WHO WERE STALIN’S VICTIMS?

(This is an unfinished entry, which, however, constitutes the third part of the triptych Tragedy And Statistics. The first two were posted together on February 7, 2011.)

“One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is just a statistic.”

And once again we are opening a third consecutive entry with the same spurious quotation, and once again, for a good reason. “Who were some of Stalin’s less obvious victims?” we have asked, and let us begin with those hapless innocents who happen to be the collateral damage in any police action conducted on a massive scale. Their suffering and death are a tragic blight on Russia’s national soul, and their fate decries the motives and actions of each single individual directly or indirectly responsible for each miscarriage of justice that could result in such a tragedy.

It will be a grave mistake, however, to assume that millions of Russian innocents had been destroyed for a frivolous reason, or else, preventively, without any reason. Such an impression will be utterly inconsistent with the most basic rationale of all genuinely totalitarian societies. Presumably, every loyal citizen of a totalitarian state is protected by the state as its most valued possession. If an envious neighbor of mine denounces me to the state because he dislikes me or covets my wife, both of us will be thoroughly investigated, and the chances are that he will be repressed for the false report, and that I will go on unmolested, unless I myself do have a stinking skeleton in the closet.

One of the most common type of denunciation, resulting in the arrest and repression of the denounced, used to pertain to the countless cases of adultery, which was considered a serious crime against the Soviet State, undermining the basic Soviet family unit, and thus the very foundation of Soviet society, thereby tantamount to treason. Hundreds of thousands of otherwise blameless Soviet citizens were sent to the gulags for this all too common human transgression, and I somehow understand how they may have felt that they were treated unjustly, and even criminally. Apparently the cold logic of totalitarian justice was incomprehensible to them and in that case society was punishing them first and foremost as pariahs, incompatible with its basic rules of civil conduct.

Another type of transgressor was the easy loafer, the laidback underachiever, who was judged as not giving a 120% effort for the greater glory of the state and the nation. This type of denunciation was hard to repel for all those who were not literally burning themselves out in the workplace, and thus many innocents were repressed merely for lacking the necessary energy and enthusiasm in performing their civic duty…

These were just a few types of punishable transgressions, which may seem minor to the modern critic, but do let us keep in mind that those late 1930’s in Soviet Russia were not some kind of heyday of arbitrary justice run amok. The country was deep in the realization of an imminent apocalyptic war with the German superpower, and, consequently, the law of the land was virtually, and understandably, substituted by a full-blown martial law…

(To be continued at a later time…)