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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten

CHAPTER 5Communism and Nazism:Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten

347. General Zhukov' s decree to the soldiers upon their conquering Berlin in 1945: "You, the Soviet soldier, take revenge! Behave so that the assault made by our armies be remembered not only by today's Germans, but their grandchildren. Keep in mind that everything owned by those inhuman Germans now belongs to you. You, the Soviet soldier, do not have any compassion and mercy!" (NIN, March 3, 1985).

438. (The losses of the USSR in the "purges" before World War II and during the war). A.I. Solzhenitsyn, referring to the estimation of Prof. Kulgakov, claims that the people of the USSR lost 66 million in the years of terror and 44 million in the war. It is believed that these numbers are exaggerated, but even those moderate estimations are not less shocking. The Soviet demographer M. Maksudov carried out analyses and concluded that in the period between 1932 and 1949, a total of 43 million people died from various causes, out of which on the battlefield and from the consequences of the war about 20 million soldiers and civilians died, which corresponds to the official data. The difference of 23 million refers to those killed in the years of Stalinist repression and starvation before the war. According to Maksudov' s estimations, during Stalin's rule, one in two men and one in four women did not die naturally, that is, did not live as long as they could have (according to Roy Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, excerpts in Duga magazine, Belgrade, April 16, 1985).

453. (Bolshevism vs. Nazism). In 1940, the Soviet Academy of Science, in the review published by its astronomical section, states that the theory on the existence of some sort of relativistic social peace is "enemy fiction of the agents of world imperialism and abominable propaganda promoted by a dying ideology." It is indicative that both official Nazi and Bolshevik propaganda shared negative views on Einstein's relativity theory. Dr. Walter Gross, the state advisor for the "aryanization of science" in Hitler's Germany, stated in 1940 that Einstein's theories are the "product of the frenzy of polluted liberalism and democratic idiocy, absolutely unacceptable to German scientists."

459. In the article by Roy Medvedev published in the Roman magazine La Repubblica (May 1985), entitled The Faults and Merits of Comrade Stalin, there is the following statement: "In 1943, Stalin legalized the Orthodox Church and re-established the Archbishopric, by which he succeeded to use not only all the Soviet forces but also all the force of Russian patriotism. But, at the same time, he gravely affected the Muslim population of the Crimean, Caucasus and the Volga River basin, who had been forcefully deported to Siberia and into the Caucasus. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost during this horrible evacuation."

517. "The labor camps in the USSR enjoy a great reputation as institutions for the re-education of thousands of people"-American journalist Ana Louise Strong in 1973. My comment: to these words, the millions of victims of these camps are turning in their graves.

576. "...and the fathers of the families, instead of letting them go back home for dinner, were sent to the areas where climate suits the white bear, not people."

592. Socialist realism (Soc-realism) in literature and the agricultural collectives in the economy go hand in hand.

593. "Purges" disregard people, they deal with "human material," and "human material" has neither personality nor soul.

Alija Izetbegović - Notes From Prison, 1983-1988 of 18


627. Trying to appease the ruling Stalinist regime in Hungary, Gyorgy Lukacs in his presentation before the Hungarian Academy of Science, held in June 1951, stated that Stalin's works in linguistics (published in 1959) have historical significance and criticizes his own colleagues who are trying to sell certain politically unacceptable views. This, Lukacs' criticism of his own colleagues, was a mere denouncement. In his paper, he supported the most vulgar form of theory of reflection, reducing art and literature solely to socio-economic relations.

629. In his book The Sentenced Group of Six, Mensur Seferovic tells the story of six communists who were sentenced to death by the Communist Party in 1942 because they had refused to carry out the decision made by the Party to execute several renowned citizens of the town of Bihac. The sentence was later turned under one condition: within a new, delayed, deadline, the six men had to carry out the order. The decision had later been suspended and the sentenced men rehabilitated (Oslobodjenje, September 1, 1985).

637. "Lenin is more alive than all the living" or "Lenin is more human than all humans"-such and similar slogans could be read all over the USSR. Later, it would be Stalin, then Krushchev, then Brezhnev.

641. In the book Heavy Wings by the Chinese writer Zhang Li (translated in the West), life in the Peoples' Republic of China is described in grim colors:corruption, intrigue, broken human relations, women being subordinated. All the heroes of the book are dissatisfied with their lives. All the positive characters of the novel are apolitical. The writer herself spent three years in an educational reformatory institution during the so-called Cultural Revolution. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Zhang Li describes the condition in that institution: "I was awfully skinny and, despite of that, I had to carry out the hardest work that only men could do" (the Zagreb magazine Danas, August28, 1985).

642. Janez Stanic, in his book The White Stains of Socialism (published by Globus, Zagreb, 1985), describes what is usually considered as the deformations of socialism in Russia and China. Some drastic examples include the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR carried out in the 1930s, known also as the "liquidation of the kulaks as the class," the actual physical extermination which took over 6 million lives (deportation and death in Siberia), events that many historians, even those Soviet, Mikhail Geller and Alexander Nekhritch, consider to be one of the greatest genocides in the twentieth century. Soviet agriculture never recovered: The country with the greatest area of fertile soil in the world is now incapable of feeding her own population and has become one of the biggest importers of food. The second example is the so-called "Great Leap Forward" in China at the end of the 1950s, when tens of millions of people were evicted from their villages to build factories, railroads, dams, and the like (in the official propaganda, it was called "the release of the creative energies of the masses"). One of the actions of the "Great Leap Forward" was known as the "Campaign for Steel." In rural communities, this campaign resulted in the construction of around two million small, primitive steelworks in which, at the peak of the campaign (195 8-59), over 60 million people were employed. During this time, China produced around 11 million tons of steel, of which the real steelworks produced 80 percent; the primitive ones not more than 20 percent. In addition, there was an enormous disproportion in labor; in the larger steel-works, approximately one million people worked, producing about 9 million tons of steel, while about 60 million workers produced the remaining 2.2 million -tons. These data were published later within the process of the "correction of errors." The key problem and harm were done because these people stopped cultivating their land (Danas, Zagreb, August 28, 1985).

645. In his book Punished Nations, the Soviet writer Alexander Nekhritch investigates and describes Stalin's genocide of the small nations in the USSR.



Soviet General Grigorenko was thus removed, pronounced insane and put into a psychiatric clinic because he advocated the rehabilitation of Attars from the Crimean and the permission for them to return to their island.

654. In his Tales of Kolyma (about Stalin's camps), Varlam Shalamov gave a description of the life and death of Siberian camp inmates. These stories are almost impossible to retell. Most of them are improbable, said Predrag Matvejevic. "Shalamov' s stories hold a very odd measurement: the manual for the endurance of material, applied on men" (Sinyavski). In most of the cases, culture in those camps soon disappears, faster than one could have thought. In the Gulags, there are no heroes. "I was a mere corpse and lived in accordance with the psychology of a beast," says Shalamov (p. 251). "Among other things, Shalamov offered the answer to the questions such as: how could this have been possible? An unpunished requital where millions of people succeeded because those people were innocent" (Predrag Matvejevic, NIN, August 11, 1985).

718. What else could I expect from judges (prosecutors, investigators), who have based their knowledge of law on the Marxist premise that "law is the will of the ruling class transformed into statutes," a formula that is a cynical contradiction to the very idea of law.

719. The classical principle: It is better to leave a hundred guilty men unpunished than to sentence one innocent person. Lenin confronted to the opposite principle: "It is not so important to punish a crime severely, but not to leave a single crime unpunished," cites Boris Elesov, Deputy Minister of the Interior of the USSR, in a 1985 interview with the magazine Panorama. According to the same source, 10 percent of crimes remain undiscovered in the USSR, that is, go unpunished. As far as I know, in the United States the situation is quite opposite. It is a different story to establish the price of this "efficiency" and the number of those who have been sentenced in this way.

746. "Given that among 9 million Bulgarians, ethnic minorities make up 12.5 percent of the population". . . "the integration of minorities" started as early as 1956. Since that time, as many as 1,299 mosques and other religious and national symbols have been destroyed. At the tenth Bulgarian Communist Party Congress, in 1971, the creation of a "single socialist nation" was proclaimed and, another curiosity, citizenship and ethnicity were merged. What followed was the action of changing Muslim names to Bulgarian, all under the aegis of socialism, communism and patriotism. Those who opposed were told: "Those who do not wish to continue living in their native villages and wish to move, competent authorities will provide the possibility to move within three to four hours." These words were uttered by Stanko Todorov, Politburo member and the speaker of the National Assembly of Peoples' Republics of Bulgaria, at the beginning of 1985 (published in Slovensko Delo, March 12, 1985).

748. The basic premise of Leszek Kolakowski is that the historical role of Marxism has been completed. The project of the revolutionary change of the world has proved a failure.

749. In the mass expulsion of people, the method as well as the scope varied (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, "the boat people," etc.). Romania, however, set a precedent in this respect. In the spring of 1985, Romania passed an administrative decision pronouncing a large group of citizens (roughly a thousand people) personae non grata and deported them. They simply loaded them on planes and sent them off to West Berlin and Stockholm. Authorities in these two cities did not know what to do, as the deported people arrived without passports and it was impossible to establish their identity (from the Belgrade weekly Interview, November 22, 1985).

813. The oppression of minorities is a sort of "natural state" that can be constrained by culture and civilization. We have found that in our century typical ethnic oppression is-perhaps paradoxically-carried out in the countries of the



"peoples' democracy"-Bulgaria, Albania, Romania and the USSR. Hundreds of thousands of Turks, Macedonians, Serbs, Roma and Kurds in Bulgaria have ceased to exist overnight by way of state decree. They became Bulgarians, with new Bulgarian names. In Albania, at the same time, roughly 120,000 Macedonians, Montenegrins and Serbs were reduced to no more than 3,000 Macedonians living in nine villages. At the same time there were growing tensions between Hungary and Romania over the destiny of two million ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania, the group the Romanians are trying to assimilate (Danas, December 17, 1985). The slightest inquiry from their homeland about their destiny is understood as "interference with internal affairs" of the country in question. The tendency to assimilate seems to be "natural." How could this occur, as a delayed phenomenon, in the countries of this type, where one would not expect "ethnic criteria" to be predominant? The reason lies in the fact that this natural "instinct to assimilate"-actually to subordinate and suppress-has no hindrance in the legislation. On the contrary, even the disrespect for human and all other rights, a trait inherent to these political systems and ruling ideology, opens the gates wide to the savage nationalism of the majority that meets no resistance whatsoever. In this type of country, this disrespect for the rights of the citizens -goes even a step further: The very laws of the country are being disregarded. What rules is the pretext of voluntarism that originates directly from the well-known formula proposed by Marx (and Engels) on legislation as the expression of will of the ruling class.

863. In 1939, Europe was faced with the most difficult dilemma in her history: to choose between "Evil with Hope"-Stalinism-and "Evil without Hope"-Hitlerism. That is how it looked, but only virtually. Both were evil and both were hopeless.

891. Soviet artists, members of registered associations, were obliged, as stated in one of the statutes, to "present life in light of socialist ideals" (one of the postulates of socialist realism). Emotions and experiences that were not related to work and socialist development, from the socialist viewpoint, were neither of any merit nor interesting enough to become the subject of art.

892. There are many reasons to believe that, in the case of the "Cultural Revolution" in China, the expulsion of people was, thanks to the endless wealth of Chinese traditions and their immense imagination, "enriched" by new, unprecedented forms of terror. The Cultural Revolution was very un-cultural; it was the greatest barbarism of this century, not only because of its violence, but also for its massive repression. It is estimated that, one way or another, over 100 million people suffered from its cruelty.

893. When it comes to the banning of books, the fact that there are indexes of banned books is not the greatest problem. It is even worse when there is no such list, so that all books, except for those officially approved, are either suspicious or banned, that is, when instead of an index of banned books there is only the index of those approved. It is destructiveness at its maximum. Such a situation was created by the Chinese Communists between 1966 and 1976.960. During the "Cultural Revolution" there was the establishment of "Committees for the Surveillance of Bourgeois Monsters." These monsters were primarily writers and artists.

989. In his speech at the twentieth Congress, Krushchev cited that, out of 139 members and candidates for the Central Committee, selected at the seventeenth Party Congress, 98 had been arrested and executed. Stalin was the author of the notion "enemy of the people," which served as the excuse for the cruelest violence and executions without charges lodged or trial.

1029. Viewed historically, the credit for introducing the institute of the criminal act of enemy propaganda, i.e., the ban on the freedom of speech, belongs to the first socialist state in the world-the USSR. In the proposal for modifications of the Criminal Code of the USSR, in May 1922, Lenin claims that enemy propaganda is



one of the six new criminal acts carrying the death sentence. Along with this proposal, Lenin offered this explanation: "The idea is clear, I hope: we need to grant the most extensive possible formulation because it will be the revolutionary consciousness that will eventually determine the appropriate implementation of this provision in practice" (in a letter to the Judiciary Commissar, Dimitri Kursky, in the Belgrade daily Politika, Svijet, March18, 1986).

1031. (Nationalism in socialism)-After the October Revolution, the Cyrillic alphabet spread even to the nations who had had their own alphabet and had been literate, such as the Kyrgyz, Uzbeks and Kazakhs. The explanations offered were that it was ancient literacy "built on foreign linguistic grounds." This mainly forceful approach made Cyrillic the basic alphabet of some very ancient nations, far beyond the borders of the republics inhabited by the Slav population. Even in present-day Mongolia, Cyrillic is used.

1044. In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoyevsky showed-or at least wanted to do so-that the emerging Soviet man, embodied in the Karamazovs (all very different: Alyosha, Dimitri, Ivan and Fyodor), is equally capable of great deeds as well as evil, equally ready to create both the Kingdom of God and the Empire of Satan on this earth. The latter happened.

1081. The suffering that mankind has gone through could be understood as God' s punishment for man's attempt to create heaven on earth without God and against Him. Such a project reached a planetary scope in the twentieth century, and consequently the punishment had a planetary character. The attempt ended up with the creation of the greatest inferno in human history.

1099. In the twentieth century, so proud of its name and its achievements, we have become introduced to a literature known as "camp literature" that emerged from the horrible circumstances of Stalin's and Hitler's concentration camps. Readers have different feelings about this literature; most of them would rather not read it at all, closing their eyes and shutting their ears to it, in order not to "know," if they had the right to ignore it. Faced with the description of human suffering, we could agree with the writer who said that "the extreme insight into the fact that people, even at the lowest level of humiliation, discover the indestructibility of their humanity, therefore, as a supernatural fact" (Jovica Aéin, Delo, Belgrade, No. 4-5/1986, p. 9).

1108. "You know, once one has spent years in camps, one needs nothing, and everything becomes a pleasure to him," wrote Margaret Buber-Neumann, the German writer, who spent two years in a Soviet concentration camp in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, and then, after Stalin handed her over to Hitler (she was Jewish), she spent an additional five years in a Nazi camp.

1162. Varlam Shalamov, the Russian writer who wrote tales from the concentration camps ("Tales from Kolyma"), was born in 1907 and died in 1982, having spent almost 25 years in the camps-from 1929 to 1934 and from 1937 to 1957. This martyr-writer writes that a horse loses strength much faster than man and that there is no horse (except for those from Yakutsk) that could endure what people endured in Stalin's Siberian camps. Following this thought, Shalamov even claims that man is the animal who can endure most, physically, and that this is the reason (neither his mind nor his soul) why man distanced himself from the animal world and became human in the first place. Perhaps it was the hope that kept man in the hardest of conditions, continues Shalamov, because animals know nothing about hope, whereas man, thanks also to a certain measure of foolishness, continues to hope-and survives.

1169. (On political rulings). It often happens that the public considers those charged with a political offense guilty for "selfish" reasons. This is a kind of defense mechanism. People refuse to accept the fact that they live in a world



(society) in which man is protected by law and order. Then, for them, the question arises, how could they keep silent? That is why they have to believe that those sentenced are guilty, at least have breached the law, and that otherwise they would not have been sentenced and imprisoned. If a man is sentenced even if he is innocent and sentenced unlawfully, then the one who- is thinking about it is no longer secure; such is the option people instinctively-in self-defense- tend to reject. This conclusion is easier to impose upon oneself-and to accept- the more severe is the sentence in question. In the absence of evidence the severe sentence itself becomes the proof of the existence of guilt. This is how ordinary people reason-if someone were not guilty, he would have been sentenced to two or three, not to 15 years of prison. It is exactly this viewpoint that those who have decreed the sentence have counted on (naturally, it is not the court but the committee). If guilt is not clear and obvious, then a mild sentence becomes suspect and shows that the authorities lack self-confidence. With a strict sentence, such doubt is out of the question. Thus an innocent man is punished twice. This is an old trick, also used by the Nazis, who applied it not in the duration of the sentence but in the cruelty of its execution in their concentration camps. (They would not treat him so cruelly if he was not a traitor, would they-this is how this idea was approached by the ordinary German.)

1171. German concentration camps were extremely inhuman, though rational, based on a sort of demonic science. Torture and humiliation of camp inmates was rational in the sense that it was calculated so that in the shortest time possible a man's personality and will for resistance was broken. The same method was applied by the Gestapo and in the arrests, that is, in the selection of those to be transported to the camps. They were mainly the groups and community leaders for whom there were grounds for suspicion that they could become opponents of the system. If that would not suffice, the circle of those arrested expanded. In a relatively short period of time and with relatively few casualties, Hitler succeeded in suppressing resistance and channeled the people of Germany towards the aim he had defined. For the Soviet concentration camps, as for the method, one can say that they were equally cruel and inhuman, but, unlike the Nazi camps, they were not rational. It was cruelty for cruelty's sake, torture with no purpose whatsoever, and arrests without any grounds and logic. Still, German camps remain a grave accusation against the perception of civilized man and show that without ethics the acceptable humane and human matrix could not be created. "Once the inmate," wrote Bruno Bettelheim, a Nazi camp inmate himself, "reached his final stage of adapting to camp conditions, his personality would have changed and he would start accepting the SS values as his own." One of the "rationalities" of the German concentration camps was their attitude toward those inmates incapable of labor and the ill. The Gestapo considered it useful to liquidate them as soon as possible, so they were either murdered or else everything was done to see them die as fast as possible. This "rational selection" buried all the weak inmates as early as the first days of their detention. Bettelheim calls those camps "Gestapo laboratories for the subordination of free people," where "laboratory" is a rational, even scientific, but not always human and humane term.

1173. In the Soviet concentration camps, people often caused injury to themselves in order to, at least temporarily, gain admission to the hospital and thus escape the insufferable living and working conditions of the camps. But, once those cases became too frequent, the camp authorities discovered what was happening and only those injuries that could be proven were accepted. All other cases were defined as "premeditated self-inflicted injuries" and as such they qualified as sabotage that led to an additional ten years of prison. Gustav Herling Grudjinski wrote about this in his article Resurrection (Delo, Ljubljana, 4-5/1986).

1174. With their concentration camps and their monstrous atrocities, both Nazism and Stalinism remain a grave accusation against western civilization. Whatever we might think, these monstrous methods and the people who applied them were one of the possibilities of this civilization, a possibility that, alas, had materialized.



1360. In Lenin's famous definition, "dictatorship of the proletariat is a boundless authority and power relying on violence. . ." and so on ("Sotchinenia"), one can sense the praise of violence, not as the means, even less as an urgent necessity, but as the principle or an aim that is self-sufficient. This ode to violence does not make us angry, it shocks.

1946. Vladimir Bartoshewski, a Polish writer (who suffered detention in Auschwitz, between 1940 and 1945 and was then, between 1946 and 1953, a prisoner in Poland, only to be imprisoned again, from 1985 to 1986, as activist of Solidarity), wrote: "He who saves one life, saved the whole of mankind." Compare this with the Qur'an: "He who kills one man, is as if he killed the whole world" (Qur'an, 5/35). Bartoshevski was awarded the German Publisher's Peace Award in 1986.

2004. Stalin claimed that social democrats were the greatest threat to the communists and banned any electoral collaboration between the communists and social democrats. Thus the Germans, voting in Prussia against the social democrats, helped Hitler's rise to power.

2048. In ancient Rome there was the law known as Damnation Memorial, which ordered the deletion of the names of criminals and traitors from all the history books. Following this law, the names of two emperors were also erased:Caligula's and Nero's. A similar practice, only in a more radical form, can be found in the USSR: the practice of re-tailoring and re-forging history. But the most obvious aspect of this re-tailoring, literally, using scissors, is the reshaping of photographs. In the beginning this photo-editing was aimed only at presenting the leadership and their results in development in a better light, namely, to create a sort of propaganda in the form of pictorial hagiography. From the 1930s onward, its purpose was to erase the unwanted. People who had been eliminated from political life disappeared from the photos (most often it meant physical liquidation as well). In 1986, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, there was an exhibition of photographs that falsify history. Included in the exhibition were a great number of those retouched Soviet photos. The exhibition proved that this had always been done, but this massive, systematic and brutal form of it had only been a practice of the socialist countries of the twentieth century. Most of the photos originated from the USSR, China, Cuba and Albania (Start, Zagreb, November 14, 1986).

2136. H.G. Wells, in one of his books (written in the 1920s), caused Churchill not to trust his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks being beasts with blood on their hands, and the like. Wells writes that Churchill feared that the Bolsheviks would bring about a new era where common sense would prevail, along with scientific achievements, and that "there would no longer be room for the men of Churchill's breed."

2149. Each ideological state (even an Islamic one) indoctrinates, to a greater or lesser extent, its subjects, imposing its own system of beliefs and opinions, but indoctrination in socialist countries today is essentially different from the communist type. This current indoctrination has no defined system of values. From its subjects it demands the daily acceptance and confirmation of the new "truths" tailored to meet the needs of the authorities. Needs of the present may be opposed to those of the past. The Soviet propagandists told one story about Hitler and Nazism before the signing of the Soviet-German pact in 1939, and one completely different after. The whole nation was expected to turn some of their beliefs 180 degrees after the signing of the pact. Then, in 1941, at the beginning of World War II, the Soviet agitators offered a completely new, third, "truth" about the Germans, and again the nation had to believe it. Again and again, the story continued.

2155. A fact that acquired an almost global significance is that the socialist movement did not find room in itself for a humanistic culture, which was almost always in conflict with writers. It would be wrong to assume that this was the case



only in the socialist East. In the West, particularly between the two world wars, we can find the same phenomenon. And it was by no means by accident!

2232. Socialist realism is one side of the world; the flip side is the Gulag. An idealized image of the world is compensation for the naturalistic reality. Oppression desperately needs the lies; it generates lies just as freedom generates humor. In this analysis, one can start from the other end and find that totalitarianism cannot stand humor (remember Kundera' s Joke).

2237. Soviet writer and poet Bulat Okudzhava' s mother spent nineteen years in a Soviet concentration camp.

2240. In Leningrad, in one of the city's oldest churches, there is now the "Museum of Atheism" (NIN, January 4, 1987).

2262. We were taught at school that man has entered history, that he has become a "historic being" once he learned how to write. But he became what he is, that is, man, once he learned how to speak, to express his thoughts. Then some people emerged and forbade man to speak, invented the notorious "verbal crime," the crime of words, and sent man back to the dark pit he had emerged from.

2267. The Soviet biologist Lysenko once stated: "We, in the Soviet Union, are not giving birth to men, we are producing organisms and then we make them cooks, doctors, mechanists, roads maintenance workers, engineers, etc." ("Interview," January 16, 1987). Believe it or not, he said this with pride.

2291. Socialism is forced optimism.

2306. In 1925, in the USSR, a society called "The Association of Militant Atheists" was established. From 1922 to 1941 they issued the paper Godless, and from 1925, a magazine with the same name. At the same time, the papers Atheist and Militant Atheist were also published. Within the Academy of Social Science (attached to the Communist Party Central Committee), a special institute for scientific atheism was formed in 1964; in a USSR Communist Party program dated 1961, it was written that the Party would use all the available means of ideological action to make people "remedy their religious prejudices" ("The Dream of Atheists and the Awakening of Believers," Borba, January 31, 1987).

2310. Some statistics on the USSR: In 1920, three-quarters of the population were illiterate, 82 percent of population living in rural areas. Shortly after World War II, there were 20 million more women than men; now they outnumber men by ten million. Men live shorter lives. The reasons: vodka, accidents, difficult life. One-third of the population in big cities lives outside wedlock. This is known in the USSR as the "phenomenon of the lonely." From a divorce rate of 2.3 per 100 marriages 50 years ago, in 1986 divorce had moved to 34 per 100. This is the average for the whole of the USSR. In the European part of the USSR the ratio is even worse, as divorce is still quite rare in Central Asia. The most frequent cause for divorce is the husband's alcoholism. The second is the heavy burden on women (they are employed and also work in the home). In the USSR there are 135 million people employed and 58 million retired; 6 million engineers, of which only 2 million of them have an adequate workplace. Secondary school is compulsory for all. Out of the 135 million employed, 34 million have a university (or other relevant) degree. There are fewer and fewer children. The measures put in place in order to boost the birthrate did not produce the desired results (from the presentation of Igor Bestuzhev Lade, Soviet sociologist, NIN, February 1, 1987).

2449. Bolshevisation has become the denomination for the comprehensive and total control of all paths of life.



2451. At a session of the Association of Moscow Writers, the decision was made to exclude Boris Pasternak from the Association of Writers of the USSR and condemn his literature. From the records of this session (held on October 31, 1958), one can read shocking statements made by mainly anonymous writers against a colleague who was in every sense much above them. S. Smirnov who demanded individual members to vote chaired the session. "I fully agree that the novel Dr. Zhivago is trash and I think that this internal emigrant, B. Pasternak, should be expelled from the USSR," said Smirnov; he proposed to submit the request to the Soviet government to evict Pasternak from the USSR. L. Oshanin, I. Zelenin, V. Pertsov, A. Bezymensky, A. Sofronov ("He should be sent from our country"), S. Antonov, B. Sluatsi, G. Nikolayev ("The story of Pasternak is the story of treason"), V. Soloukhin ("That book is the Cold War weapon against Communism"), S. Baruzdin ("Our people have not known Pasternak as a writer, but they will remember him as a traitor"), B. Polevoy and many others spoke along the same lines. Twenty-nine years later, at the beginning of 1987, in the same hall where these actions happened, Pasternak was to be rehabilitated. This time, again following the orders, albeit different, of the authorities, writers sang odes to Pasternak. Has what they really meant ever been spoken?

2455. Ana Akhmatova's Requiem has been finally published. The comment from the daily Politika (March, 13, 1987): "Ana Akhmatova's poem has, for a long time, been the clandestine, illegal hymn of all who suffered Stalin's terror. The Soviet literary establishment which, in 1984, accepted Ana Akhmatova back in the Pantheon of 20th century Soviet writers, has just approved the publication of her poem Requiem, the illegal hymn of those who had fallen as victims of Stalin's terror in the 1930s. The poem has been published in its entirety in the March issue of literary review October." Prior to that, Soviet readership had the chance to get to know only parts of the poem. Requiem is dedicated to the poetess's son, who was killed in Stalin's camp. One part of the poem reads:

For seventeen months I have been calling youasking you to come home, beggingOh, my son, my terror crawledbefore the executioner's feetEverything is forever messed upso much, so that I no longer know who is the man and who the beast norhow much time is left to the execution.

Ana Akhmatova, who had been praised, in the decade before the Bolshevik Revolution, as one of the leading Russian poets, died in 1966. Her husband was executed in 1921.

2456. Some things are known about the casualties of the communist system in the USSR and China. According to estimations in the West (in the East, of course, if there are any, such information is not publicized) in the Stalinist purge of 1936-1938, eight to ten million people died. For the duration of Stalin's rule, from 1924 and 1953, the death toll rose to about 15 million people. When an Italian journalist noted in 1980 that Stalin had, in these purges, killed more people than the "Cultural Revolution" did in China (1966-1976), the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping responded, "I am not sure about it, I am not sure at all." Hu Yaobang, recently deposed secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, disclosed for the first time in 1980, to Yugoslav newspaper correspondents, the fact, unknown until then, that the "Cultural Revolution" took a toll of three million victims. Together with members of their families, their relatives, friends and acquaintances, who were persecuted because of them or along with them, the estimates are that about one hundred million people suffered this police and political action (Danas, March 17, 1987).

2843. After the conflict between the Yugoslav Communist Party and Informburo (IB) in 1948, forced migrations of Yugoslav ethnic minorities occurred in Bulgaria,



Hungary and Romania. Jaksa Petric, Yugoslav representative to the United Nations, informed the UN about the inhuman dislocation into the cold regions of Baragan, actually a desert, of the Serb minority in Romania, carried out with extreme cruelty, resulting in the deaths of many in the severest imaginable conditions (Danas, June 16, 1987). In Romania, the communists were in power in those days, under absolute control of the USSR.

2846. It is interesting that the Nazis and Stalinists have equally opposed jazz. They called it the "cannibalistic music."

2888. When we think about culture and man (about "cultural and civilized man"), we should not, we cannot, it is not permitted, to avoid one question:How could it be that the rage, the madness, the frenzy, the shamelessness and inhumanity that have been "given" to this world by two totalitarian regimes - Nazism and Stalinism - happen in this century of culture and civilization? The answer to this question should make us question once again all of our notions and ideas that we usually link to the notions of culture and civilization.

2889. We cannot pull down the Berlin Wall, but we can hate it and despise its builders. One day, our condemnation will pull down this shameful symbol of barbarism in the twentieth century.

2890. What could one think about the country where scientific disputes end up in Siberia?2891. Gumilyov, a Russian poet, husband of poetess Ana Akhmatova, was executed in Petrograd, after the October Revolution. He was rehabilitated after the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR.2901. Mao Tse-tung has openly proclaimed tenor to be the law of the communist system and claimed that the Cultural Revolution needs to be repeated every 20 years in order to prevent the aging and sclerosis of a society (Danas, July 14, 1987).

2126. The journalist Alexander Vasinsky wrote in Izvestia about the phenomenon of "homo duplex," thinking one thing and speaking another, imposed on a great number of intellectuals in the USSR. Vasinsky calls it "thinking awry." Princeton University's Professor Robert Tucker, one of the greatest U.S. experts on the USSR, said in one interview: "The origin of this phenomenon is in Stalin's tyranny, in the tenor of the thirties. If one has not learned to be silent, to behave in public in accordance with the prescribed scenario, one's disappearance was very probable" (NIN, July 19, 1997).

2130. The German critic of culture, Max Nordan (1849-1923), wrote a book entitled Perversity, where he interpreted the emergence of European Moderna in psychopathological terms. It is interesting that the Nazis and the Marxists had equally accepted his concept of "perverted art."It is evident from the polemics led in Russia, by the beginning of the century, with symbolists. Nordan's notions of "healthy" and "sick" (perverted) art were to be found later in the articles by which the orthodox Stalinists fought against the opponents of social realism. In an article against Verlain, Gorky expressly refened to Nordan.

2132. One of the fruits of social realism in Russia is the "production novel." The first such stillborn was delivered to this world by Gladkov. His novel had the appropriate title: Cement.

2138. Communists confronted the principle of "revolutionary justification" (opportunism) to the rule of law and legality, which became an alibi for endless lawlessness and arbitrariness, because what is revolutionary justified at some point, was decided upon by the leaders (most often, one man) in power. As it is known, at a certain point they have concluded that it is justified to destroy the independent judiciary, organize staged trials, introduce censorship, decimate the intelligentsia, occupy other peoples' countries, force millions into exodus, and the



like. All this thanks to the theory of revolutionary justification instead of the rule of law.

2163. In 1937, two grand exhibitions were opened in Munich: first, the "GreatExhibition of German Art" (actually the Nazikunst), and a day later, the exhibition of the "perverted art" (Nordan' s term). The latter presented 730 pieces (paintings, sculptures, prints) by 112 artists. The European Moderna was presented here as a psychopathological phenomenon.

2206. Very few people know that Hitler's Minister for Propaganda, Goebbels, wrote praise to Lenin (in his Lenin oder Hitler?) and that he recommended Nazi film directors to study the Battleship Potemkin, while the Soviet writer Vassily Grossman (in his novel Life and Destiny) deals with the shocking revelation that Leninism and Nazism resemble each other like twins. In the novel that is a variation of this theme, the SS officer Lis speaks about a captured Russian officer and an old Bolshevik Muscovite: "Believe me, the one who finds us terrifying is equally terrified by you."

3075. Immediately after the war, Borislav Pekic (the author of the Golden Fleece and other world-renowned novels) was sentenced to 15 years in prison because of his membership in a youth organization of a social-democrat orientation. He served five years and described them in the novel with the characteristic title, The Years Swallowed by Locusts.

3119. "Pressurized by this environment," (referring to the situation and condition of the Partisan units in Herzegovina in 1942, my note), in the Partisan HQs and among the party leadership, a belief had been generated that behind the Chetniks there was the Kulak Fifth Column, whose physical extermination was the primary task of the Partisans, according to correspondence between the Operational HQ of the Kalinovik Sector within the Supreme Command HQ of the Peoples' Liberation Movement during April 1942, as well as reports sent to the Supreme Command HQ by the Operational HQ for Herzegovina. On the assault on the stronghold of Borac, the commander of OHQ for the Kalinovik Sector wrote in his report: "Upon the evacuation of Borac, the houses fell one by one. . . . I think that we need to cleanse all the volunteer units, disarm the necessary number of them and execute some. In the zone of operation of this HQ this is already being done. . . . After the fall of Planina and Bjelimici, we intend to destroy the Fifth Column in Trnovo, then Zagorje.. . because this is the fortress of Kulaks and Greens.. . . It would be good if you could send some of your political activists to this area in order to explain to the people this operation of cleansing the Kulaks." Informed of this campaign, the Operational HQ of the Kalinovik Sector of the Supreme Command of the PLM issued, two days later, the following instruction to commander Rade Hamovic: "All those who have sabotaged the struggle in Borac must be liquidated. This is your personal responsibility. . . . Also, you must cleanse the entire Fifth Column in the area. Therefore, you must act most energetically." The commander of the Kalinovik Sector responded urgently to the Supreme Command: "We shall ruthlessly kill all those of the Fifth Column, and the village of Gradina shall be burnt down. . . The stamina that has taken our comrades from Herzegovina has also taken us, because one can go nowhere unless we uproot not only the Fifth Column but also those who shall belong to them in the next 20 years." (All quotations from the book The Muslim Autonomous Movement and the 13th SS Division, by Enver Redzic).

3137. Some took the myth on the development of a new society on the "ruins of the old one" literally, and they never stopped destroying. This destruction most frequently turned into the destruction of tradition and the ruthless eradication of cultural values.

3142. Andrei Sinyavski, a Russian émigré-writer, former camp detainee, now living in Paris, says that one of his wardens had said, in a moment of earnestness: "All writers, from the greatest to the smallest-Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky,



each and every one of them, without exception, I would put into a lunatic asylum; they disturb the normal course of life."

3143. In the USSR, for the writer who was accused of something, there was a special legal status prescribed: "particularly dangerous state criminal." This was the qualification for Andrei Sinyavski and a number of other writers who had been put into camps.

3161. The official name for the Soviet institution in charge of censoring literature and printed material in general is: the Committee for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press (Danas, November 10, 1987).

3197. The description of the trial to Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize laureate for Literature in 1987: "We have just witnessed a fantastic play in which nothing was preserved by the form. Yes, the trial observed all the rules: on the podium, in their high chairs and engraved wooden USSR coats-of-arms, seated, there were the legally appointed peoples' judge as well as the two judges selected by social organizations, lawfully nominated peoples' jurors. Everything followed the prescribed order: the questioning of the defendant, statements of the witnesses of the prosecution and those of the defense, the public prosecutor's and defense lawyer's address, the judges' deliberations in the special room, the solemn pronouncement of their ruling 'in the name of the Russian Federal Socialist Republic,' even the audience's applause after the ruling and the guards taking the indicted from the courtroom. One fraud after another" (from the documentary chronicle Notes of Non-Conspirators by Efim G. Etkind (London, 1977).

3286. The Communist Party of Italy has more members in the less developed (semirural) South than in the industrial, that is, workers', North, which is an anomaly in Marxist terms.

3290. "It is estimated that in the USSR there are about 18 million employed in administration. At least two-thirds are redundant. However, behind those 12 million redundant clerks, there are at least 10 million dependent on them-their children, parents, relatives, close friends. They all receive some of the benefits and privileges-special storehouses for supplies, special hospitals and outpatient clinics, villas, chauffeurs, etc. They are the fiercest opponents to any change" (from an interview with Abuladze, director of Redemption (NIN, Belgrade, January 31, 1988).

3301. When the famous anti-Stalinist movie Redemption, directed by Tenghis Abuladze, was shown in Tbilisi, Georgia, a poli was conducted; audience members were full of praise, but there were exceptions still. Who were they? In an interview, Abuladze responds to this question: "There were exactly 27 of them, mainly jurists and judges, aged between 60 and 70. Weren't they the bullies and torturers my film dealt with?" wonders Abuladze. There is violence and injustice in every society. The specific trait of communist oppression was its lawlessness nicely packed in legislation and form. It is this hypocrisy that generates total confusion. Some people live and die in such systems, never learning the distinction between the truth and a lie. Putting their naïve confidence in the press, authorities, and official statements, they live in constant delusion, involuntarily and unconsciously supporting the lies and injustice. It is from these people that you often hear, flabbergasted, the naïve explanation: "It was in the newspapers." Stalinism and this uninformed and unenlightened crowd go hand in hand and make each other possible.

3305. Once he had carried out, at Stalin' s order, scores of atrocious tasks in the purges at the end of the 1930s (the last being the execution of the entire leadership of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth Organization), the chief of the secret police, NKVD, Yezhov was accused of treason himself and executed (I think it was in April 1940). On the liquidation of the Komsomol leaders, see Politika, February 15, 1988.



3313. It is not about the simple, say, feudal, early capitalist or medieval poweriessness of ordinary people. This time it is the case of the deliberate, premeditated, organized lack of powerlessness. In our time of mass literacy, mass media and mass communications, this powerlessness can only be deliberate and organized.

3317. Ethnic minorities in the states of the so-called real socialism (The Soviet Zone): At the International Conference on Human Rights held in Venice (at the beginning of February 1988), the Germans accused Poland of the persecution of Germans in Poland after World War II, referring to the "disappearance" of Poles in the USSR, the Turks demanded the condemnation of Bulgaria for eradicating the Turkish minority there by the simple change of their names into Bulgarian, while the Hungarians strongly criticized Romania for the discrimination against Hungarians in Transylvania, the Italians were objecting to the low status of the Italian minority in Yugoslavia, and so on and so forth. In a word, ethnic minorities were persecuted in the "a-national" communist systems of Poland, Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. Instructive!

3324. In the countries of the so-called real-socialism (the USSR and its satellites), there is a party personnel monopoly realized through the system of the so-called nomenclature. The nomenclature is actually the list of most influential positions in politics, economy, culture, and so on one is appointed to and dismissed from solely with the permission of the Party Committee. The nomenclature is actually made of two lists: the list of posts available exclusively with the approval of the party body in charge and the list of individuals who could be elected for those posts. Both lists circulate only internally (see Vladimir Goati in his study Position of the Party in Socialist Countries' Political Systems). The nomenclature implies privileges structured according to the caste system; for the Politburo there are no limits in privileges; below that stratum, there are various benefits (high salaries, dachas, special train compartments, special schools for their children, access to exclusive medical institutions, special storehouses for their supplies, etc.). Privileges are distributed according to rank, decreasing in quality, choice and scope from top to bottom (NIN, February 21, 1988). In the book Social Inequalities in Yugoslavia, Eva Berkovic described the system of similar privileges in our country (salaries, villas, apartments, cars, cheap holiday resorts, et alia) that spread from the federal to the republic level. "Each public, even strictly internal party, debate on the privileges was hindered as anti-socialist and anti-state," wrote Berkovic. The fact that the existence of the nomenclature denies any meaning to the elections and turns them into mere farce for naïve people does not deserve further explanation.

3362. Since Gorbachev's rise to power, a lot of unknown facts of the Stalinist era have been unveiled. It was confirmed, among other things, that Beria's men used to kidnap young, pretty women in the street, put them into the car and take them to their boss. These women would disappear forever afterwards! (Danas, Zagreb, March 15, 1988).

3372. What characterizes Stalinist oppression, distinguishing it from other, similar forms, is its massiveness. Stalin was not very choosy. In his persecutions, it was not just intellectuals, writers, politicians, generals, businessmen, managers, or Jews who suffered and lost their lives. The suffering encompassed scores of ordinary people, particularly peasants. Millions of them died from starvation and inhuman conditions in the mass transportation and the inhuman working conditions in the camps. The special chapter in this mass tragedy was the mass suffering of women. There are scores of testimonies (the books of Solzhenitzyn, Shalamov, J.S. Ginsburg, etc.) on the suffering of women who were humiliated and tortured more than men. The suffering of women in the Stalinist camps is the greatest and the most massively organized tragedy of women in human history.



3412. Soviet historian Yuri Borishov, a specialist of the period of Stalin's cult of personality, quotes the letter, dated 1937, in which the then Minister of the Interior, Yezhov, requested Stalin's approval for the liquidation of a large group of people. Stalin and Molotov signed the letter, with a "yes" added to the signatures. The letter was published in the magazine Komsomolskaya Pravda on April 2, 1988, and reads:

Comrade Stalin, I am addressing you with the request to approve the fourlists of people who are the subjects of the Military Staff Tribunal's ruling:

1. List No. 1 (general)2. List No. 2 (former army personnel)3. List No. 3 (former NKVD personnel)4. List No. 4 (wives of peoples' enemies)

Please, give your approval to have them all sentenced based on the first category.Signed: Yezhov

The first category, explains Borishov, meant execution. Stalin, according to Borishov, considered all the lists, and each was marked with a "yes," together with the signatures of Stalin and Molotov (Oslobodjenje, April 3, 1988, p. 5).

3429. Upon his return from exile in Gorky in 1987 (or 1986), Andrei Sakharov sent a letter to Gorbachev containing, among other things, the following lines: "I am appealing upon you to help the release of all the prisoners of conscience, who are either detained or exiled, upon being sentenced on the basis of Articles 109/1, 70 and 142 of the Criminal Code of the USSR and respective articles of the codes of other republics, as well as the prisoners of conscience held, on ideological and political grounds, in the special psychiatric clinics" (NJN, April 10, 1988, p. 35).

3433. The book The Anatomy of the Ethics of a Stalinist, by Jevrem Brkovic-the war biography of Milovan Dilas ("the ocean of tragic, mad acts and murders which Milovan Dilas committed whenever there was nobody to prevent him"-Joza Vlahovic). -

3438. In the USSR, the printing and import of the Bible were banned until as late as 1988. That year, for the first time, on the occasion of 1000 years of Christianity in Russia, the import of 150,000 copies of the Bible donated by Scandinavian Biblical societies was permitted. Until then, the Bible was treated as a banned commodity, its printing was punished just like any other smuggling, by the seizure of goods and a fine, even a prison sentence (Politika, April 13, 1988, article from the Viennese magazine Die Presse).

3445. Alexander Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship primarily because of the book entitled The Gulag Archipelago, after it had been published in Paris, in 1974. A tragic event preceded the publication of the book: A former camp inmate and the writer's friend received a copy of the manuscript of Gulag from the author and failed to give it back to him, considering it her duty to keep it in case the author's original somehow disappeared. But it was her copy that was seized, and she hanged herself after being interrogated by the police. It was only upon this tragedy that Solzhenitsyn, who was otherwise reluctant, decided to publish the book.

3489. Terror in the USSR did not commence with Stalin but with Lenin. Solzhenitsyn considers the latter the author of the Gulags. He claims that the pretext for the creation of those camps was the failed assassination of Lenin, upon which the Bolshevik leader personally signed decrees on ruthless and mass terror. Lenin explained the establishment of the camps by the "need to cleanse the Russian soil of all detrimental insects." The terms "cleansing" and "purges" thus entered into use, and the culprits were not human beings but insects. The statistics testify that as early as the end of 1920, in the Russian republic alone, there were 84 camps with over 50,000 detainees. Since then, both the number of camps as well as that of detainees was in a constant increase. According to



Solzhenitsyn' s testimony, over 55 million people disappeared during the rule of the Bolsheviks. Other sources speculate with considerably lower numbers, but none goes below 15 million.

3492. From Alexander Solzhenitsyn' s book The Gulag Archipelago: "There must have been a special, clandestine reason behind the arrests of ordinary party activists, the reason that has never been explicitly stated in the minutes on the rulings: to arrest primarily those who had become party members before 1924." This rule was particularly consistently applied jn Leningrad, where the opposition "platform" was signed (i.e., Zinoviev and Kamenev, author's note). Solzhenitsyn adds: "And this was the situation, this is an illustration of those years. The party conference in one region of the Moscow district. Chaired by the new regional committee secretary, whose predecessor wa~ already behind bars. At the end of the conference, a message is read with an expression of loyalty to comrade Stalin. Naturally, they all rise (just like they all rise whenever, during the whole conference, his name is mentioned). Applause thunders in the small room rising to ovations. Three minutes, four minutes, five minutes. However, palms start to hurt. Hands get paralyzed. Middle aged men become exhausted, even those who sincerely believe that Stalin is God Almighty start feeling that all this is insufferably stupid. But-who dares to stop first? The secretary of the committee could do it first, he who had read the message and is still standing on the podium. No, he is a new one, he has replaced the one who is in jail, he is also frightened. Because, in this small room there are NKVD agents applauding, and they carefully watch for who would be the first to stop. A thundering applause for their leader in this small, isolated room in this godforsaken town, roars for five minutes, seven minutes, eight minutes! They are done! This is the end of them all! Only a heart attack can save them now! In the farthest corner of the room one can cheat a bit, one can take a slower rhythm, less energetically, less frenzied. What could those on the podium do, those who can be seen by everybody? The manager of the local paper factory, the man strong and independent, standing on the podium and applauding, although he is more than aware that the situation is as artificial as it is hopeless. He has been applauding for nine minutes! The tenth minute: he looks desperately at the secretary but he does not dare to stop. This is madness! This is collective madness! The regional leaders start exchanging glances with poor hope, still with the expression of sheer happiness on their faces, and continue applauding until they collapse, until they get dragged away on stretchers. Those who remain will remain with their faces frozen. . . .

The eleventh minute-and the manager of the paper factory again assumes a serious look and sits down. And-the miracle! What happened with the inexpressible and irresistible excitement? Suddenly they all stop applauding and sit down. They are saved! Finally, salvation! But this is exactly the way to discover those with independent minds. This is how they can be eradicated. The manager of the factory was arrested that very night. No problem getting him ten years in jail, for something else, something that has nothing to do with this" (Danas, May 17, 1988).

3513. Joseph Brodsky, Russian poet, 1987 Nobel Prize winner, on the USSR:"It is quite an awful country, but that horror is what makes it interesting, as Russia is a vivid and simple example of what a man is capable of doing to another man. In this century, she has shown a phenomenal degree of the negative potentials in a human being.. . . Russia was a lecture on what man is capable of. An enormous number of human beings have been destroyed there, millions were exterminated-however, in order to exterminate millions one needs the millions who would conduct the exterminations. According to the final calculation, the closing balance sheet, Russia is, in a sense, comprised of executioners and victims. That is, more or less, how roles are cast there" (Talking to Jerzy Ilga, for the Polish review Puls, partly issued in the Belgrade literary magazine Knjizevne novine, May 15th, 1998).



3551. "The abstract working class is actually a fantastic mask for totalitarian dictatorship. It is actually on her behalf that the so-called 'workers' state' acts, even though it is everything but 'workers'.' Bakunin anticipated this as early as 1879, when in a polemic with Marx, he claimed that it would not be the workers ruling, but the former workers ruling over the real workers and that the rule would be much more cruel than the capitalist one" (Prof. Drazen Kalodjera, Start magazine, June 11, 1988).

3576. "While the French intellectual reacted to social phenomena led solely by his or her own free choice, his or her own conscience as the only judge, the history of the East-European intellectual is a long, painful history of bans, compromise, censorship and self-censorship, slander, jail and post-mortem rehabilitation" (from Danilo Kish' s foreword for the book In Praise of the intellectual by Bernard-Henry Levy, Belgrade, 1988).

3580. The bureaucratic group is the most numerous and the most powerful status of Soviet society, amounting to about eighteen million men and women.

3581. The Soviet painter Ilya Glazunov, in an interview, states how 80 percent of Old Moscow was destroyed in order to construct the communist settlements, "the machines for accommodation," as Le Corbusier called them (Danas, June 18, 1988).

3582. Pierre Beaudeux published a book in France, in 1988, about the wealthiest men in the world. In this book, the result of 2.5 years of work involving thirty-something experts, the Romanian boss Nicolae Ceaucescu was also mentioned. The book claims that he possessed a personal wealth worth $33 billion and that he ran his country as if he were the manager of an enterprise with twenty-two employees, while he was showing all the external signs of his enormous wealth (palaces, aircraft, yachts, etc.) (Danas, June 28, 1988).

3584. On September 12th, 1971, Nikita Khrushchev died. He was buried as ordinary citizen at the Novodyevicthansko cemetery in Moscow. The media reported that "Nikita Khrushchev died, as a retired citizen." In 1984 his wife Nina, a party activist for years, died. On that occasion, in the daily Vecernja Moskva, the obituary was published announcing Nina Petrovna-Kuhartchuk. The surname Khrushchev was omitted. This detail itself is insignificant for the deceased woman but is terrifying as a symptom. We had only 16 years of the twentieth century left.

3632. (On various forms of utopia) There is literary utopia such as More's and Campanela's and the real utopias of Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung and Pol Pot. There are also the so-called positive and negative utopias, Huxley's and Orwell's. I feel that I could write a book on the thesis that there is no substantial difference between these phenomena called utopia, be they literary or real ones, positive or negative. The negation of the individual (personality) in literary utopia turns into practical destruction, eradication of man in Stalin's and Pol Pot's utopia-states. And the so-called positive utopia is no less inhuman than the negative one. Neither acknowledges either God or Man. Utopia is nothing but an attempt to create "heaven on earth," without God and against Him. The result is known. Although we knew it, we could not prove it by the mid twentieth century. Now, at the end of our century, everything is very clear. What occurred is a historic experiment. Unfortunately, the price of the experiment was over a hundred million human and family tragedies.

Today is August 8, 1988. I am 63. I have been in jail for five and a half years. Less than half remains-three and a half years. Out there, there is a storm raging and I can only watch it. That is still more than nothing. The scene is extremely exciting.

3640. Mohammed Assad, in the book, "Journey to Mecca", tells the story of his first and lasting impression of the USSR. It happened at the Mary railway station in Turkmenistan in 1926. On a wall a giant, nicely designed poster depicting a young



worker in blue outfit pushing a ridiculous old man with a white beard from the cloudy sky with his foot. Below, in Russian, the caption read: This is how the workers of the Soviet Union threw God out from his sky! The USSR Association of the Godless.

3673. Ivan Kriznar, president of the Commission for the History of the Sbvenian Communist Party Central Committee, in an interview for the daily Borba about the Dachau Processes, states that a group from the leadership of the Interior Ministry of Slovenia, applying Stalinist methods, in 1942 executed the suspects they found in the liberated territory of Dolenjska Valley. This group was trained at the Dzerzhinski Police Academy in Moscow and made the core of the Slovenian OZNA (political police). The group later took part in the staging of the Dachau Processes (Danas, August 30, 1988).

3675. An interesting case sheds light on the logic and reasoning of communist rule. In Poland, for example, during the latest wave of strikes in 1988, workers were constantly criticized for posing not only economic but also political demands (the authorities refer to the workers' demand to legalize Solidarity).

Look at this criticism. Why wouldn't the workers have the right to pose political demands? When did they lose that right and who was the one who took it from them? But, bureaucratic authorities shamelessly consider that workers and other citizens have no such rights and even succeeded, repeating the point time and again, in convincing most of them that this absurdity is logical. That is how it happens that citizens, when seeking their rights to be observed or lodging complaints, claim that their demands have nothing to do (God forbid!) with politics. Political rights are forever the monopoly of communist bureaucracy.

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