Bolshevism: 60 years Later

By Charles Turk

(August 24, 2005) – Until May 8, the realities of Bolshevik brutalities suffered a 60-year denial in terms of Eastern Europe. However, on May 8, President Bush was quoted as saying “the captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.”

This long-overdue acknowledgment is an understatement. In tiny Hungary alone, with a mere 9 million people, 600,000 innocents were deported to forced labor in the Soviet Union in 1944-45. Seventy percent of these people died in captivity in the USSR within three years. Those who made it back constituted 80 percent of the dead during the weeks and months after they got home.

As they pulled the plows, within yards there were tractors and healthy horses. Failing to plow 2.4 acres per day constituted sabotage, in which case the “teams of beasts” were put into solitary confinement overnight, and were to plow the norm the next day. However, if the few who survived were willing to charge that it was the Nazis who inflicted these brutalities on them, they were reclassified as POWs and given some assistance. Imagine. The Nazis ravaging thousands three years after their destruction.

Now that there is purported democracy in the former Soviet-controlled areas, this denial of deportations continues. Those denying it today also did so under Bolshevism, only now they are party heads of Social Democrats or something even more euphemistic.

Democracy in former Bolshevik countries is similar, at best, to the robber baron era in the United States. Those who grabbed material riches under Bolshevism are rich. Those who were ripped off are poor.

D.M. Thomas, author of Solzhenitsyn, A Century in His Life, lists the human cost of Bolshevism in the USSR alone: Cause of death: 1917-21 – shootings, torture, 6 million to 12 million; 1922-23 – famine in the Volga region and other areas, 7.5 million to 13 million; 1922-28 – destruction of the old social classes, the clergy and believers, 2 million to 3 million; 1929-33 – liquidation of kulaks, organized famine, 16 million; 1934-41 – mass executions in prisons and camps, starvation in camps, artificially created epidemics, 7 million; 1941-42 – destruction of prisoners through hunger and overwork, 7.5 million; 1943-45 – deaths in Stalin’s wartime camps, 5 million; 1946-53 – deaths in Stalin’s camps after the war, 6 million.

All this sickening history of murder then is far more than just “captivity.” One effective bit to cut into Stalin’s mouth might have been to demand an explanation as to why, when the brutal Nazi troops left Leningrad in retreat, tens of thousands of Leningraders joined them instead of rejoicing in “liberation” by the Red Army. Thus by the Yalta agreement, 67 million people in Europe had been sold into slavery and slaughter.

If so, we have hidden the ineptitude of gloried statesmen in the West, and at the same time concealed the Soviet brutalities. Ignorance is bliss, but is pretended ignorance bliss? No, it is connivance.

The scattered bones of the tens of millions in the fields around the former 3,500 to 6,300 Soviet-forced labor camps are the real testimony, not the carefully crafted, Cloroxed words of politicians.

Turk, a retired English teacher, lived under Bolshevism for 11 years. He now is a lecturer on Bolshevik brutalities.
Copyright 2005 Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
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