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“— А ну, — сказала мама, — разорви эту книгу, клади в печку и разжигай. Книг у нас было много, мама собирала их и постоянно покупала новые. И вот она стала пересматривать их, стопу за стопой — и отправлять в печь. Книги горят долго и упрямо, их надо ворошить кочергой. [...] Особенно жаль было великолепно иллюстрированных, переплетенных годовых комплектов «Иностранной литературы» с 1890 по 1910 год, напечатанную при царе «Русскую историю в картинах», не говоря уж о книгах Горького. — Это вредительские книги, — объяснила мать. Понятно. Если в школе тетради жгут, то вредительские книги надо и подавно — в печь. Горький не так давно умер, но вокруг все шепотом говорили, что его отравили. Сперва сына его убили, а потом и самого «залечили» в Кремлевской больнице. А раз такое дело, лучше его книг не держать. Но я буквально завизжал, когда к сожжению были приговорены японские сказки: — Не надо, мама, не надо! Это была самая любимая книга моего детства, по ней я выучился читать. В ней рассказывалось о занятных и поучительных историях, происходивших с мальчиком Таро и девочкой Такой, а на картинках были прудики с золотыми рыбками и японские домики среди карликовых сосенок. Я вцепился в книгу, а мать стала вырывать, и она была сильнее, и мои Таро и Такой полетели в огонь. Обложка была плотная, лакированная и долго не хотела гореть. Лежит великолепная детская книга среди огня — и не горит. — Японцы — капиталисты и наши враги, — сказала мать. — Нельзя держать в доме японские книги. Чтобы я не разревелся, она дала мне ножницы и велела кромсать семейные фотографии. Ставила крест на лицах, которые надо вырезать, это были враги народа, и я их аккуратно вырезал. Что-то у нас оказалось подозрительно много знакомых врагов народа. После моей обработки фотографии выглядели презабавно. Вот, например, большая групповая фотография, ряды проглотивших аршин мужчин и женщин, надпись: «Учительская конференция 1935 года». А в этих рядах теперь, после моих ножниц, — пустые дырки в форме человеческих силуэтов, словно не люди были, а привидения. Все они оказались врагами народа, теперь их уж нет, их надо забыть [88—89].”

FearTerrorOblivionStalinismConformismBurning Books
Book:Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel
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“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.”

HistoryHonestyRacismPrejudiceBraveryRussiaHolocaustUkraineAccuracyNazismPolandJewsMassacreAntisemitismStalinismBerlin WallHistoriansNational SocialismYale UniversityBelarus1989Slavic PeoplesPolish JewsOperation ReinhardTimothy D Snyder
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“На поминках по моему отцу за одним столом в первый и последний раз встретились две ветви моей семьи — дед по матери, уроженец юга Украины и выпускник техникума, сталинист, ветеран Финской и Великой Отечественной, и двоюродная бабушка по отцу, яркий представитель московской еврейской интеллигенции, доктор наук, муж которой чудом не попал в лагерь. В какой-то момент речь зашла о репрессиях — семья отца была репрессирована, его отец погиб в лагере, а сам он провел несколько лет в ссылке. И произошла удивительная вещь. Оказалось, что эти два человека прожили свои жизни в разных странах, никак не пересекавшихся друг с другом. Дед, по его словам, не знал о репрессиях, их, скорее всего, и не было. А в той стране, где жила бабушка, все всё знали с 20-х годов, и аресты и лагеря были, в общем, главной реальностью, в которой существовали она и ее круг. Тот разговор за столом со всей очевидностью продемонстрировал то, что абстрактно кажется невероятным. Объективной реальности прошлого не существует. Ее формирует память, а память необъективна. Но гораздо важнее, что такое неопределенное прошлое, в свою очередь, формирует настоящее. Замороженная и «непредсказуемая» история страны с двоящейся памятью оборачивается двоящейся реальностью в настоящем. Такая раздвоенность чревата, в лучшем случае, «просто» невозможностью двигаться вперед, в худшем — гражданской войной.”

PastImaginationFamilyMemoryUncertaintyRepressionObjectivityStalinismBifurcation
Author:Николай Эппле
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“Having confronted the world with little except a battered typewriter and a certain resilience, he can now take posthumous credit for having got the three great questions of the 20th century essentially 'right.' Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism, and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while he was soldiering in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them all—the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual underlings of Stalinism.”

EuropeLiesFascismColonialism20th CenturyImperialismSpainNazismBritish EmpireStalinismGeorge OrwellIntellectual LifeCataloniaSpanish Civil War
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“For nearly thirty years the powerful propaganda machines of Stalinism worked furiously to expunge Trotsky's name from the annals of the revolution, or to leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor. To the present Soviet generation, and not only to it, Trotsky's life-story is already like an ancient Egyptian sepulchre which is known to have contained the body of a great man and the record, engraved in gold, of his deeds; but tomb-robbers and ghouls have plundered and left it so empty and desolate that no trace is found of the record it once contained. The work of the tomb-robbers has, in this present instance, been so persistent that it has strongly affected the views even of independent Western historians and scholars.”

LiesPropagandaSoviet UnionStalinismLeon Trotsky
Author:Isaac Deutscher
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“Когда люди живут в таких обстоятельствах, когда происходят ужасные вещи на их глазах, многие закрывают глаза и не хотят ничего знать, видеть. Потому что знать, видеть и понимать — это очень опасно. Многие рассуждали так: если я буду это знать, об этом думать, я начну об этом говорить. Тогда со мной самим что-то случится, я никому ничем не помогу, поэтому я не буду знать и не буду думать, пока меня это не коснулось. И сейчас так тоже многие думают.”

FearSilenceEscapismUssrStalinismConformismPutinism
Author:Владимир Войнович
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“And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.”

Human NatureTerrorHolocaustTotalitarianismStalinismFacism
Book:Life and Fate
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“Depending on the contemporary mood, Orwell oscillates from Saint George to George the Seer to George the Sage. What other thinker has been both so fervidly claimed and derided by both the left and right? Who else except Kafka do we credit with having seen the sinister future? When the NSA spying scandal broke in June, Amazon sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four vaulted more than 6000 percent. The connection of Big Brother with the NSA might have been hysterical and spurious, but it was also testament to our sentimental, kneejerk affection for Orwell, to the fact that he remains the default scribe whenever our paranoia is fondled by the ominous machinations of realpolitik. The utter clarity and goodness of his intellect seem something of a miracle when one considers how many of his fellow writers botched the most pressing moral and political tests of their time. He could smell bullshit and blood a continent away: When a passel of leftist intellectuals was hailing the Soviet Union as humankind’s only hope, Orwell was persistent in pointing out that Stalin was a monocratic lunatic.”

IntegrityPropagandaTotalitarianismStalinismGeorge OrwellJoseph StalinRight Wing PoliticsLeft Wing PoliticsNational Security Agency
Author:William Giraldi
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“What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge.”

WarRevengeGenocideWorld War IiHolocaustNazismPolandEthnic CleansingJewsAntisemitismStalinismStalinGermansEastern EuropeanErnest Gellner
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“We shall never now be able to arrive at any judgment of the full scale of what took place, of the number who perished, or of the standard they might have attained. No one will ever tell us about the notebooks hurriedly burned before departures on prisoner transports, or of the completed fragments and big schemes carried in heads and cast together with those heads into frozen mass graves. Verses can be read, lips close to ear; they can be remembered, and they or the memory of them can be communicated. But prose cannot be passed on before its time. It is harder for it to survive. It is too bulky, too rigid, too bound up with paper, to pass through the vicissitudes of the Archipelago.”

PoetryProseRussian LiteratureStalinism1976Prison CampsProse Versus VerseThe Muses In Gulag
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
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“Some lurid things have been said about me—that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth—that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I'd only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that such shocking deformities didn't seem to count for so much then. Arguing with the Stalinist mentality for more than three decades now, and doing a bit of soapboxing and street-corner speaking on and off, has meant that it takes quite a lot to hurt my tender feelings, or bruise my milk-white skin.”

RacismHomosexualityAlcoholismIraq WarWar On TerrorInsultsStalinismEdward SaidAd HominemClosetedAlexander Cockburn
Book:Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
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“In general, forced migration study reveals the stunning and gradually increasing adherence of the Soviet system to ethnically rather than socially determined repression criteria (the policy in question reached its apogee during Stalin’s rule). In other words, the state declares its loyalty to international and class awareness publicly, while in practice gravitates towards essentially nationalistic goals and methods. The deportation of so-called punished peoples can provide a most prominent example of this approach, the deportation itself serving as the punishment. All such peoples were deported not merely from their historical homeland, but also from other cities and districts, as well as demobilized from the army, which shows that such ethnic deportations embraced the entire country (we term this type of repression “total deportation”). Apart from their homeland, the “punished people” were deprived of their autonomy if they had any before, in other words, of their relative sovereignty. In essence, ten peoples in the USSR were subjected to total deportation. Seven of them—Germans, Karachais, Kalmyks, Ingushetians, Chechens, Balkars, and Crimean Tatars—lost their national autonomy too (their total number amounted to 2 million, and the land populated by them before the deportation exceeded 150,000 square kilometers). According to the criteria formulated above, another three peoples—namely Finns, Koreans, and Meskhetian Turks—fall under the category of “totally deported peoples.”

NationalismSoviet UnionTotalitarianismRepressionEthnic CleansingUssrCrimes Against HumanityStalinismDeportations
Book:Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR
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“So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to employ them. I knew that its vast patrimony of oil wealth, far from being 'nationalized,' had been privatized for the use of one family, and was being squandered on hideous ostentation at home and militarism abroad. (Post-Kuwait inspections by the United Nations had uncovered a huge nuclear-reactor site that had not even been known about by the international community.) I had seen with my own eyes the evidence of a serious breach of the Genocide Convention on Iraqi soil, and I had also seen with my own eyes the evidence that it had been carried out in part with the use of weapons of mass destruction. I was, if you like, the prisoner of this knowledge. I certainly did not have the option of un-knowing it.”

IraqOilGenocideFascismUnited NationsIraq WarMilitarismWmdStalinismPsychopathsSerial KillersKuwaitNational SocialismBill ClintonPrivatisationBa Ath PartyCrime FamilyBa Athist IraqInvasion Of KuwaitAl CaponeNationalisationGenocide ConventionNuclear Reactor Technology
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed—and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed—and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug—opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.”

LawJusticeUnited StatesMoralityIraqSocialismLiberalismIraq WarNatoInternational LawLeftismStalinismAnti War MovementGeorge W BushSaddam HusseinAnti AmericanismBa Ath PartyBa Athist IraqOpposition To The Iraq WarBa AthismPro War Left
Book:A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
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“In addition, of course, they would be taken to a bath and in the bath vestibule they would be ordered to leave their leather coats, their Romanov sheepskin coats, their woolen sweaters, their suits of fine wool, their felt cloaks, their leather boots, their felt boots (for, after all, these were no illiterate peasants this time, but the Party elite—editors of newspapers, directors of trusts and factories, responsible officials in the provincial Party committees, professors of political economy, and, by the beginning of the thirties, all of them understood what good merchandise was). "And who is going to guard them?" the newcomers asked skeptically. "Oh, come on now, who needs your things?" The bath personnel acted offended. "Go on in and don't worry." And they did go in. And the exit was through a different door, and after passing through it, they received back cotton breeches, field shirts, camp quilted jackets without pockets, and pigskin shoes. (Oh, this was no small thing! This was farewell to your former life—to your titles, your positions, and your arrogance!) "Where are our things?" they cried. "Your things you left at home!" some chief or other bellowed at them. "In camp nothing belongs to you. Here in camp, we have communism! Forward march, leader!" And if it was "communism," then what was there for them to object to? That is what they had dedicated their lives to.”

1930sStalinismIntelligentsia1973PurgesThe Slave Caravans
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“That's how the world is arranged: they can take anyone's freedom from him, without a qualm. If we want to take back the freedom which is our birthright—they make us pay with our lives and the lives of all whom we meet on the way. They can do anything, but we cannot. That's why they are stronger than we.”

TotalitarianismAuthoritarianismSoviet RussiaStalinism19771951
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII
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“Should we wrap it all up and simply say that they arrested the innocent? But we omitted saying that the very concept of guilt had been repealed by the proletarian revolution and, at the beginning of the thirties, was defined as rightist opportunism! So we can't even discuss these out-of-date concepts, guilt and innocence.”

CommunismTotalitarianismPolice StateSoviet RussiaStalinism19731938Double ThinkSecurity StateArbitrary Arrest
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“But just take the jurists' side for a moment: why, in fact, should a trial be supposed to have two possible outcomes when our general elections are conducted on the basis of one candidate? An acquittal is, in fact, unthinkable from the economic point of view! It would mean that the informers, the Security officers, the Interrogators, the prosecutor's staff, the internal guard in the prison, and the convoy had all worked to no purpose.”

CommunismTotalitarianismSoviet RussiaStalinism19411973Show Trial
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well that they weren't wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being shaken up justifiably. The military men, who knew they hadn't worked for foreign intelligence services and had not sabotaged the Red Army, believed readily enough that the engineers were wreckers and that the priests deserved to be destroyed. Imprisoned, the Soviet person reasoned in the following way: I personally am innocent, but any methods are justified in dealing with those others, the enemies. The lessons of interrogation and the cell failed to enlighten such people. Even after they themselves had been convicted, they retained the blind beliefs of their days in freedom: belief in universal conspiracies, poisonings, wrecking, espionage.”

PropagandaTotalitarianismWwiiDouble StandardSoviet RussiaStalinismPolitical Prisoners19451973Double Think
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. […] It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.”

CapitalismBureaucracyFree MarketNeoliberalismStalinismLate CapitalismCapitalist Realism
Book:Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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“The scythe went down the ranks, in cities and provinces, lopping the heads of the Party apparatuses, of intellectuals, activists. Nearly the entire Party Central Committee was killed; nearly the entire Soviet war council; nearly the entire Red Army command, starting with its head, Tukhachevsky; 35,000 officers; most Soviet ambassadors, almost the entire staffs of Pravda and Izvestia, most of the officials of the Cheka (including its head, Yagoda), most of the leaders of the Young Communist League . . . From late 1936 into 1939 the slaughter went on. The tortures and shootings that took place in the basement of the Lubyanka, headquarters of the security police, must have set a world record for one building.”

HistoryCommunismTortureSoviet UnionStalinismRussian RevolutionMass Murder1936GorkyLubyanka
Book:Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky
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“The prisoners, feral and maddened by thirst, tried to snatch discarded watermelon rinds lying along the road or to drink from muddy puddles nearby. At first, the NKVD guards simply shot those who dared rush toward the water. But soon the situation slipped out of control. When a small puddle flashed in the sun, all the prisoners surged toward this miserable source of water, ignoring fear of death, desperate shouts, and gunfire from the guards. They fought wildly, beating one another for the right to press their lips to the life-giving moisture. Peter reached the puddle among the first, but several men were already lying in it, gulping greedily and blocking others. In a fit of rage, Peter grabbed one of them by the clothes, flung him several meters aside, collapsed into his place — and fused his mouth to the water. He drank frantically. For the first few minutes, he felt nothing but a dizzying mix of rapture, pleasure, and joy as his thirst was quenched. Only when mud replaced water in his mouth did awareness of what was happening slowly begin to return. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One Context note: During a prisoner transport in Stalin’s USSR in the early years of World War II, extreme thirst drove Gulag inmates to the edge of madness. Even filthy puddles became objects of violent struggle, exposing how wartime Soviet repression reduced human survival to pure instinct.”

Historical FictionWorld War IiTotalitarianismDehumanizationStalinismPolitical PrisonersGulagSoviet HistoryNkvdDeath Marchers
Book:Камінь. Біографічний роман. Книга перша. Перші кроки до світла та назад: Дитинство та занурення в ГУЛАГ.
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“Daghestan must be governed in accordance with its specific features, its manner of life and customs. We are told that among the Daghestan peoples the Sharia is of great importance. We have also been informed that the enemies of Soviet power are spreading rumours that it has banned the Sharia. I have been authorized by the Government of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic to state here that these rumours are false. The Government of Russia gives every people the full right to govern itself on the basis of its laws and customs. The Soviet Government considers that the Sharia, as common law, is as fully authorized as that of any other of the peoples inhabiting Russia. If the Daghestan people desire to preserve their laws and customs, they should be preserved. (from Congress of the Peoples of Daghestan, 1920)”

IslamCommunismStalinismSharia LawDagestan
Author:Josef Stalin
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“Stalin and Kim made human idols of themselves because they believed, as utopian idealists always do, in the ultimate goodness of themselves and the unchallengeable rightness of their decisions. There was no higher power, and so there could be no higher law. If people disagreed with them, it was because those people were in some way defective--insane, malignant, or mercenary. The rulers could not tolerate actual religion, because they could not tolerate any rival authority or any rival source or judge of goodness, gratitude, and justice.”

CommunismTyrantsDictatorshipReligious IntoleranceStalinismStalinDictatorsUtopianismUtopian SocialismKim Jong Il
Author:Peter Hitchens
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“All the values turn upside down with the years, and what was considered a privilege in the Special Purpose Camp of the twenties—to wear government-issue clothing—would become an annoyance in the Special Camp of the forties: there the privilege would be not to wear government-issue clothing, but to wear at least something of one's own, even just a cap. The reason here was not economic only but was a cry of the whole epoch: one decade saw as its ideal how to join in the common lot, and the other how to get away from it.”

CommunismStalinismPrison Life1974
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
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“It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms—like 'Stalinism,' say—just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.”

ReligionEvilLibertyHistoryIslamTerrorismOsama Bin LadenJihadTheocracyStalinismAdolf HitlerNapoleonIslamism2011September 11 AttacksDeath Of Osama Bin LadenCults Of Personality
Book:The Enemy
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“Stalin’s teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical, qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another’… The slide away from truth-directed science had disastrous results in agriculture. It was also humanly disastrous. Biologists who disagreed were shot or imprisoned.”

TruthBiologyStalinismBelief SystemObjective Truth
Book:Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
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“I have quite a few of ‘my own’ people now,” Stalin concluded, “but the very first day of the war revealed a lack of proper organization and coordination among them. Worse still, among these ‘my own’ there are plenty of fools — and traitors lying low. This filth must be eliminated as quickly as possible, because a new system of power can be built only if I do not fear for my rear.” He turned back to the sheet of paper and wrote decisively: “Immediately neutralize all spies and potential enemies.” The General Secretary of the Communist Party raised his eyes to the ceiling. Images of former comrades — now exposed as traitors — flashed before his mind’s eye. Blood rushed to his face; beneath his habitual vigilance, rage began to surface. Yes, I too had erred for too long, following the lead of Leninist–Trotskyist lackeys who believed the revolution could be exported by financing foreign anti-imperialist movements. Through these empty talkers, colossal resources had vanished abroad like water into sand — resources that should have gone into armaments. And time? Years lost. Years that were desperately needed now. These double-dealers should have been destroyed immediately after Trotsky’s defeat — a barren breed capable only of parroting outdated ideas of long-dead leaders. At least now they were no longer underfoot, no longer pulling in opposite directions and tearing the system apart. “Stop,” Stalin ordered himself. “I must not descend into emotion. That is unacceptable. What matters is drawing conclusions from my own miscalculations.” — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One Context note: An internal monologue of Joseph Stalin during the first days of the German–Soviet War, a later and decisive phase of World War II. The passage reveals the core logic of Stalinist power: paranoia, purges, and the conviction that absolute control — rather than human life — is the true foundation of victory. It exposes how fear, repression, and ideological obsession shaped decision-making at the highest levels of the Soviet state.”

TyrannyHistorical FictionWorld War IiTotalitarianismAbuse Of PowerPower And ControlStalinismStalinPolitical PsychologyUssr History
Book:Камінь. Біографічний роман. Книга перша. Перші кроки до світла та назад: Дитинство та занурення в ГУЛАГ.
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“Peter had only just graduated with honors from the Zaporizhzhia Pedagogical Institute and was supposed to leave for his first teaching job the very next day. Instead, he was arrested. For what sins was a student obsessed with honesty punished — a young man who had risen from the very bottom of society and sincerely believed in the socialist ideal? His parents did not know. Peter himself did not know either. He believed what had happened was a terrible mistake and hoped it would soon be corrected. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book Two Context note: In the Stalinist USSR, arrests often struck young, loyal, and idealistic citizens. Many believed their detention was a bureaucratic error — until the machinery of repression proved otherwise.”

YouthInjusticeComing Of AgeIdealismTotalitarianismStalinismLoss Of InnocencePolitical HistorySoviet HistoryPolitical Repression
Book:Камінь. Біографічний роман. Книга друга. Непрості дороги до пекла: Виживання в умовах насильства.
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“To outsmart you they thought up work squads—but not squads like the ones outside the camps, where everyone is paid his separate wage. Everything was so arranged in the camp that the prisoners egged one another on. It was like this: either you all got a bit extra or you all croaked. You're loafing you bastard—do you think I'm willing to go hungry just because of you? Put your guts into it, slob.”

Soviet UnionStalinismPrisonersGulagPrison CampWork Squad
Book:One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
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“At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something. They imprisoned all those POW's, of course, not for treason to the motherland, because it was absolutely clear even to a fool that only the Vlasov men could be accused of treason. They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve for.”

Soviet UnionTotalitarianismRepressionTreasonImprisonmentStalinismPolitical PrisonersPrisoner Of War19451973
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“Stalin perceived the world in stark black and white. In the same way, he divided people, nations, actions, and ideas into only two absolute categories: “ours” and “theirs.” “Ours” were all those — and everything — that, at the moment of decision, fell under his control or contributed to strengthening it. “Theirs” were everyone else, and everything else. He saw his role as a strategist in constructing a system of power that would force each of the “ours,” individually and collectively, to work at the very limit of human endurance in order to fulfill his strategic design. That design was simple and ruthless: to endlessly increase the number and strength of the “ours” by coercing the “theirs” into becoming “ours,” while simultaneously destroying — or, as a last resort, neutralizing — all who refused to submit. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One Context note: This passage reflects the ideological logic of Stalinist totalitarianism, where power was built on absolute division, forced loyalty, and systematic repression. In the Soviet worldview of the 1930s–1940s, survival depended on belonging to “ours” — or being destroyed as “theirs.”

PowerHistorical FictionDictatorshipSoviet UnionTotalitarianismAuthoritarianismStalinismStalinStalin EraPolitical Repression
Book:Камень. Биографический роман: Часть первая. Первые шаги к свету и обратно
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“If your case, as a politically repressed person, is reviewed by the Special Council, you are almost guaranteed the standard sentence: ten years in labor camps plus three years’ loss of civil rights. The Special Council delivers verdicts in batches, so it simply does not have time to examine each case in detail. But if a judicial panel hears your case—and if I, as the prosecutor, withdraw the charges—you might even be acquitted. For that, however, you would need to submit a request to be sent to the front and, if acquitted, go to war.” “And are you prepared to withdraw the charges?” Peter asked in surprise. “I will be frank with you,” the prosecutor replied, enunciating each word. “As a patriot of my country, I believe that in wartime young, strong, and intelligent men like you should fight the enemy—not rot in the camps. Two of my own sons are at the front fulfilling their duty to the Motherland, and I am ready to help you do the same.” “Thank you,” Peter said firmly. “I, too, am ready to defend my country rather than remain safely in the rear.” Context note: Set during World War II under Stalin’s regime, this scene exposes the legal absurdity of Soviet repression, where “justice” depended less on evidence than on political expediency. Special tribunals could issue sentences in batches, while wartime necessity sometimes transformed prisoners into soldiers—revealing a system in which ideology, survival, and patriotism collided.”

Historical FictionWorld War IiSoviet UnionAbuse Of PowerStalinismPolitical RepressionLabor CampMiscarriage Of JusticeMoral ChoiceShow Trial
Book:Камінь. Біографічний роман. Книга третя. Несправджені сподівання.: Все буде Голодомор.
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