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Soviet Atrocities and the Killing of Disabled and Innocent Children

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Elisabeth:
Part II of my post.

The 1920s: After the Civil War but Before Stalinism, or,
How to Build a Totalitarian State

From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I:

That same year, 1921, began with Cheka Order No. 10, dated January 8: "To intensify the repression of the bourgeoisie." Now, when the Civil War had ended, repression was not to be reduced but intensified! …In the summer of 1921 the State Commission for Famine Relief, including Kuskova, Prokopovich, Kishkin, and others, was arrested. They had tried to combat the unprecedented famine in Russia. The heart of the matter, though, was that theirs were the wrong hands to be offering food and could not be allowed to feed the starving…

In that same year the practice of arresting students began (for example, the group of Yevgeniya Doyarenko in the Timiryazev Academy) for "criticism of the system" (not in public,  merely in conversation amongst themselves)… Also in 1921 the arrests of members of all non-Bolshevik parties were expanded and systematized. In fact, all Russia’s political parties had been buried, except the victorious one... And so that the dissolution of these parties would be irreversible, it was necessary that their members should disintegrate and their physical bodies, too.

Not one citizen of the former Russian state who had ever joined a party other than the Bolshevik party could avoid his fate. He was condemned unless, like Maisky or Vyshinsky, he succeeded in making his way across the planks of the wreck to the Bolsheviks. He might not be arrested in the first group. He might live on, depending on how dangerous he was believed to be, until 1922, [1927], 1932, or even 1937, but the lists were kept; his turn would and did come; he was arrested or else politely invited to an interrogation, where he was asked just one question: Had he been a member of such and such, from then till then?

Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. I, pp. 34-35

Keep in mind as you read all this that Solzhenitsyn worked on Gulag in secret in the Soviet Union of the 1960s and, in addition to suffering harassment by the KGB, had only the most limited access to local archives (most state and party archives were closed). Since the 1990s additional material about the terror "waves" of the 1920s has no doubt become available.

Summary of Pages 35-41:

1922 was the year of the big Menshevik trial.

Also in 1922 the Cheka began its "church revolution" – "to remove the existing leadership and replace it with one which would have only one ear turned to heaven and the other to the Lubyanka." Metropolitans, bishops, archpriests, monks, deacons and nuns were arrested. Also arrested: "theosophists, mystics, spiritualists… religious societies and philosophers of the Berdyayev circle," the "Eastern Catholics" (followers of the Russian philospher Vladimir Solovyov), and ordinary Roman Catholics, especially Poles.

During these years Tanya Khodakevich wrote a poem:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear

For this she received a ten-year sentence.

In 1926 the Zionist society, "Hehalutz," was exiled.

In 1925 one hundred Leningrad students were sentenced to three years in political detention for reading Plekhanov and Menshikov literature smuggled in from abroad.

Former members of the nobility and former state officials were also arrested in the 1920s, as were former Tsarist officers who had gone over to the Red Army during the Civil War (their wives were also arrested).

"Sometimes sheer accident took a hand. Solely out of a love of order, a certain Mova kept at home a list of all former employees of the provincial judiciary. This was discovered by accident in 1925, and they were all arrested and shot."

In 1926 the Political Red Cross in Petrograd was shut down and its leaders sent into exile.

Etc., etc.  

Tsarfan:
"Desiring with the most heartfelt anxiety, even as Our Apostleship requires, that the Catholic faith should especially in this Our day increase and flourish everywhere, and that all heretical depravity should be driven far from the frontiers and bournes of the Faithful, We very gladly proclaim and even restate those particular means and methods whereby Our pious desire may obtain its wished effect, since when all errors are uprooted by Our diligent avocation as by the hoe of a provident husbandman, a zeal for, and the regular observance of, Our holy Faith will be all the more strongly impressed upon the hearts of the faithful . . . .

Wherefore We, as is Our duty, being wholly desirous of removing all hindrances and obstacles by which the good work of the Inquisitors may be let and tarded, as also applying potent remedies to prevent the disease of heresy and other turpitudes diffusing their poison . . . We decree and enjoin that the aforesaid Inquisitors be empowered to proceed to the just correction, imprisonment, and punishment of any persons, without let or hindrance . . . .  (Bull of Innocent VIII)

Acting on this authority, somewhere between 600,000 and 9,000,000 Europeans were tortured and executed over the next 250 years.

I have always viewed the ideology of Catholicism to be that the Roman Church is the sole interpreter of Christ's will on earth.  I have viewed the atrocities of the Inquisition as a methodology applied to secure the ends of the ideology.

I guess I was wrong.  Catholicism, at least in that era, was apparenty an ideology of terror and atrocity.

Louis_Charles:
I am confused. How does the Inquisition become an ideology and not a methodology? It clearly existed as one --- and not the only --- means of dealing with what were regarded as heresies. Nor was the Inquisition the raison d'etre of the medieval Catholic Church, anymore than, say, the Reign of Terror was the expression of liberty, fraternity and equality.

I do recognize that the Inquisition was a sanctioned arm of the Church. I disagree that it was an expression of the innate nature of Catholicism even during the time in which it flourished. As a catholic institution, the Church has always had internal contradictions in terms of its behavior. There have been frequent regrettable lapses from the message of the Gospels. The late Pope recognized this when he issued apologies for the treatment of Jews and other groups, and even at the time these horrific events took place, there were some internal voices raised against them. Sadly, not enough to prevent them. I would regard the Inquisition as a perverted methodology to implement the ideology of Christianity imposed upon it by Christ when he told the apostles to go and spread His message.

Tsarfan:

--- Quote ---I am confused. How does the Inquisition become an ideology and not a methodology?

--- End quote ---


Personally, I think the Inquisition was a methodology and not an ideology.  My point was that Lenin's atrocities, too, were a methodology, not part and parcel of the ideology.

However, if one uses Lenin's pronouncements on his metholody to argue it was intrinsic to the ideology, then must one not also examine the Catholic Church's pronouncements on its methodology and conclude the same -- since both pronouncements produced atrocities?

Elisabeth:
Thank you, Louis Charles. You have put it quite eloquently. But my husband, a professor of Russian intellectual history, has advised me that it's no use arguing with someone like Tsarfan, who continues to ignore the Soviet cultural context and the many differences between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, among other things.

My impression is that Tsarfan regards the Holocaust as "new," but any mass murders carried out by the Bolsheviks are to be regarded only in the light of previous atrocities carried out by authoritarian regimes. I can only conclude from this that I am right in asserting that one major difficulty in teaching students about Soviet atrocities is that too many people with liberal sympathies are psychologically averse to accepting the fact that the far left (the Communists, in various countries) produced genocidal atrocities on on an even greater scale in the twentieth century than the far right (the Nazis).

Tsarfan will not even admit that there are distinct similarities between the Nazi and Bolshevik regimes. That is startling to me.

Indeed, if one proclaims Stalin as the natural heir of Leninism (well, among other things, he took class warfare to the countryside, as Lenin always intended), then Tsarfan attempts to make him into a nationalist, i.e., someone on the far right. This is a common ploy by certain (thankfully rare) elements of the far left who cannot accept that Lenin was not the egalitarian saint of Soviet legend.  

BTW, I should note here that I consider myself a liberal, and have voted Democratic in all the elections for which I have been an eligible voter. This does not prevent me from seeing, however, that Lenin and Stalin and Co. were every bit as evil as Hitler and the Nazis.

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