Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton
On the glossy cover, there is blurred portrait of Churchill. The book “Speeches that changed the world” is precious collection of performances, speeches and sermons that became turning points of human history. Starting from Sinai Revelation and Ten Commandments by God, the origin of Judeo-Christian civilization to Reagan’s calling: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, which demolished walls of socialist camp in Europe like a horn of Jericho; from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg on the place of the crucial battle of the Civil War, to inspirational call done by John F. Kennedy: “Don’t ask what your country can do for you…”.
Here is the speech to the troops at Tilbury by Queen Elizabeth I of England. Britain, which has just crushed down the Spanish Armada, had become the mistress of the seas disposing Spain as a sea and colonial power. Here is the speech of Gandhi that set India onto the path to independence.
There is also an unknown statement of Stalin in front of Politburo (Political Bureau of Communist party of USSR) from August 19, 1939 – four days before signing Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It was published only in 1991 for the first time. What thing did he say there that I didn’t know and that had changed the world so much?
Perhaps, it would be better for me not to read this statement. I have heard voice of Soso, sprayed with Georgian accent: “Peace or war. This question enters critical phase. Position, which the whole USSR would stick to, now depends only on his solution. We are totally sure that if we sign alliance treaty with France and Britain, then Germany would be forced to abstain from Poland and seek for modus vivendi with Western countries. That way the war would be avoided and then consequential development of events would take a dangerous character.
On the other hand, if we accept a well-known offer from Germany about consigning a non-aggression pact with it. Then, undoubtedly it will attack Poland, and consequently entering of England and France into the war becomes inevitable.”
…People of my afterwar generation are grown on tales about miracles, which saved their parents in war. It was a reference point of self-recognition, that our birth is miracle. Miraculously survived parents, miraculously born children. My aunt had been saved with her child during the siege because her husband pulled home a round killed horse from the front line of Leningrad. They were eating it frosted in winter 1942. Then she told how much they were glad that my mother with grandmother left for Stalingrad and that now they didn’t have not to share that horsemeat. A family friend, a surgeon, had been saying that corpses near which he was passing by to get to hospital, had cut soft body tissues. Many siege diaries are classified even now…
Stalin: “So our choice is obvious: we have to accept German’s offer, but to British and French delegation (which offered union versus Hitler – T.M.) to refuse politely and send them back home. It’s not difficult to anticipate a bunce which we would extract by acting in such a way. To us it is evident, that Poland will be smashed down before England and France might come to help it. In that case Germany would hand us a piece of Poland up to Warsaw outskirts, including Ukrainian Galicia...”
… In Stalingrad, my mother went to exchange cards on food when there was some shelling. She saw German’s motorcyclists and returned to the factory. Chief engineer took golden watches from everyone and handed to a ferryman, so that he could deliver them to technical carriage. They got only to the middle of Volga River when German’s paratroopers started landing on the place they had just departed from. In Krasnoyarsk, they put machine tools just in snow and they had been working out weapons. At 6 a.m., the prisoners were convoyed under barks first, and then the rest went. During the whole war period, my mom had only one day off. She bought 100 grams of butter at local market and went to a cinema. The butter was stolen in the cinema...
Stalin: “In USSR’s interests – motherland of workers is that the war burst out between Reich and capitalistic English - French block. It is needed to be done everything for that war to last as long as ever possible to wear down both sides. Exactly by this reason we must agree on pact, offered by Germany, and to work on that the war once declared, would last maximum timespan.”
… In 1945, sixteen-year-olds were drafted to army. My math teacher quietly cried that if her son had been born a month later, he would not have been killed. He got sixteen in April and he was drafted immediately. In May, he was already killed. “All the world is guilty in front of a mother whose son was killed” (V. Grossman) How many such mothers all over Soviet Union had been crying and quietly sorrowing their killed sons until the death? When sorrow of the loss of a child enters a woman’s heart it leaves only with the last beat...
Stalin: “Germany will provide us full freedom of action in three Baltic countries. It will not strain on Bessarabia’s return to Russia. It will be ready to give up Romania, Bulgari and Hungary to us as a zone of influence. Question on Yugoslavia remains open”.
… Trains with soldiers returning home were met on each station with crowds of women. “Come out, here is a house for you. Every man in the village was killed. We will carry you on our arms.” Man to woman ratio was one to six after the war. Not surprisingly. German to Soviet troops killed ratio was one to seven. I do not know if Zhukov said words attributed to him: “Do not spare any man, women will give births to new people.” But filling the enemy with corpses was praised as heroism, and the illustrious protagonist Alexander Matrosov, whose feat was repeated many times, instead of a sandbag, fell with his chest on the embrasure ...
... In the family of my mother-in-law, 15 people died. In the city where my mother and the famous writer Vasily Grossman were born, 30,000 Jews were shot. The execution of Jews took place in every city of Belarus and Ukraine immediately after the occupation by the Germans. The death of the civilian population (mainly Jews) in the occupation is estimated at 7 million. Nobody can verify the numbers. Data on the Leningrad blockade is still inaccurate: a million more - a million less. It was in the Nazi camps that accurate statistics were kept. The Germans captured 6 million Soviet soldiers and officers. 3.3 million in German captivity (according to Western historians, 3.8 million) died. The Red Cross visited captured British and Americans providing them with food parcels. Soviet prisoners of war were declared deserters and traitors by their government. Order of People's Commissar of Defense I.V. Stalin No. 270 (dated August 16, 1941) declared Soviet soldiers who were in the hands of the enemy, malicious deserters and traitors to the motherland. It especially draws attention to the words about the destruction of prisoners, both ground and air, and the families of captured Red Army soldiers were deprived of state benefits and assistance. Generals who were taken prisoner were sentenced to death in absentia, and their wives and parents were prosecuted and exiled to remote areas of the USSR.
In the vast expanses surrounded by barbed wire, Soviet prisoners of war, thrown directly onto the bare ground, had a choice: go to Vlasov's army or eat corpses. Many of the survivors of hard work in German captivity were sent to Soviet camps upon their return, where they were finished off by hunger and overwork in the cold.
Why did Stalin need a war?
Alas, he needed much more than just Poland, the Baltic countries, and influence in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Let us give the word to Stalin himself: “The experience of the last twenty years shows that in peacetime it is impossible to have a communist movement in Europe strong enough to allow the Bolshevik Party to seize power. The dictatorship of this party becomes possible only as a result of a great war. We will make our choice, and it is clear.”
This means that there is not enough of Poland, the Baltic countries, influence in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. The war is needed to create the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party and seize power throughout Europe. Naturally, he will be a dictator.
Let us listen to him once again, or rather, the instructions he sent to the Comintern immediately after the conclusion of the pact with Hitler on August 23, 1939.
Stalin: “The establishment of the Soviet system in all capitalist countries through world revolution remains the main goal of the foreign policy of the USSR. The European war, which the capitalist countries are waging for their own motives, creates unique and favorable circumstances and conditions for the emergence of a world revolution ... We have reached our goal: a general war without responsibility for it in the eyes of the world and without participation in it ... “
Of course, he needed more than Poland, more than the Baltic countries, more than influence in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. “The establishment of the Soviet system ... through the world revolution” around the world. He needed power over the whole world. He wanted to be the dictator of the globe.
In total:
Stalin, judging by his words, deliberately concludes a pact with Hitler, realizing that this will lead to war in Europe. “We will fan the world fire on the mountain to all bourgeois!” He needs a war so that the Bolshevik Party can seize power. He needs a world revolution. Having concluded a pact with Hitler and dividing Poland with him (taking the Baltic states with Bessarabia), he lets him go to fight France and England, thinking that Hitler will drag him chestnuts from the fire, bleeding Europe and preparing it for the Stalinist invasion.
But an error occurred. Hitler turned out to be just as bloody and no less crazy a mega-maniac as Stalin himself. He also wanted to take over the world. Suffering from the megalomaniacal idolatry of the collectively insane German people, disoriented by the easy victory over France and the smaller European countries, Hitler overestimated the power of his army and underestimated the unique ability of the Soviet army to fill it with corpses.
Our birth was indeed a miracle, a miracle of our parents' survival in a bloody meat grinder that crushed tens of millions of people. National socialism in Germany was no different from international socialism in the USSR, which by the end of Stalin's life, who glorified and praised the great Russian people, became, unlike German, Russian National Socialism. Even the Stalinist Holocaust was already on wheels.
In February 1953, Jews in Leningrad began to be sacked. First the non-partisans, then the leadership. As a party member, engineer and single mother, my mother was the last to be fired. In the newspapers, such persecution of Jews began, from the “doctors' case” to “economic crimes”, that it was impossible to walk along the street: people stood at the newspaper stands and cursed the Jews who allegedly killed Russians in all hospitals and robbed everyone. The pogrom crowd was only waiting for the signal, which was to be the sentence and hanging of Jewish doctors on Red Square. Freight trains were at the stations. The Jews, who were not allowed to work in Leningrad, sat at home and silently were howling with fear. Three days after Stalin's death, they were permitted to go back.
Why is Soso's voice from the page of the collection "Speeches that Changed the World" so paralyzed? Because it suddenly became clear that the world of nightmares that attacked me in my post-war childhood, seen and heard from relatives: the pangs of hunger, representatives of the authorities refuse to evacuate the family, because someone who does not stand yet on their feet because of hunger, will still die, cut off wounded arms and legs in hospitals in a hurry, faces mutilated by shrapnel, so that they wore masks so as not to frighten people. Continuously rolling bitching disabled stumps on the streets in wheelchairs made of scooters pushing themselves with irons, washing in a trough, woman who saved my mother’s friend (pretended to be a housekeeper) from execution along with other Jews, the only father in the whole class at school who returned from the war, the lament of grandmother and aunt for the dead - that everything was just a whim from the boundless lust of the bloody jester's power, for whom helpful tailors sewed the uniform of the generalissimo. He got what he wanted: “A general war without responsibility for it in the eyes of the world and without participation in it ...” He hoped not to participate in it.
Something else is even worse. My children are proud of the photograph of their grandfather next to Zhukov in Berlin. The entire consciousness of generations after the war was brought up on the consciousness of the rightness of the country - an innocent victim of the “treacherous attack of Germany”, on pride in the Victory: “We will not stand up for the price”, on songs about the war: “There were only three of us left ...”, on films about the war, on war books. The war was the only common denominator that equated a party functionary with a dissident – in this pride in victory, they understood each other. Their father's medals shone in their eyes.
How to explain to the dead that it was all just a bloody performance started by a crazy director, where he made the actors really die, a theater of war in the truest sense of the word. A gamble gone awry by a provincial sadist maddened by power, impunity and cheapness of human lives sacrificed to him, who, in addition, ruined his own wife and son.
It is too normal to lament that today, as a setting in a surrealist farce, portraits and statues of Stalin have again appeared on the streets of Russia; that the authors of articles in military journals complain that Stalin's justice was too lenient and humane, since those who surrendered and were in the occupied territories were released too quickly from the camps. Probably, as Stalin ordered at the beginning of the war, they should have been shot.
On Victory Day, I stopped by with a bottle of vodka and a bouquet to congratulate the only relative of the surviving 94-year-old war veteran. He lost his hand at the front, and his native country, in gratitude, immediately awarded him a camp term with rehabilitation in the 56th. He was lucky: as a physicist, he spent 10 years in a sharashka, in Kresty. It was worse for his wife, who was pregnant at the time of his arrest, until the end of her life she did not forget how friends, noticing her, the wife of the imprisoned “enemy of the people”, were crossing to the other side of the street with fear.
A veteran (a scientist is a scientist) informed me that Stalin was indeed a great man. Only a giant can destroy such a mighty huge country as Russia, during the life of just one generation.
But the veteran is not quite right. It's not just about Stalin.
Stalinism (like Hitlerism) was an orgy of mass idolatry. John Steinbeck described Stalinist Russia: “Nothing in Soviet life can escape the Stalinist gaze in plaster, bronze, paint, embroidery. His portraits are not only in every museum but in every room of every museum. His statue marches in front of every building. His busts are in front of every airport, railway station and bus station. His busts are in every school class and his portrait is often right behind his bust. He is everywhere and he sees everything. It is impossible to pass a minute without a smiling, thoughtful or stern look from Stalin. The tyrant was equalized with God.
It is no secret that slaves themselves create a tyrant, and it is not a tyrant who creates slaves. Just as parents, allowing a child to do everything, leaving him unpunished for everything and constantly praising him, make him mad, so people blinded in idolatry creates a tyrant. When a tyrant is equated with God, he pays the people with well-deserved mass sadism, senseless wars and multi-million bloody executions.
In the collection “Speeches that changed the world”, in the very first passage - in the Sinai Revelation, when the people receive the Commandments given to them by the Almighty, there are words of the Prohibition.
The first commandment: “I am the Lord your God ... you shall have no other gods before my face...”
The second commandment: “Do not create yourself an idol ...”
The creation of idols and their worship in both Judaism and Christianity is considered a terrible sin. It so happened that it was in the Sinai Revelation, the main speech in the world that really changed it, that these two most important commandments (the first and second) from the Old Testament transmitted to Moses by the Almighty are pronounced by the Almighty himself. Only Moses pronounces the rest. The Almighty himself pronounces two prohibitions: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me” and “Thou shalt not make thyself idols.”
In Deuteronomy, the Most High declares himself to be a jealous God. It is endlessly repeated in the Torah that idolatry will be punished, that “rivers will flow with blood and ditches will be filled with the dead.” The orgy of mass idolatry always ends in the monstrous bloody ending promised in the Old Testament. If you carefully read what the people are promised in the Torah for idolatry, then a frightening understanding comes about the promised, inevitable and happened punishment. Stalin, finding himself in the position of an idol, was simply a technical performer.
As for the veterans, who have already died, it is probably fortunate that they did not read Stalin's speeches before the Politburo, as well as his instructions to the Comintern. And it's too late to explain to them whether they fought for it or not. It is just that history needs to be verified by the Torah, because everything is repeated: in Russia they sing songs about Putin, in North Korea they march in front of a chubby dummy killer. Most recently, the hysterical mass worship of Obama (watching a video where a crazy teacher conducts a choir of children singing about Obama) made me wonder where in California I could get horsemeat and not have to share it with someone.
