This thread is a few months old, but I just read something that reminds me of it. Back then, Justin wrote:
"Of course Stalin was a cruel tyrant who, among hsi other defects, kept anyone even remotely near him in a state of terrified subservience, and often helped them to other sorts of shots, nine grams in the back of the head. But he was _perceived_ as "democratic" in the old Soviet sense, sort of the way that W is perceived as regular guy, man of the people, decent (and formerly) straight-talking fella. (And not as a privileged Yalie/Hahvahd grad from a multimillionaire family.)"
There is a bestselling Russian leftwing (he's a fan of Brezhnev, actually) journalist by the name of Sergei Kara-Murza. I'm reading his book "Sovetskaya tsivilizatsiya ot nachala do velikoi pobedy" (Soviet Civilization from the Beginning to the Great Victory), and he makes the following interesting comment (quick, rough translation by me; the word I am translating by "peasant commune" is "obshchina"):
"A very important feature of the "Stalinist repressions" consists in that the actions of the government were met with mass support, which it would have been impossible to either organize or imitate. It would also have been impossible to carry out such repressions if the personnel of the enforcement agencies and the victims themselves had not accepted them as legitimate (although each victim likely considered his particular case to be a mistake). This is obvious not only because there were hardly no attempts made by people to protect themselves from repressions, even by those who had the means. In the repressions against the high military command death sentences were given to victims by their colleagues, who at the next stage would become victims themselves.
"When we talk about the repressions, we avoid looking at one obvious, but unpleasant, fact. The repressions of 1937-38 to a great extent were created not by state totalitarianism, but by a profound _democracy_. But not a democracy of civil society of rational individuals, but the archaic one of the peasant commune. This is an enormous dark force, and when it is allowed to carry out its will, innocent heads roll. For it is easy for the peasant commune to believe in plots and the secret power of aliens, of "enemies of the people." When such hatred, possessing the power of an epidemic, rules the peasant commune, every witch will burn. And the Russian peasant commune is not crueler in this, than, for example, that of Western Europe -- it simply occured there earlier than it did among us."
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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