"US worse than the USSR"? American Amnesia of the worst sort

[Hekate]

89. It's a terrible, terrible system. Change it. But the Soviets....

Under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, tens of millions of ordinary individuals were executed or imprisoned in labour camps that were little more than death camps. Perceived political orientation was the key variable in these mass atrocities. But gender played an important role, and in many respects the Purge period of Soviet history can be considered the worst gendercide of the twentieth century. http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html

For Stalin, these dissident viewpoints represented an unacceptable threat. Anyone not unquestioningly loyal to him -- and many hundreds of thousands who were -- had to be "weeded out." The Communist Party would be rebuilt in the image of the "Great Leader." This was the origin of the "cult of personality" that permeated Soviet politics and culture, depicting Stalin as infallible, almost deity-like. (The cult lasted until his death in 1953, and provided George Orwell with the fuel for his satire Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a Stalin-like figure appears as "Big Brother.&quot Stalin's drive for total control, and his pressing need for convict labour to fuel rapid industrialization, next spawned the series of immense internal purges -- beginning in 1935 -- that sent millions of party members and ordinary individuals to their deaths, either through summary executions or in the atrocious conditions of the "Gulag Archipelago."
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But the impetus to "cleanse" the social body rapidly spilled beyond these elite boundaries, and the greatest impact of the Purge was felt in the wider society -- where millions of ordinary Soviet citizens assisted in "unmasking" their compatriots. Frank Smitha describes this mass hysteria well, writing that:
A society that is intense in its struggle for change has a flip side to its idealism: intolerance. People saw enemies everywhere, >snip<In factories and offices, mass meetings were held in which people were urged to be vigilant against sabotage. It was up to common folks to make the distinction between incompetence and intentional wrecking (i.e., sabotage), and any mishap might be blamed on wrecking. Denunciations became common. Neighbors denounced neighbors. Denunciations were a good way of striking against people one did not like, including one's parents, a way of eliminating people blocking one's promotion, and ... a means of proving one's patriotism.
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Much has been written about the absurdly minor infractions for which individuals were sentenced to ten years in labour camps -- standardly a death sentence. "A tailor laying aside his needle stuck it into a newspaper on the wall so it wouldn't get lost and happened to stick it in the eye of a portrait of Kaganovich [a member of the Soviet Politburo]. A customer observed this. Article 58, ten years (terrorism). A saleswoman accepting merchandise from a forwarder noted it down on a sheet of newspaper. There was no other paper. The number of pieces of soap happened to fall on the forehead of Comrade Stalin. Article 58, ten years." (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 293.)

http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html


Again, I recommend Solzhenitsyn.