"We have a long way to go before we get to 1937, but for the first time the road is clear. You can see far ahead, like on a cold, crisp winter morning, and there, in the distance, you can just about make out the outlines of the guillotines."
Said Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Europe, quoted in "With New Limits on Media, Putin Closes a Door on Russia’s ‘Openness’ The Russian leader is undoing the social freedoms introduced at the end of the Soviet Union, risking a return to total control and ideological isolation" by Steven Lee Myers (NYT).
The article says that by "1937," Radchenko meant the year of Stalin’s Great Terror and links to this pieced from September 13, 1937, "Soviet 'Cleansing' Sweeps Through All Strata of Life/Starting With Generals and High Leaders, Stalin's Purge Is Now Hitting Cooks and Nurses-People Getting Inured to Arrests":
Here's the continuation of the article on page 8, replete with the splurge of handmade lingerie:
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34 comments:
would it be kinky, to wear the doeskin gloves WITH the handmade lingerie
Isn't it interesting those who can point to Putin's limiting dissenting voices and suppressing opposing views then couple this with total acceptance to what's being done to us in the West.
One reason for shutting things down... https://defiantamerica.com/reddit-loser-gets-ukrainian-soldiers-bombed-after-one-of-the-soldiers-revealed-that-they-are-using-schools-for-bases-photos/
Maybe?
"There is less and less access to accurate information from the West amid the relentless pounding from increasingly hysterical state propaganda..."
Taken out of context, I honestly thought he was still talking about 'the West'. Da Da Sergey, just turn on msnbc...
And the left still thinks this is the blueprint for society.
Yeah, Biden and Garland have a ways to go to get to Stalin's level but they are working on it.
The NYT article from 1937 is by Harold Denny. Walter Duranty must have been otherwise engaged.
"Oriental mystery" is good.
As a mental exercise, try to imagine that here in the USA ....
* CNN never broadcast any criticism of the ruling party.
* comics never told any jokes publicly about the President.
* elections were considered widely to be farces.
* political protesters were held indefinitely without indictment or trial
Russia is becoming that kind of authoritarian regime.
Where do they think they are, Canada?
""There is less and less access to accurate information from the MSM amid the relentless pounding from increasingly hysterical DNC propaganda, which admittedly, is having its effect....""
THere, fixed it.
$2.95 for Gloves, doesn't sound like much, but in 1937, you could get a good steak dinner at nice Restaurant for $1.
Twittering a scapebaby in the Obama, Biden, Clinton, McCain, Biden's Slavic Spring of the Spring series from Tripoli to Cairo to Damascus to Kiev to Kabul to our own District of Corruption in progress. Meanwhile, Xi et al enjoy annexation without remorse, violent border disputes with democratic neighbors, laundered Green environmentalism, diversity [dogmatism], practical and actual slavery, and the progressive one-child/selective-child solution with enthusiastic endorsement from the very bigots.
those who can point to Putin's limiting dissenting voices and suppressing opposing views then couple this with total acceptance to what's being done to us in the West
You're a racist, sexist, genderist, phobic once-upon-a-time baby... fetus whose mom-ddy dresses them funny. Take a knee, beg, good boy, girl, whatever. #AllsFairInLustAbortion
If you want the inside dope on Russia, you'll need to get the Duranty Magic-8 Ball.
So it's just like the Twitter, NYT, Facebook censorship we have here in the 'Land of the free.'
Hunter Biden is laughing in our faces...
Stalin only arrested 16 people on suspicion to overthrow the government. Pelosi beat that by at least an order of magnitude. Oh, but Stalin had them shot. Pelosi had at least one shot.
Biden and Garland can get some guidance from Justin Trudeau. Justin is a Pajama Boy, who, aside from liking to play dress up, has a very nasty streak.
My first thought was the West also…
Judging from what's been published in the New York Times and Washington Post and presented as TV News since around 2008 (if not earlier), it's not as though information from Western sources is likely to be any more accurate.
"NEW VISTAS OPEN TO THE WOMEN OF NEW RUSSIA; Now They Begin to Understand They Are Not Drudges but the Partners Of Their Men Folk and They Look Forward to True Sex Equality"
Walther Duranty, March 15, 1936, NYT
Just thought I'd chum the water...
"As the writer Eugenia Ginzburg famously said, the year 1937 began on 1 December 1934 -- the day on which Sergei Kirov, head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, was assassinated.
Stalin set off for Leningrad accompanied by half the Politburo. He also issued a decree lifting legal restraints on the speedy prosecution and execution of terrorists. Taking personal charge of the investigation, he ensured that almost all the evidence was eradicated. Nearly everyone involved was shot, imprisoned, killed in convenient accidents or otherwise removed from the scene. Leningrad quaked under Stalin's wrath. According to Solzhenitsyn, a quarter of the population was arrested.
"The entire nation was sucked into the vortex of terror. Stalin had not been satisfied with exterminating the kulaks and devastating the countryside. He was now mangling the Communist party..... What strangely interested the Supreme Command in Tokyo was that during these monstrous purges many Russians it had never heard of (and who themselves had scarcely heard of Nippon) confessed to being Japanese spies. About Stalin's motives, the Japanese were as much in the dark as his victims. Those newly arrested in Russia repeated Za chto? -- What for? -- so often that fellow prisoners described the expression as "Record No.1" and told them to switch it off. For some condemned to death the words Za chto? were their last, scrawled on the walls of their cell in blood."
The Dark Valley, by Piers Brendon
Through the looking glass.
"A 'quiet' purge continued for 18 months. Hundreds of thousands of members were expelled from the Party. Many others were "unmasked," ... sent to concentration camps. There "class enemies" were held collectively responsible for Kirov's murder, even though they had been behind barbed wire at the time. In April 1935, a new law decreed that children aged 12 and above were subject to the full penal code, including execution -- an instrument of immense power in the hands of the Lubyanka torturers, who used it against even younger children. The NKVD was strengthened until its administration cost two-thirds as much as all other government departments put together....it managed the huge segment of the Soviet Union's economy which consisted of slave labor. Nevertheless, in comparison to the butchery which followed, this was, as Anna Akhmatova said, a "vegetarian" terror."
"There is less and less access to accurate information from the West amid the relentless pounding from increasingly hysterical state propaganda, which admittedly, is having its effect...."
I must admit, when I first saw that headline, I thought he was talking about all the censorship from "social media".
But, I guess instead he's shocked the Putin would think he's allowed to do the same as Zuckerberg, and the people running Google and Twitter!
Gosh, it's almost like Putin thinks he's Justin Trudeau or something!
"Stalin disguised it by continuing the thaw.... While flaying the Party, he caressed the people. Bread rationing was abolished.... Lipstick, nail varnish, plucked eyebrows, jewelry ceased to be decadent. Russia was once again the 'Motherland.' Christmas trees came back into fashion. New department stores were built.....
"In 1936, the three major show trials took place. The purge entered its most manic phase, sweeping the countryside like a Siberian blizzard and blasting the lives of millions. Meetings were held at which anybody suspected of deviating from orthodoxy by a hair's breadth was denounced. 'Everyone was a traitor until he exposed someone else as a traitor,' wrote one NKVD officer. Whole cadres were seized. Newspapers printed long lists of the condemned, though they included only a 'very small proportion of the "disappearances".' Most at risk were senior officials of local government, industry, and the professions. When Communicatons Commissar Kovalev arrived to take up his new post in Minsk in 1937, he found nothing but empty offices. His predecessors and their deputies had all been arrested. 'I was amazed that the trains were still running.'
"According to some estimates, as many as 10 ordinary citizens were purged during the late '30s for every one Party member. Sometimes, to meet the quota of arrests assigned to them, the secret police simply counterfeited their victims' confessions and shot them out of hand. Any connection with someone stigmatized as an enemy of the people could be fatal. Relations were guilty by blood. (Loved wives, said an NKVD officer, got eight years, unloved five.)
"Street names kept changing. State bankers disappeared so rapidly that rouble notes finally had to appear without an official signature. Terrified of finding themselves incarcerated, NKVD officers dared not lessen the momentum of detentions. They drew up more dossiers, increased the pace of the arrests, and speeded up the process of interrogation."
In Stalin's Russia, they disappeared you, in America, they only make you invisible.
I read through the report. They say journalism is the first draft of history. That's what they say. The reporter got it right that there were widespread purges, but he missed the larger story that the purges were the work of a psycho killer and an ideology that enabled psycho killers. Most on the left were somewhat sympathetic to this psycho killer ideology, but the purges attracted criticism even on the left. This just highlights how callous they were to the systemic and repeated famines that had gone before these purges.. Scumbags all.
Howard, who has advocated here for his political enemies to be "terminated with extreme prejudice", looks back fondly at Stalin's Terror and wants to re-create it.
tim in vermont said...
In Stalin's Russia, they disappeared you, in America, they only make you invisible.
Does the phase Gramscian damage mean anything to you?
The people here in the US who you claim to oppose are the end product of things done to the US by people like Putin.
Yet there you are, supporting / justifying / excusing / defending one of America's biggest enemies
The 1937 NYT article says (p8) that “…the younger generation is solidly behind the Stalin Government and utterly out of sympathy with the malcontents”.
Seems the same today, per Clint Ehrlich: https://twitter.com/clintehrlich/status/1500996394659696640?s=21
Per Ehrlich Putin is popular at home, for fighting against imminent attacks by the west.
Konstantin Kisin at Triggernometry is also worth watching
So not any different than America today??
@ Kai Akker - For what it's worth, Stalin did not allow Christmas trees to come back into fashion. After one of his advisers talked about how much fun children had with Christmas trees, Stalin decided to make New Years a big celebration and repurpose the trees as New Years trees. It became one of the sacred days on the calendar, joining May Day and the day Lenin's forces took over the government. Luckily for the Bolsheviks, these days came around near when Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving did pre-1917.
Thanks, Roger.
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