The goals of Soviet torture
From Martin Amis’s book Koba the Dread:
…[T]orture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin’s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.
And the Party leadership knew it was a fiction. This made the use of torture even more evil, if such a thing be possible.
More:
On arrest, the invariable response was Zachto? Why? What for?
This was evidence of the belief—in the “normal,” non-Gulag world—in some sort of rational motivation for such things. But that soon evaporated:
When she hears that a friend had been picked up (this was in the early 1930s), Nadezhda Mandelstam said: Zachto? Anna Akhmatova lost patience. Don’t you understand, she said, that they are now arresting people for nothing.
In those words “for nothing,” the reference is not just to the fact that the arrested people are innocent. There is also a higher “for nothing,” which is embodied in our present knowledge that the Soviet experiment was a complete failure both in economic and human terms, and (fortunately) did not last for even a century in its most virulent forms. But still, it lasted way too long, and caused untold human suffering—for nothing.
Amis writes:
There are several names for what happened in Germany and Poland in the early 1940s. The Holocaust, the Shoah, the Wind of Death…There are no names for what happened in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953 (although Russians refer, totemically to “the twenty million,” and to the Stalinshchina—the time of Stalin’s rule). What should we call it? The Decimation, the Fratricide, the Mindslaughter? No. Call it the Zachto? Call it the What For?
And here’s quite a quote, from the founder of the Cheka:
Dzerzhinsky said: “We represent in ourselves organized terror ”“ this must be said very clearly.” and “[The Red Terror involves] the terrorization, arrests and extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles.”
Which was most important to the perpetrators, the terror or the supposed goals behind the terror? I do not know, but my gut tells me it was the terror itself and the feeling of power it gave the perpetrators. The rest was at least in part a justification for what they secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) enjoyed.
The goal of terror was, obviously, to terrorize. To install fear in everybody, so that nobody dare to protest or even dream to resist the oppression. And there is a historically known name for this system of government: Oprichnina, a system first introduced by Ivan The Terrible in 16 century. Oprichniks were then what Chekists were in 20 century.
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
George Orwell
1984
At the risk of striking a hyperbolic note, I think American liberals evince a similar psychopathology, namely, the desire to seek self-validation through coercing others to do as they (the liberals) think they should do.
In the Soviets’ case, the torture was incidental. Just select some dyed in the wool sadists and give them their head, so that the remaining people will do as they’re told.
But that, and not the torture, was the point, and we see it today on the American left. Their response to all stimuli is to use the apparatus of government to force people to do something, or to prohibit them from doing something. The notion of providing incentives, or (dare I say it?) just letting people be to make their own decisions (right or wrong as others may see them) appears not to occur to them.
The only, slim consolation regarding the Soviets is that wave upon wave of torturers themselves met the exact same fate, and were powerless to prevent it. Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria — all were executed, and Beria especially begged to live.
One reason for the interest in power might have been, like control freaks, the fear that something’s about to jump from the bushes and bite you in the ass and you’d better control every little thing, every little thing and big thing. For that you need power.
It was both neo… the sadism of the torture was the candy to buy the brutal classes commiseration with and use towards an end. The leaders needed terror, and for that they needed men, and so they opened the prisons and found men to put in the place of power who would be rewarded by having this small freedom in a world where there was very little.
the purpose of terror was to freeze and separate people. to create a state in which you did only what you needed to do, say what you needed to say, and froze. this caused horrible drinking with the men who found it safer to sit around and kill time, and prostitution with women, as gifts were an exception to the issue of no trade. you would not know if a friend or your own child would give you up to the state for something, besides the state potentially picking you almost at random.
Pavlik Morosov would be a name to look up
I don’t think it’s fear of an external threat, but rather of an internal one. They crave power as a way of validating themselves (“I’m not weak and insignificant! I have power over others!”)
I think this is one of the drivers behind the AGW nonsense. “We have to be careful, because we are so powerful, so important, that we could inadvertently destroy the earth.” Notice their reaction to assertions that mankind – much less a subset of it – is way too insignificant to affect the planet, that we are less significant than the bacteria on a billiard ball. They splutter with rage at the very suggestion. Their rage does not arise from rejection of their beliefs, but rather from affirmation of their fears.
Neo:
Amis came to a similar conclusion, in discussing an abusive conversation that Stalin had with Krupskaya, Leniin’s wife, because she had “supposedly breached Lenin’s medical regimen.” In Krupskaya’s words:
But why such a response to the wife of Lenin? Amis compared this to Dzerzhinsky’s response to being criticized for a harsh purge in Georgia. While Dzerzhinsky admitted he had gone too far in Georgia, he added,”But we couldn’t help ourselves.”
Several days before this conversation, the Central Committee had entrusted Lenin’s medical care to Stalin, which could only increase his feeling powerful.
Amis comes with at least two explanations for why Stalin instigated the great Terror in the 1930s. The 1934 Party Congress- the “Congress of Victors”- had a secret ballot on the composition of the Central Committee. About a tenth of the voters crossed out Stalin’s name. Amis speculates that the one of the reasons for the Great Terror was to collectively punish the Congress for the tenth who crossed out Stalin’s name. Of the 1,996 delegates to the “Congress of Victors,” 1,108 lost their lives during the Great Terror.
Another reason Amis gives for the Great Terror was to eliminate the Old Bolsheviks who could contradict Stalin’s rewriting of history to show him taking a significant role in the 1917 Revolution. Those who survived would have been too afraid to speak out.
While many books have been written on Stalin, Amis’s book is not a superfluous addition. I bought the book at a used book store for $1 about a year ago. Well worth the purchase price. 🙂
Drunk with unlimited power, these godless people fall into trap of demonic possession, like Spanish inquisitors before them. Unlimited power always unleashes the worst in people, sadism included. The founder of Cheka, Dzerzhinsky was educated in Catholic seminary preparing for priesthood.
And yet what is so frustrating is that none NONE of this is taught in schools.
Down the memory hole it does.
momo
Yet…. I will be ordering Bloodland, about Europe between Stalin and Hitler. It’s not an insignificant seller.
There’s so much not taught in schools these days.
It’s almost as if….
“At the risk of striking a hyperbolic note, I think American liberals evince a similar psychopathology, namely, the desire to seek self-validation through coercing others to do as they (the liberals) think they should do.”
Indeed. That is what liberal political correctness is all about. It’s why the liberals who enforce political correctness are so arbitrary and dishonest and cruel in their accusations. They don’t really care if people see that their claimed justifications are BS, because their purpose is not to make the world a kinder, more just place, it is to increase their power. By destroying even the most innocent, they demonstrate their power and thus terrorize the populace.
I note from scanning this evening’s TV schedule that CBS is devoting twice as much attention to the Democrats as it’s giving the GOP ticket:
(all times EDT)
7-8 pm Sixty Minutes – interviews with Romney and Ryan
8-9 pm Big Brother
9-10 pm Criminal Minds
Occam’s Beard Says:
“At the risk of striking a hyperbolic note, I think American liberals evince a similar psychopathology, namely, the desire to seek self-validation through coercing others to do as they (the liberals) think they should do. ”
I agree. Sometimes someone comes along and argues that the problem that keeps the left / pc program from working is that it is based on lies. The goal is to force everyone to believe in the lies but since they are lies… the end results can not come about. 2 + 2 still equals 4.