On Mon, Sep 14, 2026 at 6:12 PM Michael Pugliese via groups.io <[email protected]> wrote:
> Re : "The single most damning category is the documents Stalin personally > signed. The rasstrel'nye spiski—the shooting lists—are albums of names > compiled by the NKVD and sent to the Politburo for pre-approval of sentence > before any trial occurred. There are around 380 of them, carrying roughly > 44,000 names; Stalin signed about 357, and Molotov a comparable number, > with Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Zhdanov close behind." > > Masha Gessen detailed this in-The future is history : how totalitarianism > reclaimed Russia > > GRIEF, ARRESTED | 143 > In 1989, Gorbachev made Alexander Nikolaevich chair of a newly created > Rehabilitation Commission, in charge of reviewing archival documents and > clearing the names of those who had been unjustly punished in the Stalin > era. Alexander Nikolaevich was better prepared than Gorbachev to start > learning about the terror, both because he was old enough to have heard > Khrushchev deliver his secret speech to the Party Congress and because he > had seen the cattle cars carrying Soviet prisoners of war to the Gulag > after the Great Patriotic War. But what he saw when he studied the archives > during perestroika made his stomach turn. He saw that Stalin personally had > signed execution orders for forty-four thousand people, people he did not > know and whose cases he had not read, if the cases even existed—he had > simply signed off on long lists of names, apparently because he enjoyed the > process.⁴ He saw evidence of secret-police competitions, formal ones—like > when different departments within the NKVD (the precursor agency to the > KGB) raced one another to highest number of political probes launched—and > informal ones, like when three of the NKVD brass took three thousand cases > with them on a train journey, got drunk, and engaged > > 144 UNRAVELING > in a speed challenge: Who could go through a stack of cases fastest, mark- > ing each with the letter P. They were not reading the cases. The letter P— > pronounced r in Russian—stood for rasstrel, "execution." He saw evidence of > specific days on which the fate of thousands was decided. On November 22, > 1937, Stalin and two of his closest advisers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Andrei > Zhdanov, approved twelve lists submitted by the NKVD, containing 1,352 > people who would be executed. On December 7, they signed off on thirteen > lists for a total of 2,397 people, 2,124 of whom were to be executed. On > January 3, 1938, they were joined by two other top Bolsheviks, Kliment > Voroshilov and Lazar Kaganovich, and together they signed off on twenty- > two lists with 2,547 names, 2,270 to be executed. > > > June 10, 1938: twenty-nine lists, 2,750 people, 2,371 to be executed. > September 12, 1938: thirty-eight lists, 6,013 people, 4,825 to be executed. > There were too many such dates and figures to make them commemora- > tive or otherwise meaningful. Some lists had a specific makeup. On August > 20, 1938, Stalin and Molotov together signed off on a list of fifteen women > who were classified as "wives of enemies of the people." Ten of them were > housewives and two were students. All were executed. Their husbands, who > had been arrested earlier, were executed later.5 Other lists looked > altogether > random, though the mind scrambled each time to make sense of them. > Lidiya Chukovskaya, a writer whose husband, a physicist, was executed > in 1938 at the age of thirty-one, raged against this habit of attempting to > make sense of the absurd: > > The truth was too primitive and too bloody. The regime had attacked > its citizens for no imaginable reason and was beating them, torturing > them, and executing them. How were we to understand the reason > for such whimsy? If you let it sink in that there is no reason, that they > were doing it "just because," that killers killed just because it is their > job to kill, then your heart, though no bullet has pierced it, will be > torn apart, and your mind, in its intact shell of a head, will grow > shaky. Looking at the truth would have been akin to staring down > the barrel of a gun, so one tried to steal oneself away. > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43412): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43412 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121137801/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
