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Report of comrade Smirnov, instructor in the Cheka, from Sysran in the Tambov province, March 22, 1919:I checked the Kulak's uprising in the Novo-Matrionskaïa volost. Instruction has been led in a chaotic way. 75 persons were interrogated under torture and it's impossible to understand anything from the transcribed testimonials (...) 5 people were shot on February 16, 13 the day after. The report of the sentence and the executions is dated February 28th. When I asked the local Cheka officer he answered: "We never have the time to write reports. What's the point anyway, since we're exterminating the Kulaks and bourgeois as a class?Mission report of comrade Rosenthal, inspector at the Special Department Direction, from Astrakhan, October 16, 1919:
(...) as for the events of March, it is impossible to get the slightest idea of who was shot and why (...) Almost all the Chekists consume heavy doses of cocaine. It helps them, as they say, to better stand the daily sight of blood.From Omsk, February 1922, an inspector writes:
(Peasants) who didn't fulfill their quota of delivery fully are tied up, forced to run up the village's central street, naked, and locked in unheated warehouses. Many women were beaten until they pass out; they were placed naked in holes dug in the snow...Report of the political police, Pskov province, October 1922:
In the Riazan and Tver province, fulfilling 100% of the quotas would condemn the peasantry to die from starvation.These four examples are but a few drops in an ocean of blood. At that time, the martyr of the Russian people, victim of the Socialist attention, was just beginning and the worst was still to come.
In the Novo-Nikolaïevsk province, famine is menacing and the peasants are saving grass and roots for their own sustenance.
Information from the province of Kiev tells us about a swell of suicides never seen before: peasants commit mass suicides because they can't pay the taxes nor get their confiscated weapons back.
Yet Adam Nicolson, when he's not writing nonsense about the terrorists facing their responsibilities at Guantanamo, follows a long tradition of Leftist Western intellectuals spitting at the face of the multitude slaughtered by Socialism, by writing nonsense on contemporaneous Russia.
Despite the record of violence of the super Communist state against its own people - not mentioning its record of violence and terrorism against the rest of the world - Adam the Useful yet frustrated Idiot's opinion is that Russia's greatest tragedy is coming now under the form of what he calls "the worst side of America's gift to the world", that horrendous "materialism" which, for the horrified and outraged Adam, takes shape in the palace being renovated for Vladimir Putin at Strelna.
Adam doesn't dig the deco you know.
And that's Russia's tragedy, and America's fault.
This pathetic and irrelevant marmalade of marshmallow nostalgia about whatever past "unique spirit and sensibility" belonging to the Russian construction works, and on which Adam the Phony Lachrymose pour out his feelings, as a cheap way to blame America for something else and for something more is nothing but an insult to the reader's intelligence.
I understand it's an "opinion" column, but could it be that standards are falling that low over there at the Telegraph?
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674 - Nightfly
Nightfly