From Stalin to Putin and back

Some Eastern thinkers insist on the cyclical nature of life. Solomon, or whoever wrote Ecclesiastes, had a similar idea: “… the wind returneth again according to its circuits.”

Even though that view denies Christian teleology, which is by definition linear, looking at Russia I sometimes feel those ancient chaps had a point. The latest occasion that inspired such heretical thoughts was the 12-year prison term handed out to Ksenia Karelina.

This young woman, a talented amateur ballerina, holds dual Russian-US citizenship, having acquired the second part by marrying an American. She settled in Los Angeles and was supposed to live happily ever after.

But then Ksenia made a fatal mistake: she decided to visit her 90-year-old grandmother in Yekaterinburg, the city she herself was from. When Ksenia landed, she was welcomed home by friendly customs men, who checked her phone for suspicious contacts.

The key word they tapped in was ‘Ukraine’, and sure enough, Ksenia turned out to be a seasoned criminal. Brace yourself, for I’m now going to divulge the gruesome details of her crime. Are you ready?

Here comes: it turned out Ksenia had donated about £50 to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based charity that provides humanitarian aid to children and old people in the Ukraine. The officers were shocked by the evidence of that heinous crime, as I’m sure you are.

Ksenia Karelina was summarily arrested and charged with high treason. She was then tried in camera and, having pleaded guilty, sentenced to 12 years in, not to cut too fine a point, a concentration camp.

Knowing a few things about the investigative techniques favoured by Russian jurisprudence, I suspect the closed trial was necessary to conceal the reasons for Ksenia’s mea culpa. Spectators might have spotted the aftermath of vigorous interrogations.

That made me think of my own life in Russia, which mercifully came to an end 51 years ago. Those were the halcyon days of Brezhnev’s reign, when anyone finding anything wrong with communism – and sharing his thoughts with other people, either orally or especially in writing – risked a prison term.

My memory of that is still quite vivid, because I was a rather active dissident, going quite a bit further than just grumbling. Hence KGB major Sazonov had a father-to-son talk with me and threatened me with Article 70 of the USSR Penal Code: “agitation and propaganda aiming to undermine the Soviet Union” or words to that effect.

And here’s the thing: the maximum prison term for that crime was specified as seven (7) years. True enough, some people did get such draconian sentences, but not many. Back in 1973 political prisoners in the Soviet Union numbered dozens, a few hundred tops. And most of them had sentences shorter than seven years.

The Code also has an article for high treason, but take my word for it: that wouldn’t have been invoked just for a little change donated to a charitable cause, no matter how objectionable.

Karelina’s case harkens back to much earlier times, those of Stalin, when millions were executed or murdered ‘the dry way’ (wasn’t Soviet slang wonderful) – killed by starvation, cold, torture and backbreaking labour in concentration camps.

It appears that Putin has jumped backwards, leapfrogging Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s time, and landing smack in the middle of Stalin’s, if not yet with full force.

There are some 1,200 political prisoners in today’s Russia, and those are just the ones we know about. Terms like 15 years are routinely handed out to evildoers who describe the war in the Ukraine as just that, rather than the mandated ‘special military operation’.

There’s still no death penalty, not officially at any rate. Unofficially, prisoners – or even people at large – are being murdered apace. The methods vary from poison to shooting to stabbing to savage beatings, the usual repertoire of violence.

Russians who aren’t blinded by the flying shards of round-the-clock propaganda fear that unbridled mass terror, unseen since Stalin’s time, is on its way back. They have much to be afraid of.

I’ll now translate for your delectation a few choice excerpts from an indictment passed on some NKVD executioners in 1940, when even Stalin’s mass murderers felt the boys had overstepped the mark.

The accepted killing technique was a bullet in the nape of the neck, and just one NKVD/KGB executioner, Vasily Blokhin, ran up a score in six digits. He even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records by dispatching 7,000 Polish POWs in just 28 days.

But such methods didn’t satisfy the refined tastes of Blokhin’s colleagues in the Vologda Region. They were eventually charged with “perverse methods of applying capital punishment”.

According to the official indictment, the officers: “drove 55 prisoners to the field and hacked them with axes. Two women were beaten to death with logs of wood.”

During the interrogation of one suspect, he had his nose broken with a metal hook and his eyes gouged out, after which he was buried under the floorboards. Two “citizens” were killed with sledgehammers and buried under the floor of the local register office, apparently taking the overflow from the NKVD’s own headquarters.

“One evening a meeting was called at the local NKVD office, where everyone was told of the CPSU Central Committee directive to kill about 70 people without using firearms. After that, the boss took an axe and a sledgehammer out of the cabinet, saying that was how they were to kill some 30 people that night. They were to chop people’s heads off and then bury pieces of their flesh in the pre-prepared graves at the cemetery.

“Prisoners, 15-20 at a time, were taken out of prison to the register office, where they were tied up, put into sleighs and covered with blankets, with NKVD officers sitting on top. When arriving at the graves, prisoners were taken out one by one, dismembered with an axe and buried in pieces. That way officers dispatched a large number of prisoners within three days. Afterwards they burned their own clothes covered with blood and the clothes of the killed prisoners.”

The grandsons of those Vologda monsters are now running the country, and, though ostensibly Russian politics has changed, the NKVD/KGB/FSB has enjoyed an unbroken continuity of monstrosity. It’s under their tutelage that Russia has become what a certain British columnist likes to describe as “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”.

At the moment, they mostly vent their best urges on Ukrainians, trying to match and outdo their NKVD progenitors. But those Russians who know the history of their country are quaking in their boots. The wind of unrestrained violence is gusting full blast, and it’s not long before it’ll indeed “return again according to its circuits”.

That sinister organisation has been running Russia de jure for 25 years through its frontman, Col. Putin. And those Russians who understand something that columnist doesn’t are running for their lives. As did I, all those years ago.