DS Logan McRae is just coming off medical leave in Aberdeen (where it's usually cold and raining sideways) when he's assigned to DI Insch to investigate the murder of three-year-old David Reid. Soon, other children have gone missing and bodies are being discovered.
‘You know,’ said [DI] Insch, ‘since you came back to work we’ve had two abductions, found a dead girl, a dead boy and dragged a corpse with no knees out the harbour. All in the space of three days. That’s a record for Aberdeen.’ He poked about in his packet of fizzy, jelly shapes, coming out with what looked like an amoeba. ‘I’m beginning to think you’re some sort of jinx.’ ‘Thank you, sir.’
The prime suspect is "Roadkill," a schizophrenic with a degree in medieval history who, after leaving a mental hospital got a job picking up dead animals off the roads. Turns out he was keeping them on his small acreage and in one of the large piles was found the body of a 4-year-old girl.
The community is enraged, of course, with self-righteous anger directed at the police and this occasioned one of the funnier scenes in the book as protesters have gathered outside the police station with the usual misspelled signs. (You know the ones: "Get a Brain. Morans" or "Obama. Commander and Theif." or "No Pubic Option.") Or, as here, who can't spell paedophile. Logan winced as he read that last one. Nothing like stupid people with righteous fury and a mob on their side. Last time there had been this kind of fervour three paediatricians had their surgery windows smashed. Now it looked like they were after the foot fetishists.
The situation becomes more confused when forensics reveals one of the dead children had most likely been hit by a car.
Excellent.
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Review: Broken Ground by Val McDermid
A Scottish police procedural (thanks to Net Galley for their free preview in exchange for an honest review.) I haven't read a ton of McDermid and I didn't much care for her protagonist DCI Karen Pirie who ostensibly is still suffering from the loss of her significant other and seems to be taking it out on everyone else. That her boss has it in for the Historic Crimes Unit and has planted a spy in her midst in the form of DS McCartney doesn't help. Her boss is but a caricature of the bitch boss. I would have liked to understand her more. But I suppose seeing her only through Pirie's eyes the view we get is biased in the extreme.
A body has been found by a couple with the help of a crofter. They had been trying to dig up two Indian motorcycles, presumed now to be worth a considerable sum, that had been buried by the woman's grandfather who was "taking" them rather than let them be destroyed as post-war trash. Unbeknownnst to them, the pannier of one also contained a slug of diamonds that another GI was trying to smuggle out of Europe. I was a bit surprised they hadn't bothered to look in the pannier before burying it, but never mind.
I was a bit disappointed with this book. The characters just weren't particularly likeable, not that it's a necessary criteria for liking a bit. They just seemed a bit "off."
Note that the formatting in this ARC for Kindle is really awful, but I assume it will have been fixed by the time of publication.
A body has been found by a couple with the help of a crofter. They had been trying to dig up two Indian motorcycles, presumed now to be worth a considerable sum, that had been buried by the woman's grandfather who was "taking" them rather than let them be destroyed as post-war trash. Unbeknownnst to them, the pannier of one also contained a slug of diamonds that another GI was trying to smuggle out of Europe. I was a bit surprised they hadn't bothered to look in the pannier before burying it, but never mind.
I was a bit disappointed with this book. The characters just weren't particularly likeable, not that it's a necessary criteria for liking a bit. They just seemed a bit "off."
Note that the formatting in this ARC for Kindle is really awful, but I assume it will have been fixed by the time of publication.
Review: Unforgotten by Clare Francis
Hugh Gwynne, in the middle of a court case, becomes obsessed with the idea that his wife, Lizzie, was killed by an arsonist. She had died in a fire at their home, a fire the police insisted was accidental, but nothing seemed to fit, there were too many things out of place.
In the meantime, his client, Tom Deacon, a war veteran claiming PTSD after a car crash in which he saw his daughter burned to death, is furious with Hugh because Hugh had revealed some negative information about Tom that threatens his case which had appeared headed for victory until an anonymous letter arrived with the information.
Hugh's son Charlie has a history with drugs and Hugh worries that perhaps one of his contacts had killed his wife. But she was also involved in finding a witness to a killing that she had stumbled on while working with her clients in the projects.
An interesting story that has less mystery and more a treatise on bereavement and obsession. Still, I would read more of her work.
In the meantime, his client, Tom Deacon, a war veteran claiming PTSD after a car crash in which he saw his daughter burned to death, is furious with Hugh because Hugh had revealed some negative information about Tom that threatens his case which had appeared headed for victory until an anonymous letter arrived with the information.
Hugh's son Charlie has a history with drugs and Hugh worries that perhaps one of his contacts had killed his wife. But she was also involved in finding a witness to a killing that she had stumbled on while working with her clients in the projects.
An interesting story that has less mystery and more a treatise on bereavement and obsession. Still, I would read more of her work.
Friday, August 17, 2018
W.E.B. DuBois on Robert E. Lee and Confederate Monuments
I just happened to run across this essay by WEB DuBois written in 1928 about Robert E Lee. Cogent.
1928. Source: The Crisis, March 1928, v.35, n.3 [found in the “Postscript” section]
Robert E. Lee
"Each year on the 19th of January there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing–one terrible fact–militates against this and that is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery. Copperheads like the New York Times may magisterially declare: “of course, he never fought for slavery.” Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery. If nationalism had been a stronger defense of the slave system than particularism, the South would have been as nationalistic in 1861 as it had been in 1812.
No. People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War. And Lee followed Virginia. He followed Virginia not because he particularly loved slavery (although he certainly did not hate it), but because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan. Lee hesitated and hung his head in shame because he was asked to lead armies against human progress and Christian decency and did not dare refuse. He surrendered not to Grant, but to Negro Emancipation.
Today we can best perpetuate his memory and his nobler traits not by falsifying his moral debacle, but by explaining it to the young white south. What Lee did in 1861, other Lees are doing in 1928. They lack the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro because of the overwhelming public opinion of their social environment. Their fathers in the past have condoned lynching and mob violence, just as today they acquiesce in the disfranchisement of educated and worthy black citizens, provide wretchedly inadequate public schools for Negro children and endorse a public treatment of sickness, poverty and crime which disgraces civilization.
It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. it is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God."
******************
Kevin Levin in DuBois in his civil war blog also posted this DuBois comment on Confederate monuments. (http://cwmemory.com/2017/05/29/w-e-b-dubois-on-confederate-monuments/)
W.E.B. DuBois on Confederate Monuments
cwmemory.com
Thanks to all of you who have offered suggestions on how to improve #NOLASyllabus. The list has expanded and deepened in a number of ways, though I am still trying to get a sense of where it is going.
Certainly the most exciting part are the references that I most likely would never have come across on my own. Consider the following reference to a 1931 issue of The Crisis in which W.E.B. DuBois offers some brief remarks about Confederate monuments while traveling through parts of the South.
DuBois’s reflection on the selective memory and history of Confederate monuments comes right in the middle of a narrative on the challenges and contradictions of traveling through the South at the height of the Jim Crow era.
DuBois pushes right back against the myth of the Lost Cause. He refuses to draw a distinction between the Confederate government and the men in the ranks. DuBois clearly understood that as long as white southerners were able to mythologize the war through their monuments, African Americans would remain second class citizens.
Confederate monuments did not just occupy the Jim Crow landscape. For Dubois, they helped to make it possible.
1928. Source: The Crisis, March 1928, v.35, n.3 [found in the “Postscript” section]
Robert E. Lee
"Each year on the 19th of January there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing–one terrible fact–militates against this and that is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery. Copperheads like the New York Times may magisterially declare: “of course, he never fought for slavery.” Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery. If nationalism had been a stronger defense of the slave system than particularism, the South would have been as nationalistic in 1861 as it had been in 1812.
No. People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War. And Lee followed Virginia. He followed Virginia not because he particularly loved slavery (although he certainly did not hate it), but because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan. Lee hesitated and hung his head in shame because he was asked to lead armies against human progress and Christian decency and did not dare refuse. He surrendered not to Grant, but to Negro Emancipation.
Today we can best perpetuate his memory and his nobler traits not by falsifying his moral debacle, but by explaining it to the young white south. What Lee did in 1861, other Lees are doing in 1928. They lack the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro because of the overwhelming public opinion of their social environment. Their fathers in the past have condoned lynching and mob violence, just as today they acquiesce in the disfranchisement of educated and worthy black citizens, provide wretchedly inadequate public schools for Negro children and endorse a public treatment of sickness, poverty and crime which disgraces civilization.
It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. it is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God."
******************
Kevin Levin in DuBois in his civil war blog also posted this DuBois comment on Confederate monuments. (http://cwmemory.com/2017/05/29/w-e-b-dubois-on-confederate-monuments/)
W.E.B. DuBois on Confederate Monuments
cwmemory.com
Thanks to all of you who have offered suggestions on how to improve #NOLASyllabus. The list has expanded and deepened in a number of ways, though I am still trying to get a sense of where it is going.
Certainly the most exciting part are the references that I most likely would never have come across on my own. Consider the following reference to a 1931 issue of The Crisis in which W.E.B. DuBois offers some brief remarks about Confederate monuments while traveling through parts of the South.
DuBois’s reflection on the selective memory and history of Confederate monuments comes right in the middle of a narrative on the challenges and contradictions of traveling through the South at the height of the Jim Crow era.
DuBois pushes right back against the myth of the Lost Cause. He refuses to draw a distinction between the Confederate government and the men in the ranks. DuBois clearly understood that as long as white southerners were able to mythologize the war through their monuments, African Americans would remain second class citizens.
Confederate monuments did not just occupy the Jim Crow landscape. For Dubois, they helped to make it possible.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Russian Meddling
We're in the midst of political outrage over Russian meddling in Trump's election. Trump's close monetary ties to Russian oligarchs are politically unique. Russian meddling is not.
In 1960 I was in 8th grade and we all watched in rapt attention as the first ever televised debates occurred between Nixon and Kennedy. Little did we understand or know the influence of the U-2 incident and how the internal machinations of Kremlin politics might affect the outcome in the United States. Khruschev always maintained he helped Kennedy win the election. He was upset with Eisenhower, disliked Nixon, and thought Kennedy would be easier to manipulate because of his inexperience.
By autumn, the Eisenhower administration had increased its appeals to Khrushchev to release Gary Powers and the RB-47 airmen who had been shot down over the Arctic. Khrushchev recalled later that he had refused after calculating that the election was so close any such move might have swung the outcome. “As it turned out, we’d done the right thing,” he would say later. Given the margin of victory, he said, “The slightest nudge either way would have been decisive.”
I'm reading a fascinating book by Frederick Kempe on the 1961 crisis in Berlin and he lays the groundwork by an examination of the election and the characters of the major players. Had Khruschev wanted to help Eisenhower or Nixon, he could have released Gary Powers sooner. His shoe banging at the United Nations in September helped focus the United States electorate on foreign policy.
Publicly favoring neither candidate ("which is better? the left shoe or the right shoe?")
But behind the scenes, he worked toward Nixon’s defeat. As early as January 1960, over vodka, fruit, and caviar, Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Mikhail Menshikov had asked Adlai Stevenson how Moscow might best help him defeat Nixon. Was it better for the Soviet press to praise him or criticize him—and on which topics? Stevenson responded that he did not expect to be a candidate—and he then prayed that news of the Soviet proposition would never leak. Yet both parties so deeply recognized Khrushchev’s potential to swing votes, either by design or by accident, that each reached out to him. [my emphasis - shades of 2016] Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had grown close to Khrushchev during his first U.S. trip, had flown to Moscow in February 1960 to convince the Soviet leader that he could work with Nixon. Lodge, who would become Nixon’s running mate, said, “Once Mr. Nixon is in the White House, I’m sure—I’m absolutely certain—he’ll take a position of preserving and perhaps even improving our relations."
The Democrats sent Averill Harriman to Moscow to argue that any endorsement of Kennedy would redownd to Nixon's benefit.
Khruschev was coming under pressure from within his own party as well as that of Mao in Communist China who wanted a less conciliatory position than the "peaceful coexistence" strategy being promoted by Kruschev. The situation in East Germany was also becoming dire as more and more East Germans fled to the West.
It was clear that Khruschev wanted Kennedy to win. “We thought we would have more hope of improving Soviet–American relations if John Kennedy were in the White House.” He told colleagues that Nixon’s anticommunism and his connection with “that devil of darkness [Senator Joe] McCarthy, to whom he owed his career,” all meant “we had no reason to welcome the prospect of Nixon as President.” Khrushchev believed he could outmaneuver Kennedy, a man whom his foreign ministry had characterized as “unlikely to possess the qualities of an outstanding person..... "The consensus in the Kremlin was that the young man was a lightweight, a product of American privilege who lacked the experience required for leadership." They had yet to meet Trump whose extreme narcissism and financial needs will clearly make him a tool of Putin.
In 1960 I was in 8th grade and we all watched in rapt attention as the first ever televised debates occurred between Nixon and Kennedy. Little did we understand or know the influence of the U-2 incident and how the internal machinations of Kremlin politics might affect the outcome in the United States. Khruschev always maintained he helped Kennedy win the election. He was upset with Eisenhower, disliked Nixon, and thought Kennedy would be easier to manipulate because of his inexperience.
By autumn, the Eisenhower administration had increased its appeals to Khrushchev to release Gary Powers and the RB-47 airmen who had been shot down over the Arctic. Khrushchev recalled later that he had refused after calculating that the election was so close any such move might have swung the outcome. “As it turned out, we’d done the right thing,” he would say later. Given the margin of victory, he said, “The slightest nudge either way would have been decisive.”
I'm reading a fascinating book by Frederick Kempe on the 1961 crisis in Berlin and he lays the groundwork by an examination of the election and the characters of the major players. Had Khruschev wanted to help Eisenhower or Nixon, he could have released Gary Powers sooner. His shoe banging at the United Nations in September helped focus the United States electorate on foreign policy.
Publicly favoring neither candidate ("which is better? the left shoe or the right shoe?")
But behind the scenes, he worked toward Nixon’s defeat. As early as January 1960, over vodka, fruit, and caviar, Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Mikhail Menshikov had asked Adlai Stevenson how Moscow might best help him defeat Nixon. Was it better for the Soviet press to praise him or criticize him—and on which topics? Stevenson responded that he did not expect to be a candidate—and he then prayed that news of the Soviet proposition would never leak. Yet both parties so deeply recognized Khrushchev’s potential to swing votes, either by design or by accident, that each reached out to him. [my emphasis - shades of 2016] Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had grown close to Khrushchev during his first U.S. trip, had flown to Moscow in February 1960 to convince the Soviet leader that he could work with Nixon. Lodge, who would become Nixon’s running mate, said, “Once Mr. Nixon is in the White House, I’m sure—I’m absolutely certain—he’ll take a position of preserving and perhaps even improving our relations."
The Democrats sent Averill Harriman to Moscow to argue that any endorsement of Kennedy would redownd to Nixon's benefit.
Khruschev was coming under pressure from within his own party as well as that of Mao in Communist China who wanted a less conciliatory position than the "peaceful coexistence" strategy being promoted by Kruschev. The situation in East Germany was also becoming dire as more and more East Germans fled to the West.
It was clear that Khruschev wanted Kennedy to win. “We thought we would have more hope of improving Soviet–American relations if John Kennedy were in the White House.” He told colleagues that Nixon’s anticommunism and his connection with “that devil of darkness [Senator Joe] McCarthy, to whom he owed his career,” all meant “we had no reason to welcome the prospect of Nixon as President.” Khrushchev believed he could outmaneuver Kennedy, a man whom his foreign ministry had characterized as “unlikely to possess the qualities of an outstanding person..... "The consensus in the Kremlin was that the young man was a lightweight, a product of American privilege who lacked the experience required for leadership." They had yet to meet Trump whose extreme narcissism and financial needs will clearly make him a tool of Putin.
Tuesday, August 07, 2018
Red Famine by Anne Appelbaum
Among other things, I collect stamps from Eastern Europe and that obviously includes several countries from the former USSR. I'm also a fan of Anne Applebaum's column. She resides in Poland, speaks fluent Polish, and is a scholar of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. That she attended a Friends school (as did I) doesn't hurt either. So I was intrigued to read a review of her latest book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on the Ukraine, in the NYRB, August 16, 2018, which I have been reading.
Famous as the grain basket of the east and prized by both invading Germans and Soviet's, the poor Ukraine farmers have been treated as badly as the Irish by the British. The Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine even has its own label: Holodomor (killing by hunger.) In 1932, Stalin issued his "On the Procurement of Grain in Ukraine, the North Caucusus, and the Western Region." The commands contained in the document were collect as much (all) the grain produced in these areas to help pay for Soviet industrialization, not to mention quiet the slowly building resentment in Russia of shortages created by the failures of collectivization. The result was the deaths of more than four million Ukrainians, more than half of all those who died during in the USSR during that period.
The demise of the USSR and the opening of Soviet archives has revealed the depths of the efforts to use grain to also subvert and destroy any vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. Complaints to local implementers of Stalin's genocidal order resulted in letters like the following:
#2 Letter to Stalin from Komsomol member Pastushenko, Polonyste village, Baban raion, Vinnitsa oblast, on the requisition of grain and starving collective farmers (excerpt)
February 10, 1932*
Good day honorable secretary of the AUCP(b), Comrade Stalin!
I am writing you this letter from a remote, out-of-the-way village in Ukraine. On a military map you will find the village called Polonyste on the river Yatran in the Uman region of Baban raion. Listen to this, Comrade Stalin! The village of 317 homesteads is collectivized a full one hundred percent. Do you think we have Soviet rule here?
No, it’s not Soviet, but completely bourgeois. Remember serfdom, six days of work for the master, and the seventh was а Sunday, when you didn’t work because it was a holiday? In the village cooperative, we work every day. There is nothing around the homes but empty buildings, yet we still have to pay taxes from our households for work done on the collective farm, and turn over our own savings; if you sign for a loan of 40 karbovantsi at the collective farm then [you must] pay it back from your homestead. It has been three years since everything has been collectivized by the kolhosp, yet we have to turn in grain procurements for land that we contributed to the kolhosp. Don’t go to the kolhosp for bread, but yourself provide 45 poods from three-tenths of a field, pay 28 karbovantsi for a share in the cooperative and pay a construction advance of 15 karbovantsi from your home; all that is left from three years of food are only kopeks of money — such is life.
Our village has fulfilled the [grain procurement] plan by 65 percent. The kolhosp shipped out the last funt of every sort of grain. There is nothing for the horses, only chopped wheat sprinkled with molasses; 56 horses have died already. Everyday three, four, six horses die of starvation; there is not a kernel left. There were 500 pigs, 184 of which have already died, [the remainder] eat sugar beet residue. There are only 60 cows, of which 46 will go for meat, leaving 14 for the entire village for all of 1932. That’s livestock breeding for you. Ours is a beet-growing and cattle-farming region and there are predictions that all the livestock will die in two months. People are beginning to die of famine, to swell and children ask for “bread, bread.” Do no think, Dear Leader, that people have refused to work… or [that there was] a bad harvest that nobody is considering. Last year’s harvest was average and the population barely survived because the plan was 38,000 poods. This year it’s 57,000 poods…
A brigade of 86 persons has spent three months doing nothing [but] check under every house, day after day. Since the campaign began, every house has been searched 60 times. They took the last funt of vegetables from the kolhosp, [leaving] collective farmers with two poods of potatoes per person; the remaining funts went for procurement. There is no provision for spring sowing, not a funt of seed, not a grain crop left: no potatoes, no beans, no legumes, no lentils, no peas, no buckwheat, no cattle grass, no barley, no oats, no soybeans — everything to the last funt. They have taken our beets and pickled cabbage and are taking away our chickens. Villagers say the secret slaughter of rabbits is taking place because there is nothing to eat. Such is the state of affairs, Comrade Stalin. […]
Komsomolets, Branch secretary,
member of RKM bureau
Pastushenko
Rape of the Ukrainian breadbasket in 1932 was not the first time. Ukraine didn't exist as a nation during WWI but was fought over by the Russians and Austro-Hungarians. Following WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution, grain became essential to the success of the revolution. Lenin wrote to his commanders in Ukraine: "For God's sake, use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain, and more grain. Otherwise Petrograd may starve to death." Lenin's troops were fighting the Ukrainian nationalists who had gone underground after WW I and had formed the Ukrainian Central Rada, a socialist regime but not allied enough with Moscow. But it was all about grain. Ukraine suffered as Communist colonialism took place.
Stalin was after more than just grain, however. Part of his rationale was to eliminate the peasant class and create a working class, needed for the industrialization of the USSR, and to eliminate ethnic and national differences. "The national question is purely a peasant question...the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers..., which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal proletariat. ." (Mikhail Kalinin) The world-wide revolution had not materialized and Russian insecurity required a more rapid transformation of the economy into a military and industrial one to resist a hostile capitalist world.
The Ukraine suffered as collectivization of the farms, arrest of peasants (anyone who resisted, really) who were labeled as wealthy exploiters (kurkuls) and deported north. The goal was to completely control grain supplies. Ukraine political leaders were purged if they showed an signs of resistance to Stalin's policies. As all the grain was confiscated and sent north, nothing was left to plant for following years and starvation and genocide was the result.
Famous as the grain basket of the east and prized by both invading Germans and Soviet's, the poor Ukraine farmers have been treated as badly as the Irish by the British. The Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine even has its own label: Holodomor (killing by hunger.) In 1932, Stalin issued his "On the Procurement of Grain in Ukraine, the North Caucusus, and the Western Region." The commands contained in the document were collect as much (all) the grain produced in these areas to help pay for Soviet industrialization, not to mention quiet the slowly building resentment in Russia of shortages created by the failures of collectivization. The result was the deaths of more than four million Ukrainians, more than half of all those who died during in the USSR during that period.
The demise of the USSR and the opening of Soviet archives has revealed the depths of the efforts to use grain to also subvert and destroy any vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. Complaints to local implementers of Stalin's genocidal order resulted in letters like the following:
#2 Letter to Stalin from Komsomol member Pastushenko, Polonyste village, Baban raion, Vinnitsa oblast, on the requisition of grain and starving collective farmers (excerpt)
February 10, 1932*
Good day honorable secretary of the AUCP(b), Comrade Stalin!
I am writing you this letter from a remote, out-of-the-way village in Ukraine. On a military map you will find the village called Polonyste on the river Yatran in the Uman region of Baban raion. Listen to this, Comrade Stalin! The village of 317 homesteads is collectivized a full one hundred percent. Do you think we have Soviet rule here?
No, it’s not Soviet, but completely bourgeois. Remember serfdom, six days of work for the master, and the seventh was а Sunday, when you didn’t work because it was a holiday? In the village cooperative, we work every day. There is nothing around the homes but empty buildings, yet we still have to pay taxes from our households for work done on the collective farm, and turn over our own savings; if you sign for a loan of 40 karbovantsi at the collective farm then [you must] pay it back from your homestead. It has been three years since everything has been collectivized by the kolhosp, yet we have to turn in grain procurements for land that we contributed to the kolhosp. Don’t go to the kolhosp for bread, but yourself provide 45 poods from three-tenths of a field, pay 28 karbovantsi for a share in the cooperative and pay a construction advance of 15 karbovantsi from your home; all that is left from three years of food are only kopeks of money — such is life.
Our village has fulfilled the [grain procurement] plan by 65 percent. The kolhosp shipped out the last funt of every sort of grain. There is nothing for the horses, only chopped wheat sprinkled with molasses; 56 horses have died already. Everyday three, four, six horses die of starvation; there is not a kernel left. There were 500 pigs, 184 of which have already died, [the remainder] eat sugar beet residue. There are only 60 cows, of which 46 will go for meat, leaving 14 for the entire village for all of 1932. That’s livestock breeding for you. Ours is a beet-growing and cattle-farming region and there are predictions that all the livestock will die in two months. People are beginning to die of famine, to swell and children ask for “bread, bread.” Do no think, Dear Leader, that people have refused to work… or [that there was] a bad harvest that nobody is considering. Last year’s harvest was average and the population barely survived because the plan was 38,000 poods. This year it’s 57,000 poods…
A brigade of 86 persons has spent three months doing nothing [but] check under every house, day after day. Since the campaign began, every house has been searched 60 times. They took the last funt of vegetables from the kolhosp, [leaving] collective farmers with two poods of potatoes per person; the remaining funts went for procurement. There is no provision for spring sowing, not a funt of seed, not a grain crop left: no potatoes, no beans, no legumes, no lentils, no peas, no buckwheat, no cattle grass, no barley, no oats, no soybeans — everything to the last funt. They have taken our beets and pickled cabbage and are taking away our chickens. Villagers say the secret slaughter of rabbits is taking place because there is nothing to eat. Such is the state of affairs, Comrade Stalin. […]
Komsomolets, Branch secretary,
member of RKM bureau
Pastushenko
Rape of the Ukrainian breadbasket in 1932 was not the first time. Ukraine didn't exist as a nation during WWI but was fought over by the Russians and Austro-Hungarians. Following WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution, grain became essential to the success of the revolution. Lenin wrote to his commanders in Ukraine: "For God's sake, use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain, and more grain. Otherwise Petrograd may starve to death." Lenin's troops were fighting the Ukrainian nationalists who had gone underground after WW I and had formed the Ukrainian Central Rada, a socialist regime but not allied enough with Moscow. But it was all about grain. Ukraine suffered as Communist colonialism took place.
Stalin was after more than just grain, however. Part of his rationale was to eliminate the peasant class and create a working class, needed for the industrialization of the USSR, and to eliminate ethnic and national differences. "The national question is purely a peasant question...the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers..., which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal proletariat. ." (Mikhail Kalinin) The world-wide revolution had not materialized and Russian insecurity required a more rapid transformation of the economy into a military and industrial one to resist a hostile capitalist world.
The Ukraine suffered as collectivization of the farms, arrest of peasants (anyone who resisted, really) who were labeled as wealthy exploiters (kurkuls) and deported north. The goal was to completely control grain supplies. Ukraine political leaders were purged if they showed an signs of resistance to Stalin's policies. As all the grain was confiscated and sent north, nothing was left to plant for following years and starvation and genocide was the result.
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