks", were either deported for resettlement to the
remotest regions or transported, as forced labour, to the Soviet
concentration camp system, the Gulag Archipelago.
Collectivisation coincided with Stalin's decision to industrialise the
Soviet Union at breakneck speed. The most immediate purpose of
collectivisation was to force peasants to deliver grain to the regime,
either to feed the factory workers, or for the export income needed to pay
for the imports of foreign machinery Soviet heavy industry required.
In the early 1930s, Stalin collected grain quotas even when there was
nothing for the peasants to eat. In his "man-made famine" of 1933, perhaps
five million Ukrainian peasants starved to death.
The Communist Party celebrated the economic achievements at the Congress
of Victors in 1934. Stalin was acclaimed, not merely as the leader of the
party, but as a towering, universal genius in every human sphere.
Beneath the surface, however, reality was more complex. At the congress,
corridor discussions about removing Stalin from his post as general
secretary took place. In the secret ballot for the Central Committee, more
than 100 of the 2000 or so delegates crossed out Stalin's name. Only three
had crossed out the name of the popular Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov.
The Congress of Victors marked a turning point in the history of the Soviet
Union. Stalin no longer trusted the Communist Party. As an immediate measure
he arranged for the assassination of Kirov, whose death he ostentatiously
mourned. More important, he decided that there existed inside the Soviet
Union a vast anti-socialist conspiracy. Stalin was convinced that the leader
of this conspiracy was the man he most feared and loathed, Leon Trotsky.
Unfortunately, because he had been sent into foreign exile by Stalin,
Trotsky was not available for arrest, trial and execution. However, Stalin
was also convinced that the Trotsky conspiracy inside the Soviet Union was
led by Zinoviev and Kamenev. Both were arrested and, in 1936, were put on
public trial where they confessed abjectly to heinous crimes. They were
executed without delay. Stalin soon came to the opinion that the conspiracy
had spread to the Right. In 1938 the show trial of Bukharin and his
supporters took place.
In an atmosphere of hysteria, a Soviet-wide drive to root out the entirely
fictitious Trotskyite conspiracy began. In 1937 and 1938 - the most horrific
years in Russia's long and terrible history - almost one million
"counter-revolutionaries" were executed, while perhaps five million were
dispatched to the Gulag Archipelago, where the vast majority died.
Stalin personally signed thousands of death warrants. He often took pleasure
in taunting former comrades with hints about their impending deaths. In
these years, more than half the delegates at the Congress of Victors
Stalin believed that the conspiracy had reached the Soviet army. Three of
the army's five marshals and 15 of its 16 army commanders were executed. As
the Soviet dissident historian, Roy Medvedev, puts it: "The shocking truth
can be stated quite simply: never did the officer staff of any army suffer
such great losses in any war as the Soviet army suffered in the time of
During the 1930s, Stalin became the champion of the international
anti-fascist movement, and the withering critic of the appeasement of Nazi
Germany by the democratic powers, Britain and France. It was because
of this that many left-wing intellectuals joined communist parties at this
By mid-1939, as the German invasion of Poland loomed, Stalin was effectively
offered a choice between a military alliance with Britain and France or
acceptance of a non-aggression pact with Germany. The West offered Stalin
participation in the front-line of a continental war, while Hitler offered
him the mirage of peace, the occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic
states, and more time to arm. Stalin chose Germany.
Between August 1939 and June 1941, he was almost fanatical in his
determination to do nothing that could be construed as a provocation to
Germany. Consequently, when the massive German attack inevitably came, on
June 22, 1941, the Soviet Army was militarily and psychologically
unprepared. For the only time in his life Stalin's resolution broke. But it
soon returned. According to his Russian biographer, General Dmitri
Volkogonov, while Stalin was not a brilliant supreme commander of the Soviet
armed forces he was highly competent. He listened to his talented generals;
he developed a broad strategic grasp; he showed judgement in his refusal to
evacuate Moscow and in his appeal to old-style Russian patriotism rather
than proletarian solidarity.
On the basis of the 1930s industrialisation, the USSR became one of the
world's great arsenals. In order to secure victory over Germany, Stalin was
unconcerned about how many millions of his soldiers or civilians died. Nazi
Germany was essentially conquered on the eastern front. This represents
Stalin's one and only contribution to the improvement of mankind.
Soon after the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, the
Soviet-British-American alliance began to fall apart. The British and
Americans encouraged the Soviet Army into eastern Europe. Generally, they
were sympathetic to Soviet border claims and demands for the creation of
"friendly" governments in the lands between Germany and the USSR.
They found it impossible, however, to reconcile themselves to Soviet
political methods or the gradual imposition of single-party dictatorship in
the areas the Red Army occupied. By 1948 Europe was effectively divided
between a Soviet East and an Anglo-American West. Eastern Europe was
swiftly Stalinised. In response to the Soviet military threat, NATO formed.
In Germany, a dangerous military stand-off over the Soviet blockade of
West Berlin arose. The Cold War had arrived. A third world war seemed
more likely than not.
As always, inside Stalin's mind, morbid suspicions, mirroring the situation
in the external world, took hold. Stalin dispatched to the Gulag vast
numbers of returned Soviet soldiers who were tainted by knowledge of
another, non-Soviet, reality.
Then, following the creation of Israel, Stalin's thoughts turned to the
Jews. In 1952, he brought the leaders of the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee to trial. A vast anti-Semitic action was, most likely, being
planned. As his health deteriorated, Stalin's gaze turned towards those
around his bed. The organs of Beria's secret police began to investigate
what was called "the doctors' plot". On March 5, 1953 - most likely to the
genuine anguish of the Soviet people and the no less genuine relief of the
members of his close entourage - Stalin finally died.
Stalin left after him nothing but the taste of ash in the mouth. He was not
responsible for the creation of the brutal single-party dictatorship in
Russia. Credit for that belongs to Lenin. Yet upon the Leninist foundations
a number of possible futures - none that was likely to be democratic or
prosperous - might have been built. That it was Stalin who succeeded Lenin,
and not Trotsky or Bukharin or someone else, mattered a great deal.
For it was Stalin who was responsible for the needless deaths of perhaps 20
million human beings. And it was Stalin, more than anyone else, who cut the
utopian 19th century idea of socialism from its humanitarian moorings and
transformed it into a 20th century nightmare of economic irrationality and
privation, mind-numbing ideological conformity and hypocrisy, barracks-style
social regimentation, primeval leader worship, and universal fear.
table of contents


text:
Mary Karr's most recent book is Lit: A Memoir. She teaches English literature at Syracuse University.
The gospel in seven words
We are The Church of
Infinite Chances, where every sinner is a saint and vice versa. "Sinners
welcome," reads the banner on my church.
The Century's work relies primarily on subscriptions and donations. Thank you for supporting nonprofit journalism.
Support us by buying books:

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Board Chairman Larry Anderson said $41M Cowlitz can't keep up with new regs and technology developments. The two credit unions share a history.
In the constant bid for growth, it may help to work on building and reinforcing a strong foundation before chasing the next new thing.
If the marketing call to action for 2011 has been loans, then looking at common challenges through a new lens will be equally important in 2012.
As the new year approaches, many credit unions are looking for new ways to increase profits and become more effective.


text:
The Jews Of Iran & Afghanistan
The Afghanis regard themselves as the descendants of King Saul. A chronicle from the 16th century says that the Afghanis were deported to Afghanistan by Nebuchadnezzar after the destruction of Jerusalem. There are synagogue ruins in Kabul that can be traced back to Nebuchadnezzar's time.
In the 1830s, many Jews fled Kabul in consequence of a prohibition against the growing of grapes and production of wine. Nevertheless there was a significant Jewish settlement in Kabul in the middle of the 19th century. The trading connections of the Jews of Kabul reached into China.
In Afghanistan the Jews speak Jewish-Persian. They composed their guides to law and religious writings in this language. The rabbis functioned like judges. The previous estimate that 18,000 Jews live in Afghanistan is now seen as an exaggeration; it is more like 5,000. There still exist ghettoes in the cities that are locked up after dark. The Jews wear a particular black kind of headcovering. They live in Kabul and farther out in Heart, Balch, Kandahar, and Ghasni.Ezra James Nollet
About the Author: Ezra James Nollet is a retired U.S. government chemist living in Poland where he is officer of the local synagogue in Legnica. Before the Deluge appears the last week of each month.
If you don't see your comment after publishing it, refresh the page.
Our comments section is intended for meaningful responses and debates in a civilized manner. We ask that you respect the fact that we are a religious Jewish website and avoid inappropriate language at all cost.
If you promote any foreign religions, gods or messiahs, lies about Israel, anti-Semitism, or advocate violence (except against terrorists), your permission to comment may be revoked.
Imported and Older Comments:


text:
How does one describe the layered horror that is eBay? Look long enough and you'll find an item that the mere knowledge of its existence brings shock and dismay. Then, you must cope with the fact that the seller thought we would be willing to pay good money for it, and then come to terms with the fact that usually they're right.
Here are some that almost had us bidding out of sheer, morbid curiosity.
12The CB-6000 Male Chastity Contraption
Oh God, this one doesn't look good at all. That's right, it's the CB-6000 male chastity belt on sale for a Buy It Now price of $189.95. What a steal!
This horrible, horrible device just about looks like the most uncomfortable and awkward thing that has ever been invented. The auction claims that "This is a new, flat design that is even more comfortable and even less noticeable than the previous popular models, "but the huge plastic dongs staring back at us seem to differ in their opinions. Wearing one of these would be the equivalent of getting that half-chub in english class, then having to go up to the board and diagram sentences, but even better because it is ALWAYS THERE.
The real climax of this auction comes when you see:
"Bonus! Free pair of Italian-designed sunglasses! See picture for listing and colors. Specify choice of color when submitting payment!" We're assuming you need these because you want everyone to think you look cool when they see you walking down the street with your plastic-cock outline bulging out of your jeans.
11The World's Largest Lite-Bright
Remember that crappy little toy with easy-to-swallow parts that you used to get bored of at your grandparent's house? How would you like to spend 15 grand on a huge one of those that some creepy guy spent way too much time on?
We thought so, just fax the deed to your house over to us, and we'll take care of the rest. Possibly the most depressing part of this auction is not the level of detail that the "artist" had to go into, but rather the handmade, hand-painted frame and exquisite velvet backing that really accent the piece. Thankfully, for the sake of this man's sanity, he will be featured in next year's Ripley's Believe It or Not!, thus assuring him a steady place in the pantheon alongside the Lizardman and that dude who got a railroad spike blown through his head.


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Daniel Hardman replaces Jessica as managing partner and makes everyone's lives extremely difficult. Harvey need's Mike's help.
Harvey has to defend a mouthy sports broadcaster who is in hot water after accusing a top athlete of using drugs.
Mike is assigned the case of a young man who was involved in a hit and run while driving home from a party. The memory of his own parents being killed by a drunk driver compromises Mike's ability to act in the best interest of his client.


text:
Mulgogijari (2000) Pisces
Directed by Hyung-tae Kim
Starring Mi-yeon Lee (Addicted), Woo-jae Choi (Phone), Ji-hye Yun (Whispering Corridors)
Where do you draw the line between love and obsession?
Ae-ryun (Mi-yeon Lee} owns a video store called Sad Movie, she loves French films and has a thing about Kurt Cobain. Dong-suk (Woo-jae Choi) is a singer/songwriter and shares the same tastes, they form a friendship based on their mutual interests.
Dong-suk is also a bit of a depressive, he cant seem to get a recording contract no matter how hard he tries and ends up getting drunk and reeling off quotes about how You can get anything you want in life as long as you want it enough. This is the sort of talk that Ae-ryun needs to hear, she knows that he has a long time girlfriend but tries to make a move on him, although flattered he tells her that all he wants is friendship, nothing more.
What started off with the air of a gentle romance turns into something a little darker, Ae-ryuns nature takes over, shes taken his drunken comments to heart and is determined to win him over. Feelings that appeared to be genuine and warm become obsessive and deceitful causing friction in Dong-suks relationship.
The plot takes an even bigger twist towards the end, which makes you re-evaluate everything thats gone before adding an extra dimension to the story.
This film belongs to Mi-yeon Lee, an excellent performance as a woman obsessed, the other actors are fine but she dominates the film. This is no bunny boiler and at the end you feel sorry for all the central characters that things work out the way they do.
I have to mention Woo-jae Chois singing, its dire! No wonder he cant get a recording contract in the film, others may disagree but I didnt like his singing voice or his music.
Overall then, not an essential film by any means but a very different treatment in comparison to the way Hollywood has presented this type of story of obsessive love.
Cheers Trev.
No BBFC rating but Id put it as probably a 15.
Region 3 dvd available from several suppliers