OK, Michael Pollack asked me to translate more of Kara-Murza's book, so I did. (Animal husbandry terms -- yikes!) This is the text immediately following the two paragraphs I've already translated.
In 2000 the newspaper Duel published excerpts from the very instructive memoirs of the lawyer B.G. Menshagin from Smolensk about how trials against “enemies of the people” took place in their regions in 1937. He simply relates, without embellishments, cases from his practice in which he was appointed as a lawyer in such trials. In one instance, eight people -- leaders in the regional cattle-breeding administration, veterinarians, and the secretary of the raikom -- were accused of sabotage. Three confessed; the others did not. One, a science employee of the Moscow VNII or experimental veterinary science, had been sent to the region to diagnose “brutsellez” (CD – I don’t know this word, I think it’s some kind of disease). Animals that have recently become sick show no external symptoms, and the diagnosis is made on the basis of a reaction of the immune system – upon injection with “antisyrovotka” (CD – I don’t know this word, clearly it’s a medicinal substance), an abscess forms, like that in the case of smallpox inoculation.
This employee and the others were accused of infecting livestock. The witnesses at the trials were milkmaids; in their eyes, these saboteurs had killed the best cows, which they had infected themselves and then sent to the knacker’s yard. One milkmaid said the following at the trial: “She is such a good cow! He stuck her and the next day she fell sick! The abscess is big.” The other milkmaids spoke in the same vein: “Oh, she was such a good cow, I’m so sorry for her. He stuck her and she died. He killed the cow.”
General meetings were called in all the collective farms and sovfarms and the court was presented with a veritable tome of demands. They were all approximately the same: “We ask the proletarian court to kill the bastards!” How was it possible in such circumstances for a lawyer to be asked for his expertise! All eight people were sentenced to be shot. The peasants were genuine in their belief, and the judge and prosecutor were afraid to move against the clearly expressed “will of the people,” which had obtained such an effective strength. The sentence is subject to no appeals! In the given case the wives of the condemned gathered money and sent lawyers to Moscow, where they were received by an assistant of Vyshinsky and quickly received a pardon, but this happened in far from all instance.
One can imagine that this mass “witch hunt” craze was generated by interfactional contradictions in the Party elite that were made possible by repressions with ritual accusations (sabotage, spying, etc.). But then a separate mass sentiment arose, and it was used by the authorities to solve pressing political tasks. Then, it was necessary to carry out the complicated task of “calming things down” – to pull society out of its passionate mood.
I believe that something similar took place in China with their “Cultural Revolution.” To do battle with the clans that had formed in the nomenklatura, Mao Tse Tung turned to the direct democracy of the young people, calling them to “thunder (CD – the word is “gromit’,” there’s that word again!) in the barracks,” and then this wave obtained its own power and logic, so that there was too much destruction. When such a tragedy on a national scale occurs, I believe, it is necessary to evaluate if the leadership was able to use this destructive pressure to carry out obligatory or highly developed tasks, or whether the chaos remained blind. God save us from having to use such methods, but they’ve already happened once
In the case of Mao Tse Tung, he was clearly able to do this – a “revolution of the nomenklatura” like our Perestroika was averted, and the ideological and theoretical space was opened up for the renewal of reforms that we observe in China. After all, practically all the cadres carrying out this reform are former hynveibiny (CD – I am transliterating this Chinese word directly from Cyrillic and have no idea what the proper English spelling is) – the student youth formed by the “Cultural Revolution.” Although no one, of course, approves of that “Cultural Revolution.”
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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