Michael Malice

And it went systemically.

So after he had all these kind of executions of people who were like Lenin's people, the old Bolsheviks, then he went after, he started arresting the secret police.

He arrested all the cops, he arrested all the judges, and all these prisoners got to see the judges who yelled at them for being counter-revolutionaries and spies.

Now they were in the jails.

If you were a foreigner, there was a huge push from the Soviet Union toward African-Americans, right?

Because they're like, look, you were living in a racist country.

Here we have no...

racial inequality, come live here.

A bunch of them went and they were all vanished.

Anyone who knew information about the outside world, if you were a foreigner, Andre Babel, I forget his first name, he had a French writer he was friends with.

He was arrested and shot because he's a spy because you're friends with Melrose.

And that means if you're a foreigner, you're a spy.

Speaking Esperanto became a crime.

Having a pen pal, literally anything that was some kind of chain between yourself and someone else

was a threat and was grounds for arrest.

It was, the Russians would joke about how relieved they would be if someone knocked on your door in the middle of the night to tell you your house was on fire because it wasn't the NKVD coming to arrest you.

And also not doing your job became a felony because now you're taking-

food or product away from the people.

And you're supposed to be there working for the people.

There's this one story, which, you know, I was doing the audio book and this is like, I still trying to get through without crying.