A listmember who shall remain nameless has suggested to me that I translate this book (preferably for money) and get it published in the Angloverse. Anybody have any ideas for possible publishers?
--- Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
>
> Some time ago, Chris posted an extract from
> Kara-Murza's Soviet
> Civilization: From 1917 to the Great Victory,
> connecting Stalinism to
> peasant subjectivity.
>
> “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.
> “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 antiserum, 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.”
>
> Ted
>
>
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