Borut Prah,
based on David Pryce-Jones in
National Review
The collapse of the Soviet Union created the “Homo Sovieticus” -- the result of Communists’ “taste for blood”. They destroyed the nation's gene pool, "consciously undermining the potential for the flowering of science and culture. A slave mentality, consequently remains ingrained in the national consciousness.” So writes Alexander Yakovlev in his book A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, recently published by Yale University Press.
Who is Yakovlev? Gorbachev has almost completely vanished, but Alexander Yakovlev has become a grand old man on Moscow's political scene. He stepped in the shoes of Andrei Sakharov, the celebrated nuclear physicist turned dissident, who was instrumental in founding Memorial, a voluntary association dedicated to rehabilitating the victims of Soviet Communism, estimated to be about 60 million people (or the entire population of Britain today). Yakovlev now heads the Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression.
Yakovlev was born in 1923 into a peasant family and grew up on a collective farm near Yaroslavl. He was a believing Communist. Clever, industrious, capable, he rose through the party's ranks to become head of the Central Committee's Department of Propaganda, responsible for the spread of Communist ideology. Under Brezhnev he wrote reports displaying independence of mind, and therefore was packed off to be Soviet ambassador to Canada. Spotting him as the best available promoter of glasnost and perestroika -- the new openness and reform that were designed to perfect Communism but ended up unraveling it instead -- Gorbachev appointed him to the Politburo.
The years of Communism have molded YakovIev's face into inexpressive, almost wooden lines, with deep-set brown eyes that give nothing away. He limps stiffly from his war wound. He talks in a low, gruff voice as he describes the party and the KGB as Siamese twins, partners in crime. In charge of special commissions of inquiry he had, and still has, access to some archives -- including Stalin's papers -- that are closed to all but a few.
One of the miracles of 20th century is that some KGB archives have seen the light of day, such as the President Reagan’s file, obtained by the Hoover Institution and laid out for the world to see in Reagan’s War. Using the archives, Yakovlev proves that Lenin -- consistently praised to this day as one of the great men of the century (several Americans have proudly received the Order of Lenin) -- was in reality a primitive mass-murderer. In 1919 Lenin was instructing the secret police that everyone who did not turn up to work on a particular religious holiday should be shot. Stalin was his worthy pupil, says Yakovlev, "in his hatred and his taste for blood." Between the two of them, they destroyed the nation's gene pool, "consciously undermining the potential for the flowering of science and culture."
Time and again Yakovlev is able to quote orders Lenin issued:
"One out of
ten guilty of parasitism will be shot."
"Merciless
war against the kulaks! Death to the kulaks!"
"The more representatives of the reactionary clergy we shoot, the better."
Along with the clergy were killed the czar's family, the aristocracy, intellectuals, peasants by the million, almost the whole officer corps, Jews and Muslims, virtually whole ethnic minorities, and "socially dangerous elements" of every sort and no sort.
As a result of one particular decree, Yakovlev writes, the executioner's bullet
"took the lives of the writers P Dorokhov and K. Schmuyle; administrator of the Nemirovich Danchenko Musical Theatre, I. Aranovic-Arditi; Moscow Philharmonia pianist A. Milikovskaya; members of the Moscow Artists Union Ts. Gustav and F. Konnov; 'nonunion' painters A. Drevin, A. Berzin, and V. Lipgart; Academy publishing house artist N. Dmitrikovsky; painter and writer S. Broide; filmactor T. Kan; architect O. Vutke; director of the Moscow Soviet's architectural department, A. Pogosia; and the professor of choral music M. Khitrovo-Kramsky, a grandson of Field Marshal Kutuzov."
These are names known only to a handful of specialists. But imagine the sweep of fear through New York or San Francisco if equivalent had happened here.
Children over the age of twelve could be executed, while those under three were taken away from parents who had been arrested, never to be seen again. The Commission for Rehabilitation receives letters to this day from people who are searching for their parents. Here is a survivor from the Andokhin family, whose letter is one among thousands to go through Yakovlev's hands:
"That autumn, for failing to follow the plan for delivering bread to the state, Father was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. And earlier the same autumn, our mother was sentenced to 10 years because, with the permission of the team leader, she had gathered five pounds (that's what the sentence said) of ears of grain on a field for grazing cattle. The local activists made deliberate efforts to wipe out the whole family ... They took away from us the alms the small children got begging for 'Christ's sake'. . . none of us were able to finish even the elementary classes."
In a detail that speaks volumes about the frenzy released, one secret policeman went so far as to denounce a circus act involving animals, because he thought some guinea pigs had the role of agitators.
Yakovlev says that he is often asked whether Stalin knew that he was hacking away at Russia's intellectual roots. "Not only did he know," is the answer, "he was the instigator of these crimes." In 1934 Ivan Pavlov, who won the 1909 Nobel Prize for his famous researches into reflex reactions, wrote to party officials: "What you are sowing throughout the civilized world is not revolution but fascism, and with enormous success."
The evidence of terror is surfacing in some unlikely places. This summer, restoration work in the basement of the Russian Supreme Court in Moscow discovered a number of skeletons from Stalin’s day. In a courthouse! These were men and women on whom the death sentence had just been passed; they were hurried downstairs, shot in the back of the head, and shoved into a cellar to rot. Also this summer, workmen at the Vasilyansky monastery, near Zhovkva in Ukraine, happened to dig up 225 bodies of victims also shot in the back of the head. Acting on a survivor's tip, the Russians have also been digging on the Zhevsky artillery range, northeast of St. Petersburg. Tens of thousands of victims are believed to lie in random trenches there, men and women arrested and never heard of again. In the nearby village of Levashyovo alone there's a mass grave of 24,000.
Helplessness in the face of injustice and horror throughout the Soviet Union; executioners brandishing revolvers; trucks, shots, screams, and afterwards the cover-up, the lying. Some who wish that Lenin and Stalin had gone further should first learn the methods of their heroes from this book. It would be very naïve to imagine that the American communists would not use same methods. Senator McCarthy understood the danger. The majority of Americans, however, to this day have no idea what bullet he helped them dodge.