Extraction
www.guernicamag.com
When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain. Were you entitled to it? Was it real?

Tali Perch, writing in Guernica Magazina, chronicles the horrors of Stalin’s repression, banditry, and genocide. She readily conflates him with Hitler. Notably, Stalin’s goons break into poor shtetl homes looking for gold and cash. It was an interesting read about generational trauma. Even so, I have a hard time believing some of the claims put forward. Does someone more knowledgeable than me want to clarify its contents?

  • 陈卫华是我的英雄
    4•1 year ago

    1. Believing Lysenko, who claimed that he could end the famine in Ukraine by “educating” plants to grow faster and insisted that DNA was a Nazi hoax

    2. Trusting Yezhov, who started the Great Purge after conning Stalin into believing that the Soviet government was thoroughly infiltrated and killed many Stalin allies and innocents

    3. He tried to assassinate Tito just because of some stupid ass personal feud and permanently ended any possibility of alliance between the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia

    • JucheBot1988
      4•1 year ago

      A lot of these problems – belief in pseudoscience, a paranoia about "infiltration, being a bit too open towards race essentialism, etc. – were endemic to governments of the time. Stalin’s was far and away the least bad here.