AlekseyCalvin
commited on
Update README.md
Browse files
README.md
CHANGED
@@ -70,8 +70,8 @@ The sculpture seemed to proclaim the full maturation and arrival of the first yo
|
|
70 |
Meanwhile, back in the USSR that year, all the tragically tense, desperately narrow-zealed, and self-vulgarizingly triumphant top Stalinist apparatchiks & opportunists had gotten busy systematically erasing the last, as it seemed to them, vestiges of the Old World: their own friends & comrades (or/and desk/podium competitors), as well as (not so infrequently) themselves, under all sorts of direct & indirect pretexts. <br>
|
71 |
Though on the level of individuals and specific cases, there was a vast diversity of varied motivations underlying how and why this or that local party administrator or police investigator or political trial judge or jury or NKVD agent or newspaper editor or casual informant (etc...) contributed and facilitated the purges, across all these disparate acts of peer-dooming ran certain oddly coherent subtexts.
|
72 |
Every purge (and not just in Soviet history) has such subtexts, and they can also be very different from context to context. <br>
|
73 |
-
In any case, though Politburo or the General Secretary Stalin did not themselves look into or had much of a say regarding most of the names on the execution lists, what they initiated and informed was
|
74 |
-
|
75 |
It seems that following many prefugurations, the Stalinist machine had finally and collectively burst full wild under the long dialectic strain of hope and paranoia into a murderous and self-destructive psychosis... <br>
|
76 |
...target for elimination this demographic (with others mainly swept up by proxy/inertia): anyone who had been in any way politically active in the late 1910s and early 1920s, mainly lifelong Bolsheviks. <br>
|
77 |
In effect, in 1937 & 1938 there took place in the USSR a veiled (and to this day, mis-categorized) anti-Communist genocide orchestrated by Communists, and which resulted in the violent elimination of 90% of surviving Communists & Socialists active before and during the Revolution, and/or influential in the 1920s. <br>
|
|
|
70 |
Meanwhile, back in the USSR that year, all the tragically tense, desperately narrow-zealed, and self-vulgarizingly triumphant top Stalinist apparatchiks & opportunists had gotten busy systematically erasing the last, as it seemed to them, vestiges of the Old World: their own friends & comrades (or/and desk/podium competitors), as well as (not so infrequently) themselves, under all sorts of direct & indirect pretexts. <br>
|
71 |
Though on the level of individuals and specific cases, there was a vast diversity of varied motivations underlying how and why this or that local party administrator or police investigator or political trial judge or jury or NKVD agent or newspaper editor or casual informant (etc...) contributed and facilitated the purges, across all these disparate acts of peer-dooming ran certain oddly coherent subtexts.
|
72 |
Every purge (and not just in Soviet history) has such subtexts, and they can also be very different from context to context. <br>
|
73 |
+
In any case, though Politburo or the General Secretary Stalin did not themselves look into or had much of a say regarding most of the names on the execution lists, what they initiated and informed was exactly this subtext, the hidden logic of the proceedings, complete with a very specific, if counterintuitive, prime target. <br>
|
74 |
+
Which group or demographic did they target? Well, in '37/'38's bloodiest and most inhumane (and exponentially so) of all the Stalinist purges, the prime target were former and current Leftist-leaning intellectuals/activists. <br>
|
75 |
It seems that following many prefugurations, the Stalinist machine had finally and collectively burst full wild under the long dialectic strain of hope and paranoia into a murderous and self-destructive psychosis... <br>
|
76 |
...target for elimination this demographic (with others mainly swept up by proxy/inertia): anyone who had been in any way politically active in the late 1910s and early 1920s, mainly lifelong Bolsheviks. <br>
|
77 |
In effect, in 1937 & 1938 there took place in the USSR a veiled (and to this day, mis-categorized) anti-Communist genocide orchestrated by Communists, and which resulted in the violent elimination of 90% of surviving Communists & Socialists active before and during the Revolution, and/or influential in the 1920s. <br>
|