Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, I think it was both things, right? I mean, there were not only sins of omission, but also sins of commission. Incidentally, one should add, I don't think for Stalin it was personal. These are people who are very remote from him, never coming into contact with the people who are suffering in this way. Attributed to him is the quote that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
I think he, in action, certainly acted in a way that would vindicate that. But the process of collectivization was not just a bureaucratic snafu following on bureaucratic snafu. There was the mobilization of communist youth, of military, of party activists to go into the regions and to search for hidden food, to extract the food where it could be found, and
We have testimony to this in the case of people who later became dissidents, like Lev Kopolov, who wrote in his memoirs about how he was among those who were sent in to enact these policies, and he saw families with the last food being taken away even as signs of starvation were visible already in the present. And yet he did not go mad. He didn't kill himself.
He didn't fall into despair because he believed. Because he had been taught and believed, at least then, that this was justified. This was a larger historical process, and a greater good would result even from these enormities. So I think that this was quite deliberate.
Well, the terror had a variety of victims. There were people who were true believers and who were Bolsheviks who were especially targeted by Stalin because he aimed to revenge himself for all the sort of condescension that he'd experienced in that movement before and also to eliminate rivals or potential rival power centers. and members of their families.
And then there were people who simply got caught up in a process whereby the repressive organs in the provinces were sent quotas. You have to achieve your quota, and maybe even better yet, overachieve your quota, overperform. That would be the key to success and rising in the bureaucracies in the age of the terror.
What's so horrifying is the way in which a whole society stood paralyzed in this process and how neighbors would be taken away in the middle of the night and people would be wary of talking about it. Resistance...
at least in these urban centers, was entirely paralyzed by fear when, if one had somehow find a way to mobilize, somehow a way to resist the process, the results might have been different. There's an astonishing book. I mean, there are so many great books that have come out quite recently, even on these topics.
Orlando Figus has an amazing book called The Whisperers that traces several families' history In the Stalin period. And it's a testimony to how a whole society and some of its most intelligent people got winnowed again and again and again.
in that process of negative selection that we talked about, the lasting dislocation and scars that this left, and the way in which how people were not able to talk about these things in public, because that would put you next on the list, suspected of having less than total devotion to the state.
I think one of the things that also is so terrifying about the entire process is even total devotion wasn't enough. the process took on a life of its own. And I think that it might even have surprised Stalin in some ways, not enough to short-circuit the process, but the notion where people were invited to denounce neighbors
co-workers, maybe even family members, meant that ever larger groups of people would be brought into the orbit of the secret police, tortured in order to produce confessions. Those confessions then would lead to more lists of suspects of people who had to be investigated and either executed or sent to the gulags. The uncertainty that this produced Was enormous.
Even loyalty was not enough to save people. The stories, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is full of stories of dedicated communists who find themselves in the Gulag and are sure that some mistake has been made. And if only Comrade Stalin would hear about this terrible thing that has happened to them, surely it would be corrected.
And nothing like this would have everyone else, by contrast, accused of terrible crimes. There must be some truth behind that. So, you know, talk about ways of disaggregating a society, ways of breaking down bonds of trust. This left lasting traces on an entire society that endured to this very day.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Well, I think some of it comes back to the ethical grounding that we mentioned earlier, the notion that ethics are entirely situational and that any ethical system is an outgrowth of a particular class reality, a particular material reality, and that leaves the door wide open. So I think that that aspect was present from the very beginning.
I think that the expectations of Marx that the revolution would take hold and be successful in a developed country played a role here as well. Russia, which compared to the rest of Europe was less developed even before the First World War, is in a dire state after all of the ravage and the millions of deaths that continue even after the war has ended in the West.
that leaves precious little in the way of structural restraints or a functioning society that would say, let's not do things this way. I think that in retrospect, that special role carved out for special individuals who can move this process forward and accelerate historical development allowed for people to step into those roles and appoint themselves executors of this ideological vision.
So I think those things play a role as well.
Well, counterfactuals are hard, like you said, and one very quickly gets off into really deep waters in speculation. There were contemporaries, and there have been scholars since, who suggest that Trotsky, by all indications, might have been even more radical than Stalin in the tempo that he wanted to achieve. Think of the slogan of permanent revolution.
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