[The following takes place in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.]
Justice became a sick joke as people were forced through torture to confess crimes against the state that they didn’t commit. Hordes of unfortunates were summarily tired and executed, or sent away to gulags to die of disease and starvation. The engineer of one of the greatest holocausts in history oversaw it all with cold efficiency. He spent long hours poring over endless lists of those to be condemned and approving their death sentences, after which he often relaxed by watching a movie.
All the problems of the state, which Stalin’s disastrous policies wrought, were blamed on “wreckers” and counterrevolutionaries. “The remnants of the dying classes,” he declared in 1933,
…they have all wormed their way into our factories, our institutions and trading bodies, our railway and river transport enterprises, and for the most part into our collective and state farms. They have wormed their way in and hidden themselves there, disguised as “workers” and “peasants,” and some of them have even managed to worm their way into the party. What have they brought with them? Of course, they have brought their hatred of the Soviet regime, their feelings of ferocious hostility to the new forms of the economy, way of life, culture… The only thing left for them to do is to play dirty tricks and do harm to the workers and collective farmers. And they do this any way they can, on the quiet. They set fire to warehouses and break machinery. They organize sabotage. They organize wrecking in the collective and state farms, and some of them, including a number of professors, go so far in their wrecking activities as to inject the livestock in collective and state farms with plague and anthrax, and encourage the spread of meningitis among horses, and so on.
The Russian populace was so thoroughly indoctrinated by the official lies and slander that they clamored for the blood of the “traitors.” And they were sated. “Stalin felt he had achieved much,” wrote Volkogonov “in removing the truth from the people, he had turned them into a crowd for which he would take responsibility himself. Among all his other crimes, this was perhaps his worst.”
Source:
Farquhar, Michael. “The Deadliest Lies Ever Told.” A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes and Frauds. Penguin, 2005. 185-86. Print.
Further Reading:
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili
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