Dope
Limited inc is quite familiar (as, I assume, hypocrite lecteur, you are too) with mass murder as a background phenomenon. After all, we all grew up in a world where the weaponry stored underground in Arkansas and the Ukraine would be more than sufficient to wipe the whole breed of Yahoos from the earth; along, probably, with many other breeds -- chihuahas, siamese cats, etc. This knowledge was, properly, bystander knowledge -- to use Karl Krauss' distinction between Dasein and Dabei-sein. The era, in other words, of Black magic.

But Limited Inc has not had the honor of personal, sensual acquaintance with mass murder. No rifle butt aimed for the lower back propelled us into a pit at Babi Yar; no NKVD boot landed on our ms in a cramped Moscow apartment. We never had to swallow our teeth, or our feces, in a basement in the Lubyanka prison, as did Meyerhold, the great theater director, before he confessed; never had to confront our formerly friendly neighbors in some Rwanda ville, neighbors armed with machetes and ready for a go with the daughter, wife, and even, shockingly, our own most precious carcass. We have the privilege of not even having to care too much about these things, and of course we exercise it, in the same way we turn switches on or off and buy our French roast coffee beans at Whole Foods. No big deal.

Which brings us, by an intellectual detour, to Aileen Kelly's essay on Stalinism, murder and time in the current NYRB.

Kelly is part of an often abused scholarly tribe, along with Sheila Fitzgerald and a few others, who study Stalinism as a phenomenon apart from what Koestler and Robert Conquest said about it. I'm going to get to that in my next post. But I wanted to share two grafs that will point you to this article.


"Brooks cites one revealing anecdote on what it was like for the ordinary Soviet citizen to live in a utopian temporality. The German Communist Wolfgang Leonhard, who grew up in Moscow, describes his confusion when in 1935 he and his mother sought to replace their outdated 1924 map of Moscow and discovered that the new map contained all the improvements destined to be completed by 1945: "We used to take both town plans with us on our walks from then on�one showing what Moscow had looked like ten years before, and the other showing what it would look like ten years hence." As Brooks says, "what had vanished or, more exactly, become compressed between two dream worlds was the present."

And this irresistible graf:

"We can still only speculate on Stalin's motives and the wider pressures that led to the orgy of violence. Yet Lewis Siegelbaum's analysis of letters from ordinary citizens shows that very many did not question the policy of repression itself, ascribing "excesses" in this respect only to particular individuals: a common suspicion was that "enemies of the people" had wormed their way into the NKVD and, by arresting loyal Communists, were attempting to undermine Soviet power. Substantial numbers of the Party elite seem to have seen the Terror as a necessary defensive operation. Those who (we may assume) did not, such as the veteran Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, were forced to use the official rhetoric. In a letter to Stalin which he hoped would save him from execution after his trial in 1938, he protests his innocence of the charges against him, but writes that "there is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge...[which] encompasses 1) the guilty; 2) persons under suspicion; and 3) persons potentially under suspicion.""