In the name of Stalin?

Soon it will be a year since Echo of Moscow broadcasts a series of programs “In the Name of Stalin” - together with the publishing house “Russian Political Encyclopedia”, with the support of the foundation named after the first president of Russia Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin. Frankly speaking, none of the programs in the series forced me, the host of this program, to change my impression of the father of all nations. I don't love him. I don’t like it because of family history: my own grandfather - a British spy - was shot in 1940, and my, now deceased, father lived under the impression of this arrest... When they came for my grandfather - to the apartment where I was born - my father was present at this. He said: before leaving the house, my grandfather asked permission to go to the toilet. They gave him permission, but they didn’t allow him to close the door... The last time my father saw his father’s back was in the opening of the unlocked toilet door... In another branch of the family there were also repressed people, which split the families, giving rise to the habit of silence.

Thanks to those who reveal the terrible layers of this silence. "Memorial", which is working on collecting evidence. Every time on the program, I read text messages from people filled with awareness of the greatness of the person who broke, among other things, their consciousness. “Who liberated you Jews from Auschwitz?” - asks one of them. “Stalin solved great problems, what can we say now about the corpse garbage that formed the foundation,” echoes another. “You creatures will die, but the name of the great Stalin will remain for centuries,” says a third. God is their judge. Maybe this vile force spared their own families? Or did their grandfathers work on the assembly line and sincerely believed that EVERYONE, do you hear, everyone who came to them was guilty?

We are still broken inside our own souls and continue to believe that someone at the top knows better whether we are honest citizens or class enemies... The Memorial human rights center has a project “The Last Witness”, in which they interview people personally who witnessed the work of this diabolical machine. At the presentation of the project, I saw an interview with an elderly woman whose parents were dispossessed. She describes monstrous details - hunger, death, torment of those closest to her. “Do you think your father was to blame for something,” the interviewer asks her.

“Of course,” she answers.

- What?

“The fact that he didn’t join the collective farm...”

Medicine is powerless. Only Moses, who led the people through the desert for forty years so that those born in slavery could die, can do anything here. And our desert contributes to the preservation of this slavery - in the minds of people. Although, I hope, those who talk about the great gift of a manager, the savior of the fatherland, etc., are simply disingenuous. Because I don’t believe that the son, grandson or great-grandson of a repressed person is able, after any number of years, to say: yes, my grandfather was not guilty of anything, but it was necessary for a great country. To hell with such a great country!

As part of this project, I traveled to Israel to interview prosecution witnesses. Natalya Solomonovna, daughter of the great actor Solomon Mikhailovich Mikhoels, killed by Stalin, wife of the repressed composer Moses (Mechislav) Weinberg and niece of the repressed doctor Miron Vovsi. “...I dreamed of being allowed to see Stalin in a straitjacket. In a shirt so I wouldn't kill him. But they let me in to tell him everything I thought about him... We initially understood that when a person known to our parents disappeared, we couldn’t ask questions... In my husband’s file, where the accusation was, it was written “Mikhoels’ son-in-law”...

Great country, God forbid. The great one - with the blood of her dead - starved, tortured, shot, murdered, followed by a staged car accident? I don't need such a great country!

Natalya Solomonovna Mikhoels, daughter of the murdered Solomon Mikhailovich, niece of the repressed Miron Lvovich, who was repeatedly denied the right to work in her specialty, grabbed any job, knew how to do a bunch of things besides her main profession, since she had to earn a living: “When we learned about Stalin’s death , I covered my head with a blanket, I didn’t know what would happen next, maybe worse... Then Talochka (Natalia’s sister) asked me to put the kettle on. We are sitting in a room. But he still doesn’t boil. We go out into the kitchen and see that I have put the phone on the burner. Okay, I didn’t turn it on... When they called that Miron Vovsi had returned, we rushed to them. He lay there - his legs hurt badly, and he was beaten. ... Comrade Stalin hardened us a lot...”

A great country - with the crippled fates of relatives of those arrested, who lost the right to work and “hello” to their housemates? I don't need such a great country!

Alla Veniaminovna Zuskina, daughter of the executed actor Veniamin Zuskin: “...The search went on for two days. ...People crossed to the other side of the street so as not to meet my mother's eyes...

…I learned that our friend, a doctor, himself an Armenian, was arrested in the doctors’ case, and his wife, also a doctor, was Jewish. I asked my mother - how can this be, he’s not a Jew? And my mother says: in the Soviet Union, all nations are equal...”

And I don’t need such a great country!

David Peresovich Markish, son of the executed writer Perez Markish: “...My mother sewed something in exile, I worked part-time where I could. No information about the fate of my father... The day after Stalin’s death they brought us a telegram: “Congratulations, we wish you happiness.” The local police officer almost comes in to pick up the telegram with his fists. And we gave him a metric, where in black and white his brother’s date of birth...”

A great country where family members of those arrested without trial are exiled to remote places. Where does the publicly appointed grief on the occasion of the death of the first person have the right to cancel the birthday of a child in any family?

I don’t need such a great country...

Many of those who left the Soviet Union are descendants of those repressed. And does anyone dare consider them guilty of anything?

On American Russian-language radio I talked about the same thing I’m writing about now. Calls - after one or two phrases the interlocutor begins to cry, and I join him: “Lord, how they beat me!.. I want to say that I spent ten years in an orphanage for the children of traitors to the Motherland, then, when my mother returned and was rehabilitated , we were looking for my sister for a long time... My grandfather told me what they did to him during the investigation, no one believed him..." And the terrible, suppressed sobs of people who, half a century later, are unable to remember all this - such a great country is not needed. Nobody needs it, you hear!

And this eternal slavery allows us today to recall the eternal Stalinist formula - the forest is cut down, the chips fly. And it gives - in advance - indulgence to any atrocities in the name of the mythical greatness of the country. And - poor, poor these cripples, if they are ready to become dust under someone’s boots, and poor those whom these cripples are ready to lay down with the same dust, in the name of this greatness. And a poor country. And I won’t leave her anywhere, because I don’t consider myself entitled to give her to these victims of genetic deformity.

Photo from the site www.netpress.ru / kubanphoto.ru