I am reading the works of the Chechen historian Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (1908-1997) and stumbled upon his obituary on the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. At the time of Stalin’s death (1953) a lot of reasonable people in the West either paid tribute to Uncle Joe or gave what they saw as a balanced view of the life and work of the Soviet dictator. How wrong they were.
Avtorkhanov would have none of it. He spend five years in Stalin’s jails from 1937 until 1942, was tortured, witnessed a mock execution and then fled to Nazi Germany, where he spend the rest of the war writing about his experience in the Soviet Union.
A Russian proverb says: About the dead you either speak well or you keep silent. Well, Avtorkhanov didn’t exactly follow that advice. Here is his obituary published in the magazine Free Caucasus in March 1953:
“Stalin has finally died. His wolfish heart has stopped beating, his diabolical mind has stopped operating. A man has passed away who had nothing human about him what so ever, no soul, no love, no compassion. A professionel tormentor’s cold hearted brutality and a bestial instinct for survival put him closer to the species of beasts than to mankind.
A man has passed away who immortalized himself through the killing of millions of human beings in the basements of the secret police, in the Siberian woods, the coalmines of Kolyma, the sands of Central Asia and the mountains of the Caucasus.
A man has passed away who created, consolidated and expanded the most reactionary and unprecedented system of state slavery.
A man has passed away who in his own image raised legions of greedy tormentors, that grabbed the fatherless throne.
A man has passed away who created and raised a first class army of international experts on rebellion, revolution and war who were ready to pull mankind into a new disaster for the ideas behind the system created by the dead demigod.
A man has passed away who for thirty years withou any punishment had been swimming in a sea of blood from our fathers and brothers, and rivers of tears from our mothers and sisters.
The most damned of all damned people who ever sat foot on this earth has passed away.
He doesn’t deserve a grave!
May his memory be damned forever!
A war of destruction on his legacy! That’s the verdict of our people. And that verdict will live on with future generations.”
Not bad.
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7 Comments
1. Hettie:as far as I know that the saying comes from Latin.
De mortuis nil nisi bene.
Jan 2, 2008 - 1:23 am 2. huxley:Wow! Thanks for posting that.
Unfortunately, the raw hatefulness of Stalin is glossed over in all but conservative circles. He deserves to be immortalized as one of the most evil humans in history.
Jan 2, 2008 - 7:31 pm 3. Anat:When he fled to Germany, the year was 1943.
Jan 3, 2008 - 6:56 am 4. Mark William Paules:This looks like going to another extreme.
To Stalin’s infamous list of other cold-hearted crimes include the following: The “suicide” of his second wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, believed in reality to have been shot to death by Stalin personally during an argument. And also Stalin’s refusal to free his own son, Yakov, from a German POW camp by means of a prisoner exchange for General Paulus. Yakov died there before the camp was liberated.
Jan 3, 2008 - 4:58 pm 5. Piotr Bein:Flemming Rose is hardly objective. Was his “Mohammed cartoon” publication in Jyllands-Posten objectivity-driven?
A scape-goating assessment of Stalin who inherited a terror apparatus created, led and staffed mostly by extremist Jews.
Israel Shahak, a Jewish defendant of the rights of Palestinians analyses the Soviet terror, concluding that extreme Jews have engaged in the Communist mass violence since the Bolshevik revolution. [Israel Shahak, "Jewish History, Jewish Religion", Pluto Press, 1994]
A Jewish professor of history cited statistical evidence of Jewish pre-eminence in decision making in Russia. [Yuri Slezkin, "The Jewish Century", Princeton University Press, 2004]
A bibliography of 25, mostly Jewish sources noted: “The [US] National Archives contain an almost overflowing abundance of State Department and Military Intelligence reports detailing Jewish control of the Bolshevik Revolution […] Scotland Yard and the British Foreign Office contain similar reports”. [Jerzy Piaski, bibliographic note 2, in: Polish Nation Libel, No. 37, 17.7.2004, http://www.papurec.org
Under Lenin, Jews constituted 5.2%, 25.7% and up to 42.9% of the Communist party, central committee, and Politburo members, respectively, while only 1.77% of the population was Jewish. [Yitzhak Arad et al. (editors), "The Einsatzgruppen Reports", Holocaust Library: New York, 1989, p 49; Stuart Kahan, "The Wolf of the Kremlin", William Morrow, 1987, p 81]
Winston Churchill publicized the role of “international and for the most part atheistical Jews” in the creation of Bolshevism and in the Revolution. The crimes perpetrated by Jewish Communists, Churchill noted, instilled in Germans and Russians a desire for retribution. In the Bolshevik institutions, “the prominent, if not indeed, the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews […] The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been present in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people […] The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with villainies which are now being perpetrated.” [Illustrated Sunday Herald, 8.2.1920]
Western history has ignored the systematic destruction of Russia’s, and later Eastern Europe’s Christians by the Bolshevik terror. In 1918–1938, the number of churches that remained open in the USSR dwindled from 54,000 to under 500. Some 600 bishops, 40,000 priests, 120,000 monks and nuns, and millions of lay people were slain in the five decades after 1918. [Soviet Union, May 1989, http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-12521.html
Jews occupied key positions in the Bolshevik regime that created the Gulag system. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was branded an anti-Semite and liar when he wrote about the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and in subsequent Soviet purges. [Guardian, 24.1.2003]
Yeltsin’s special assistant with unprecedented access to Soviet archives quoted Lenin that Jews made the best revolutionaries. [Dmitri Volkogonov, "Lenin", Free Press, 1994, p 112]
Bolsheviks hated Christians, especially the “bourgeois enemies of the state”: tsarist army officers, aristocrats, peasant farmers and intelligentsia. The top Communist Jewish official Zinoviev stated: “we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds […] For the blood of Lenin and Uritzky, Zinoviev and Volodarsky, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeoisie—more blood! As much as possible!” [Krasnaya Gazeta, 1.9.1918]
Jan 5, 2008 - 9:50 pm 6. Marek Glogoczowski:As far as I remember from the last years’ press, this “anti-Stalinist” Flemming Rose (what was his Ukrainian name?) is a fanatical Ukrainian “refugee” in Denmark, earning his life, of a professional Hypocrite and Scribe, by spitting at all people who have managed, in the past, to organize, in relatively short time, big Empires (in Danish “Dagbladden” he spat last year at Mohammad, as far as I remember.)
I would like thus to see Flemming Rose’s article (or a caricature) of biblical Moses, carrying in one hand Tables of Decalogue, and in the second hand a covered with blood sword, while murdering, during their sleep, together with Moses clan of phanatical Levies, thousands of their “brothers and sons”, which refused to prosternate in front of these famous Stone Tablests with slogan “You shall not kill”.
Jan 6, 2008 - 10:27 am 7. Geoffrey Wasteneys:Hitler and Stalin were both monsters, but Stalin was the greater monster. Hitler generally had a(perverted) reason for his killings while Stalin used a mass approach as with the Kulaks or the Ukrainians He killed all his potential,political rivals. It was said to be dangerous to be around when
Jan 6, 2008 - 6:18 pmhe was in a bad temper . Russians have a cruel streak, but Stalin was a Georgian.It is noteworthy that when a German soldier that was a communist,deserted in order to warn of the coming invasion. Stalin ordered that he be shot.Some gratitude.