Posted on 03/01/2020 8:43:09 AM PST by Kaslin
In 1929 in an edict that seemed both impossibly savage and self-destructive, Stalin announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” The people he called kulaks were the relatively wealthy peasants in the countryside.
For much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, they were the most important single economic sector of the Russian empire. They were also the cultural center. They preserved Russian traditions and honored religious faith. They grew more than enough food to feed the nation. The excess they produced created more wealth in international trade and hard currency for Russia than any other group.
That is why it seems, at first thought, that it was counter to his own interests when Stalin enlisted 25,000 urban factory workers to go and dispossess the agrarian peasants. He trained them, gave them revolvers and ordered them to drive the kulak families off their land, outright murder many of them, send more of them off to prison camps, and enslave the rest. The resulting famine killed tens of millions of kulaks and others in the most painful and pitiless way.
The atrocity of the de-kulakization -- the heartless butchery and wanton waste of life, the inhumane genocide of a culture, the destruction of the productive economic heart of Russia -- seems a brutal insanity unless you understand the real motivation behind it. As Stephen Kotkin has revealed in his biography of the man, Stalin was tough and cold, but he was not a madman. He did what he did, as Kotkin, proves, not out of murderous insanity but, even more chillingly, simply because he was a communist.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
THX for posting this.
My Grandfather was a Kulak. Went thorough the revolution as a teenager and talked about it quite a bit.
He, his brother and his parents had a small farm outside of Kiev.
The Bolsheviks (whose, according to my Gramps, slogan was “For the People” (Sound familiar??)) came on the property and basically took all their food and livestock.
I don’t know how his parents got the boys to America but I do know one of my Gramps’ first job was being an American soldier in WW1.
Vodka!
Go on You Tube land watch “The Red Menace.” It is an Anti-commie film made in 1948 and see if you don’t see the same things that are occurring today with the left. I found it truly fascinating some of the dialogue and how they demand total obedience. McCarthy was Right!
Unfortunately I have no sound so I can’t listen to it, I don’t know how to fix it.
Es tut mir leid, aber ich verstehe nicht russisch und kann es auch nicht lesen,
Vodka!
And there is much to thank them for that!
Here is a list of well-known Russian words and their original meanings and later connotations, if any. Below that you’ll find another set, that one consisting of words known to few, if any, speakers of English who are not bilingual in Russian or familiar with Russian culture. The latter list is ripe for exploitation in English. (Try referring, for example, to an elite cohort as the nomenklatura or to a petty bureaucrat as a namestnik.)
Either list can be mined for analogous meanings. Some require no annotation, while others should be introduced carefully in context or even glossed; which approach to take depends on the content and its audience.
1. Agitprop: artistic political propaganda, from a truncated form of the Russian forms of the words agitation and propaganda
2. Apparatchik: a Communist Party member and/or functionary, from the Russian form of the word apparatus
3. Babushka: in Russian, “old woman”; in English, a type of scarf commonly worn by babushkas
4. Beluga: a type of whale or sturgeon
5. Bolshevik: a revolutionary or radical, from name of the majority Communist faction in Tsarist Russia, ultimately from the Russian word for “majority”
6. Commissar: an official
7. Cossack: a Russian ethnic group associated in popular culture with military prowess and a nomadic society; the name, like the ethnic appellation Kazakh, derives from the Turkish word for “nomad”
8. Dacha: a country house
9. Duma: a legislative body
10. Glasnost: a policy of political openness and transparency, from the Russian word for “publicity”
11. Gulag: originally an acronym for a Soviet-era system of forced-labor camps; it now can refer to any repressive or coercive environment or situation
12. Intelligentsia: the intellectual elite of a society, from the English word intelligent
13. Kopeck: a Russian coin
14. Mammoth: a prehistoric mammal, and, by extension, a synonym for massive
15. Menshevik: the name of the minority Communist faction in Tsarist Russia, originally in power briefly after the Russian Revolution but defeated by the Bolsheviks
16. Perestroika: the Soviet-era system of reform, from the Russian word for “restructuring”
17. Pogrom: originally, violent persecution of Jews in Russia; now, any officially sanctioned attack on a particular group
18. Politburo: the Soviet-era primary source of government policy decisions, a truncation of the Russian forms of the words political and bureau
19. Ruble: the basic unit of Russian currency
20. Sable: a mammal related to the weasel whose sleek black coat was long prized as a clothing material, and, by extension, a synonym for black
21. Samizdat: prohibited literature produced clandestinely
22. Samovar: an urn for heating tea
23. Sputnik: a traveling companion; also, the name given to a series of Soviet-era satellites, the first objects launched into space
24. Taiga: the far northern coniferous forests of both Asia and North America, from a Turkish or Mongolian word
25. Troika: a carriage or sleigh pulled by three horses, or a triumvirate (a ruling or administrative trio)
26. Druzhina: a unit of bodyguards and elite troops
27. Glavlit: the Soviet-era government censorship agency
28. Izba: a log house
29. Knout: a whip used in punishment
30. Konyushy: an official responsible for horses used in ceremonies
31. Kulak: a well-off farmer
32. Lishenets: a disenfranchised group
33. Matryoshka: a set of Russian nesting dolls
34. Muzhik: a peasant
35. Namestnik: an administrator (from the Russian word for “deputy”)
36. Narkompros: a Soviet-era agency responsible for education and culture, later called the Ministry of Enlightening
37. Nomenklatura: the Soviet elite, holding prestigious government and industrial posts (from the Latin term nomenclature, “list of names”)
38. Okhrana: the Tsarist secret police
39: Oprichnik: Ivan the Terrible’s brutal bodyguards and henchmen
40. Prikaz: originally, a bureaucratic position; later, an administrative directive
41. Propiska: a Tsarist regulation requiring subjects to remain in their hometown
42. Rasputitsa: spring and fall periods in which, because of heavy snow or rain, unpaved roads are impassable (possibly related to the name of Rasputin)
43. Sambo: a form of martial arts
44. Silovik: the elite
45. Spetsnaz: special-forces soldiers
46. Tamizdat: prohibited literature produced outside the country
47. Tovarishch: a companion or fellow traveler; used as a direct form of address in the Soviet Union, equivalent to comrade
48. Ukase: a decree; refers specifically to a government proclamation or generically to an arbitrary command
49. Ushanka: a fur cap with ear flaps
50. Zek: an inmate
FR is the epicenter of the movement to preserve the kulaks in the U.S...
Excellent!
Ha ha! Had to use a translator app. That was my weird way to troll for other Freepers who speak Russian.... It didn't work. :)
Kaslin, that was a lot of work!
What an eye-opener. I didn’t realize I knew so much Russian. My favorite is VODKA.
Thanks a lot.
I doubt Sambo will ever make it into the lexicon. It’s too niggardly.
Radio is an American word that is the same in Russian. Most of our inventions keep the same name except in France where they deliberately find some French substitute.
The Parisian Commune was in 1793; a lot of the ideas from the French Revolution found their way into Marx’s work. The idea of butchering nobles/wealthy people, attacking the Church, and eliminating class distinctions emerged in the French Revolution. The bishops on chessboards were replaced with jesters as part of the elimination of Catholicism from French society.
When communists tried to take over Spain in 1936, a lot of the same ideas took hold; they killed thousands of priests (including a dozen bishops), tried to eliminate class distinction (even trying to eliminate the formal Spanish by replacing it with the informal/familiar), and reduced the whole population to peasant subsistence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune
Notes on the Paris Commune post Franco-Prussian war, which I’m sure you know of.
Thanks; my point was that the communism had earlier roots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune_(French_Revolution)
Very informative and thanks. I knew of the murderous brutality of the reign of terror and was even reading about the drownings at Nantes during the French Revolution a couple of days ago.
Mass murder is embedded in the genetic code of communism.
You’re welcome; thank you for your link as well.
It was sad that some of the French officers who helped secure our independence then went back and faced that - after helping us in our war against a monarchy.
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