Tea at Trianon: Gulags Were a Soviet Hell

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Gulags Were a Soviet Hell

From Liberty Nation:

The labor camps are synonymous with the Soviet Union. Following the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin erected the first camp in 1919 to house political dissidents, prosperous peasants (kulaks), petty criminals, and individuals who joked about the communist system. It was not until after Lenin’s death that they became centers for industrial production, mining output, and victims of Stalin’s Great Purge.

Not all camps were the same; some were worse than others. Solovki was considered the grandfather of all Soviet camps, a testing ground for mass prison labor. It was later described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as being “soft” because of what would follow. Bamlag adopted a “no work, no food policy,” Karlag had “never-ending” work, and Vorkutlag was “especially dangerous.” The worst of them all was Sevvostlag, according to Varlam Shalamov, who spent more than ten years there and described:

“To turn a healthy young man into a physical wreck takes 20-30 sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, with permanent hunger, ragged clothing, and nights spent in -60°C frost in a hole-ridden tarpaulin tent.”
By 1960, as many as 18 million people were sent to the gulags. Stalin’s campaign first targeted laborers, Communist Party opponents, military officers, and government officials. The initiative extended to educated citizens such as artists, doctors, scientists, and writers. Eventually, family members of these men, including women and children, were ordered to the camps. Prisoners would be arrested by security police and transferred to the gulags without a trial or right to an attorney. Why? For the accusation of being disloyal to Stalin.

If you were not detained, you would shudder for months waiting to be captured. The wife of an engineer named Aleksandr Petrovich could only sleep calmly following German aggression. “Now I can have a rest at least!” she wrote in a diary.

Each inmate was provided a sentence. The minimum was five to eight years of hard labor, and it was typically the family members of suspects who were given the minimum sentence. The only way prisoners would be granted an early release was if they exceeded quotas, worked hard, and perhaps had some influence among the guards. Historians estimate that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were released from the gulag every year between 1934 and 1953. (Read more.)