And they all confessed
And they all confessed ...
IN 1936, TERROR REIGNED in the Soviet Union and Anna Akhmatova wrote: "I have seen faces consumed, glimpsed horror under lowered eyelids, cheeks etched by pain." Even André Gide observed after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1936: "In my opinion, no country today not even in Hitler's Germany is the spirit more suppressed, more timid, more servile than in the Soviet Union." Or, as brigade commander S. P. Kolosov whose final fate is unknown expressed it in an anything but timid letter in 1937: "I am afraid to open my mouth. Whatever you say, if you say the wrong thing, you're an enemy of the people. Cowardice has become the norm."
Stalin had won the struggle for power and was now dealing death blows to the opposition by organising uncontrolled terror at every level of society. The purges carried out within the party, the army, among members of the scientific community, artists and prominent cultural figures came to be known as the Great Terror. The term is actually bizarre; terror is hardly a rank great or small but absolute: once it has taken root in a social system it spreads and acquires a life of its own.
The Terror did not stop until Stalin's death, but its foundations were laid by Lenin. A new society was to be created, a new human being was to emerge. But the New Men and Women lived in paralysing fear and the consequences were devastating. For Nikolai Bukharin, himself condemned and shot during the last of the three show trials held in Moscow, the worst aspect of the collectivisation of agriculture was not the privations suffered by the peasants but "the profound psychological change in those communists who took part in the campaign. Instead of going mad, they accepted terror as a normal administrative method and regarded obedience to all orders from above as a supreme virtue." [1]
The number of victims carried off during the Stalin era has not been officially established. Even now, nearly a decade after the dissolution
IN 1936, TERROR REIGNED in the Soviet Union and Anna Akhmatova wrote: "I have seen faces consumed, glimpsed horror under lowered eyelids, cheeks etched by pain." Even André Gide observed after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1936: "In my opinion, no country today not even in Hitler's Germany is the spirit more suppressed, more timid, more servile than in the Soviet Union." Or, as brigade commander S. P. Kolosov whose final fate is unknown expressed it in an anything but timid letter in 1937: "I am afraid to open my mouth. Whatever you say, if you say the wrong thing, you're an enemy of the people. Cowardice has become the norm."
Stalin had won the struggle for power and was now dealing death blows to the opposition by organising uncontrolled terror at every level of society. The purges carried out within the party, the army, among members of the scientific community, artists and prominent cultural figures came to be known as the Great Terror. The term is actually bizarre; terror is hardly a rank great or small but absolute: once it has taken root in a social system it spreads and acquires a life of its own.
The Terror did not stop until Stalin's death, but its foundations were laid by Lenin. A new society was to be created, a new human being was to emerge. But the New Men and Women lived in paralysing fear and the consequences were devastating. For Nikolai Bukharin, himself condemned and shot during the last of the three show trials held in Moscow, the worst aspect of the collectivisation of agriculture was not the privations suffered by the peasants but "the profound psychological change in those communists who took part in the campaign. Instead of going mad, they accepted terror as a normal administrative method and regarded obedience to all orders from above as a supreme virtue." [1]
The number of victims carried off during the Stalin era has not been officially established. Even now, nearly a decade after the dissolution