Chris Doss wrote:
> I'm kind of curious as to how Ted knows this. Did he spend a lot of
> time in pre-Revolutionary Russia hanging out with peasants?
As I've pointed out before, there's a great deal of contemporary
social history documenting that the kind of "individuality"
characteristic of the Russian peasant commune was the kind consistent
with the role assigned to it by Sergei Kara-Murza in creating "the
repressions of 1937-38".
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2006/2006-October/020858.html>
Ted