Experimental Blog # 229

Quotations from and comments about "The Future is History" - How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen

"I spent my thirties and forties documenting the death of a Russian democracy that had really never come to be. Different people were telling different stories about this: many insisted that Russia had merely taken a step back after taking two steps toward democracy; some laid the blame on Vladimir Putin and the KGB; others on a supposed Russian love of the iron fist, and still others on an inconsiderate, imperious West."

"Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. < > The leaders of many of the Soviet Union's constituent republics were becoming lax in monitoring and containing nationalist forces..."

"The cliche' of the era was "floodgates." Everyone in every field was claiming that the floodgates had opened."
"For over a generation before Gorbachev came to power, Politburo membership had generally been a lifetime appointment.  <> Gorbachev started reshuffling the Central Commottee's membership several times a year ..."
"One after another, the Eastern European states allowed protests < > In Romania, where the Party would not budge, a rebellious army seized and executed the Communist dictator and his wife. But the revolutions elsewhere were described by both local and Western press as "velvet.""

"Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself, and had no native language to describe and define what had happened."

"..Yeltsin might have appeared to be tackling the pillars of the totalitarian system, its machines of ideology and terror. < > By the end of 1991, Yeltsin had a country to run. But even with the former institutions of the Soviet state under his control, he faced a dire deficit of instruments of governance, and of people to use them."

"When Mikhail Gorbachev, as Party leader, looked at some of the secret archives for the first time in the 1980s, he felt shock, disgust, and disbelief - not only because of what had been done but because it had been done by his own Party and in its name."

"On January 2, 1992, the government lifted price controls on consumer goods, with the exception of bread, milk, and alcohol. < > Within a month, prices had gone up 352 percent..."

"Yeltsin no longer had the strength, or the popular support, to continue fighting the Communist Party. < > With resentment the dominant emotion in the land, Yeltsin could afford no public confrontation with the past."

The author's sources, as well as the author herself, perhaps, seem to become more removed from government actions during the leadership of Vladimir Putin. She writes about a "Nation Divided" and the assassination of Boris Nemtsov on February 27, 2015, who was the father of one of her sources, besides being a very important politician, who became a leader of anti-government demonstrations.

"So this was how it worked. The famous got a bullet in the heart and the less famous got poison in their tea."

Experimental Blog # 228

Quotations from "Red Famine" - Stalin's War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum

"The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state."

"On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had "no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry," as a recent biographer has written."

"In just a few short months during the winter of 1929-30 the Soviet state carried out a second revolution in the countryside, for many more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself. All across the USSR, local leaders, successful farmers, priests and village elders were deposed, expropriated, arrested or deported. Entire village populations were forced to give up their land, their livestock, and sometimes their homes in order to join collective farms. Churches were destroyed, icons smashed and bells broken."

"The Ukrainian famine reached its height in the spring of 1933. < > "Excess deaths" continued throughout the rest of 1933 and 1934". < > agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, < > and 0.6 million lost births < > These figures include all victims, wherever they died - by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages - and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards."

"In his momentous "secret speech" in 1956, Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, attacked the "cult of personality" that had surrounded the Soviet dictator and denounced Stalin for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people < > But Khrushchev, who had taken over the Ukrainian  Communist Party in 1939, kept silent about both the famine and collectivization."

"Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934 < > were not caused by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people's homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbors died of hunger."  

The author, Anne Applebaum, "lives in Poland with her husband, < > a Polish politician, and their two children" This is from the book jacket.