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no cabeçalho, pintura de Paul Béliveau
“Comrades, relax!” he explains. “The house is on fire!”
Between 1825 and 1905, the tsars executed 191 people for political reasons—not for mere “suspicion” as under the Soviets but for actual assassinations, including that of Tsar Alexander II.
(...) Some figures speak for themselves. The volume’s scholars estimate twenty million deaths in the USSR, sixty-five million in China, two million each in Cambodia and North Korea, 1.7 million in Mengistu’s Ethiopia and other African countries, and so on, to a total of about one hundred million. (Eerily, the chief revolutionary in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed predicts that the cost of perfect equality will be “a hundred million heads.”)
(...) before Stalin came to power, Lenin explicitly instructed local Bolsheviks to “introduce mass terror” to forestall opposition. When the Turks approached Baku, Baberowski notes, Lenin ordered the city burned to the ground and “the fate of the civilian population was not considered.”
To begin with, Soviet Marxism rejected the very concept of human rights. Leninist ideology instructed one to think of classes, not humanity.
Soviet ethics taught one to overcome, not foster, natural sympathy for the suffering of others, which might make one hesitate to kill a class enemy. In November 1918, Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka [ex-KGB], published an article in the journal Red Terror in which he instructed:
We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused.
It was no big step to extend the notion of enemy classes to enemy peoples, like the Cossacks, Chechens, or Crimean Tatars.
(...)
No less important was the Leninist understanding of morality. Since the Party was the agent of History itself, it could not be mistaken, and so anything the party did was morally right by definition. “Morality is entirely subordinated to the class struggle of the proletariat,” Lenin declared. At the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924, Trotsky explained:
Comrades, none of us wishes or is able to be right against his Party. The Party in the last analysis is always right, because the Party is the sole historical instrument given the proletariat for the solution of its basic problems. . . . I know that one cannot be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the Party and through the Party for history has not created other ways for the realization of what is right.
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