Adolph tooling around Paris. Now Joe is gone. What is this world coming to?
Posted on 03/19/2003 9:49:10 AM PST by paulklenk
Spectacularly wrong. A joke. Stalin killed off the only Politburo he didn't own outright. They were among the first victims of what was misnamed the "Yezhov Terror." It should have been the "Stalin Terror."
"I like old Joe. Joe is a decent fellow, but he is a prisoner of the Politburo." -- US President Harry Truman.[Shaking head]
Adolph tooling around Paris. Now Joe is gone. What is this world coming to?
That's my favorite line in this pile of crap.
Stalin took and kept the power in his country through a mixture of character, guile and good luck."Look at me! I am full of character, guile, and good luck and the NY Times loves me!"
This NYT obit makes vague reference to something it calls only "the purges." It's Stalin's terror. Arrests, interrogations, farcical trials, imprisonments, slave labor, and executions on a scale we cannot easily imagine.
It wasn't many. Of the 1996 delegates to the Bolsheviks' 1934 "Congress of Victors" 1108 dies during the terror. Prior to WWII Stalin purged: 3 of the 5 marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, 8 of 9 fleet admirals and admirals grade 1, 50 of 57 corps commanders, 154 of 186 divisional commanders, all 16 army political commissars, 25 of 28 corps commissars, 58 of 64 divisional commissars, all 11 vice commissars of defense, and 98 of the 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviet. (Gosh, I wonder why the Wehrmacht walked all over them?)
I have a couple of FReepers to thank for recommending to me a truly bloodcurdling treatment of "Uncle" Joe - Martin Amis's Koba the Dread - Laughter and the 20 Million. The number refers to the number of people killed by good ol' Joe during the collectivization campaigns and the Terror. I quote its opening lines:
Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest's "The Harvest of Sorrow...": "We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book." That sentence represents 3040 lives. The book is 411 pages long.
I do not think I shall be celebrating anything about Stalin, thanks - my only regret about his passing is that it was from natural causes.
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