Sharp encounters between Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky and other Bolshevik leaders took place when Trotsky tried to take Warsaw in 1920 and the majority of the committee antagonized his policy, we learn from a letter written by a Bolshevik adherents in Russia, who is ‘presumably‘ high up in the Soviet hierarchy and a partisan of Trotsky.
An American woman recalled the difficulties she encountered while trying to set up a household in Soviet Russia.
A carefully compiled assortment of quotes that were voiced by Stalin and Hitler (or their assorted Yes-Men). These utterances were printed with Stalin’s poisonous pronouncements in red and Hitler’s sickening soliloquies in black – both shades refer to similar topics and show an identical manner of thought that is indistinguishable from the other.
Hitler used the Bolshevik lingo more often than you might have thought…
Sweet, sweet words from British socialist George Lansbury (1859 – 1940) concerning his first encounter with the Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin:
He is about 50 years old, of medium height and carries himself with a slight stoop. He has fine eyes, which look you straight in the face, sometimes with a whimsical expression, as if he were trying to discover if anything unexpressed lay behind your words. They have, too, an expression of careful kindness; and you put him down as a man who musty love children.
No liberty of the press exists in Russia and so none but a poet recognized by the Government can get his verses published… In justice to Russian letters it must be said that all talented Russian authors have abstained from writing, or at any rate, from publishing their works during the rule of the proletariat, so that only the official poets, the literati hired by the Government, have their say.
The only Soviet-approved poet they single out for derision is Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 – 1930), who is quoted liberally.
The standard of living in Russia has never been very high, but even despite his natural stoicism, the average citizen feels he has a good reason to be disgruntled with his life… Like any other totalitarian state, the Soviet state has done its best to paint a larger than life-size picture of its citizens. It likes to describe them as steel-hard heroes with an inflexible will, living for nothing but the great ideal of a Communist future, laughing at difficulties, gaily grasping with hard ship – a continent of Douglas Fairbankses. This is just a bit too good to be true, and the last one to be taken in by it is the average Russian.
Unquestionably, the most famous individual to defect from the USSR and seek refuge in the West was Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926 – 2011), the only daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin (she used her mother’s maiden name). She was the one closest to the aging dictator during his closing days – and her defection to the United States aroused a tremendous amount of interest throughout the world. In this interview she claimed that her defection to the West was primarily inspired by her yearning to write freely. Dutiful daughter that she was, Alliluyeva stated that the guilt for the crimes attributed to her father should be equally shared by those who served in the Politburo at the time.
– from Amazon:
Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
The first Soviet famine lasted from 1919 through 1923; some historians have placed the death toll as high as five million:
[Lenin] is held responsible for the policy which has brought about a consumption of so great a proportion of the seed wheat that the fields cannot be sown. For the first time since Bolsheviki gained power, says the Berlin Lokalanzeiger, Lenin is a cipher.
Click here to read about the blackmail and extortion tactics that American Communists used in Hollywood during the Great Depression…
A short list of the assorted difficulties that faced the Russians in the early Fifties, with two additional news paragraphs that told of additional setbacks on both sides of the iron curtain.
Three years into the Soviet experiment, the ruling Bolsheviks were finding it difficult to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the proletarian masses they so deeply loved (but refused to feed).
Additional magazine and newspaper articles about the Cold War may be read on this page.
Here is an expose that revealed the hypocrisy of Stalin and the Soviet party members – who spoke of the inherit nobility of the laboring classes and the triumph of the worker’s paradise while they lived like the czars of old:
The children of the country’s rulers already regard themselves as the hereditary aristocracy… The absence of a free press and consequently, of public criticism, allows them to retain this psychology even beyond their adolescence.
Of the 17 defendants in the Russian ‘circus trial’, four were still alive in Moscow last week. Thirteen others, convicted of having acted on the instigation of exile Leon Trotsky to sabotage Soviet railways, mines and factories, were taken to a cellar of Moscow’s Lubianka Prison, where they were yanked into cells to have have their brains blown out by pointblank pistol shots.
Another article about the show trials can be read here…
Congratulations were in order in Soviet Russia last week. The occasion was the 20th anniversary of the famed N.K.V.D., secret police, and celebration of that organization’s success in ‘rooting out the enemies of the people’
On the afternoon of August 20, 1940, in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacán, Leon Trotsky (b. 1878) was murdered by Ramón Mercader (1914 – 1978). Mercader (alias Jacques Mornard) was a Spanish Communist and a Moscow-trained agent of Joseph Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD.
The attached article pertains to Mercader’s 20-year incarceration at the Mexican Lecumberri Penitentiary, where he was constrained in semi-luxurious accommodations, complete with a telephone, silk pajamas, a book collection, newspapers and weekly conjugal visits – courtesy of the Worker’s Paradise.
Click here to read a 1938 interview with Leon Trotsky.
More articles about the Winter War can be read here… – from Amazon: KEY WORDS: stalin demanded port of hango,port
When the attached article hit the newsstands in May of 1952 Joseph Stalin had less than a year to live and like most totalitarians living on borrowed time, the heavily guarded diminutive dictator had his public appearances drastically reduced in number:
Today he lives in isolation unrivaled by any monarch since the Pharaohs. He must have forgotten what he himself once told the historian Emil Ludwig: ‘Any man on a high pinnacle is lost the instant he loses touch with the masses.’
The article has a fair amount of Stalin minutia you might find interesting.
Although the true horrors of Stalin’s Russia would not be known until his death in 1953 (and then again with the opening of the Soviet Archives in 1990), bits and pieces were coming to the light as thousands of refugees and defectors swarmed the government offices of the Western Powers in search of asylum following the end of the Second World War. These small report from 1949 and 1947 let it be known how long the Soviet labor camps (Gulags) had been operational (since 1918), who was in them, how many different types of camps existed (there were three different varieties). As to the question concerning how many inmates were interred, there was no decisive count, somewhere between 14,000,000 to 20,000,000.
Since they came into being, the Soviet [forced labor] camps have swallowed more people, have exacted more victims, than all other camps – Hitler’s and others- together, and this lethal engine continues to operate full-blast…
Some were called Lishentsi, some were called land lords, Romanov lackies, the rich, the elite or simply the middle class; no matter what the ruling Soviets labeled their preferred bogeymen, they wanted them out of the way. The attached article goes into some detail as to how this was done.
