This day in history: The Great Purge of the Soviet Union began on this day in 1936.
From James Harris:
Between the summer of 1936 and 1938, the regime of Joseph Stalin summarily executed 750,000 Soviet citizens without trial or any legal process. In the same period, more than a million others were sent to the labour camps of the Gulag, from where many would not return. In the history of a murderous regime, this was a period of exceptional state violence perpetrated against its own people.
The episode has always held a certain macabre fascination, but there are other more substantial reasons for drawing attention to it as we reach the 80th anniversary. In 1991, and then again in 2000, huge volumes of archival materials — millions of documents — were released to historians. It has taken years to digest this material and make sense of it, but new and striking findings have made it possible to rewrite the history of what has come to be known as the Terror, or the Great Purge. My recent book The Great Fear is one example of this. These findings help us better understand contemporary Russia, its current, authoritarian leader and the reverence many Russians continue to feel for Stalin.
Khrushchev wanted to insulate himself from blame.
In the West, the public perception of Stalin and the Terror lingers from the period immediately after the dictator’s death in 1953. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, wanted to limit the power of the fearsome Soviet political police. But he also wanted to communicate to the Soviet political elite that they would not be blamed for the violence of the Stalin era, though they had been deeply and directly involved. So Khrushchev blamed the Terror on Stalin and his “cult of personality”, and historians in the West followed his lead.
They – particularly following the lead of Robert Conquest in his 1967 book The Great Terror – presented Stalin as a bloodthirsty, paranoid, political opportunist determined to secure total power over all other considerations. The Terror of 1936-1938 was therefore understood as the culmination of a drive to create a personal dictatorship.
What Kept Stalin Awake at Night
Archival revelations have not, it must be said, established that Stalin was actually a nice guy. Quite the contrary. But they have poked rather large holes in the traditional story.
For example, it became clear rather early on that the majority of victims of the Terror were ordinary workers and peasants — people who presented no direct challenge to Stalin’s power. When Stalin’s private papers were released in 2000, historians initially expected to see a gap between them and Stalin’s public self-presentation as a loyal follower of Lenin and defender of the Revolution. But it wasn’t there. In public and in private, Stalin was committed to building socialism, not to building a personal dictatorship for its own sake.
The purges were motivated by a precise ideological goal.
So what was the motivation behind the Terror? The answers required a lot more digging, but it gradually became clearer that the violence of the late 1930s was driven by fear. Most Bolsheviks, Stalin among them, believed that the revolutions of 1789, 1848 and 1871 had failed because their leaders hadn’t adequately anticipated the ferocity of the counter-revolutionary reaction from the establishment. They were determined not to make the same mistake.
So they created elaborate systems for gathering information on external and internal threats to their revolution. But those systems were far from perfect. They painted threats in far darker colours than was warranted. For example, the Bolsheviks spent much of the 1920s and 1930s anticipating invasion from coalitions of hostile capitalist states — coalitions that did not exist. Other perceived threats were also exaggerated beyond all proportion: scheming factions, disloyal officials, wreckers, saboteurs.
Stalin interpreted failure as treason.
Many of these “threats” were products of Stalin’s overambitious plans. He had demanded 100% fulfillment of production targets that could not be met, and he and his colleagues in the Kremlin misinterpreted the resultant dissent, resistance and breakdowns as evidence of counter-revolutionary conduct. And certain workers and peasants – who had reason to resent the regime – were viewed as dangerous potential recruits to this fictional counter-revolution.
The Preemptive War at Home
By the mid-1930s, the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the militarists in Japan, both stridently anti-communist, posed a very real threat to the USSR. War was then on the horizon, and Stalin felt he had no choice but to take preemptive action against what he saw as a potential fifth column – a group that would undermine the larger collective.
The resultant maelstrom of violence massively weakened the USSR rather than strengthening it, but the ultimate victory of Soviet forces in World War II appeared to justify the Terror. And the emergent Cold War seemed to justify the view that the capitalist world would stop at nothing to undermine Soviet power.
The KGB portrayed itself as the heroes.
The Soviet political police, renamed the KGB in 1954, never recognised the monstrous crimes that they had contributed to under Stalin’s direction. They perceived themselves as heroes of the story, brilliantly anticipating and intercepting the evil deeds of the regime’s enemies.
Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, rose from the ranks of the KGB in the 1970s. He was trained in its methods and steeped in its mentality. While one should not leap to the conclusion that he is a prisoner of his early career, the echoes of the KGB (and Stalin’s) thinking are present in the messages delivered relentlessly by the state-controlled media.
Putin is calling plays from Stalin's book.
The population is told that the US and EU want to reduce Russia to the status of a third-rate power, to take control over her resources and subvert her values. Putin does not propose officially to rehabilitate the figure of Stalin, but he does little to challenge the public presentation of his predecessor as someone who made Russia a great power, and who stood up to the West.
Today, we better understand the exaggerated fears that sparked the paroxysm of state violence that was the Great Terror. But in Russia, the echoes of those same fears prevent an open discussion of Stalin’s crimes, and serve to reinforce Putin’s authoritarianism.
This day in history: Soviet cosmonauts Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev died on this day in 1971 when their Soyuz 11 spacecraft depressurized during preparations for re-entry. These are the only reported human deaths outside the Earth's atmosphere.
Or were they the only human deaths outside the Earth's atmosphere?
There is also something called the Lost Cosmonauts (Phantom Cosmonauts) Theory. This theory alleges that Soviet and Russian space authorities have concealed the deaths of some cosmonauts in outer space. Proponents of the Lost Cosmonauts theory argue that the Soviet Union attempted to launch human spaceflights before Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight, and that cosmonauts onboard died in those attempts.
The idea of phantom cosmonauts gained traction because the Soviet Union’s early space program was shrouded in quite a bit of mystery. The Soviets denied all of these allegations, and while they were always eager to cover up any embarrassing incidents behind the Iron Curtain.
This day in history: The Novocherkassk Massacre happened on this day in 1962. On June 1 1962, the Soviet Union raised the price of consumer goods by more than 25 percent in order to cover higher operating expenses for the U.S.S.R.'s collective farm program. Butter was up 25%, and pork and beef by 30%. In protest, workers walked off of the job at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Factory and the strike soon turned into an uprising.
The day after price rises took effect in the Soviet Union, protests in the city of Novocherkassk were brutally suppressed in what is remembered as the Novocherkassk massacre. Strikers marched to the center of town, where they were joined by other protesters. After word spread that some of the strike leaders had been arrested, the local Communist party headquarters was invaded, after which the group marched into the police station and at 1:10 pm, after firing a warning volley of shots, one of the units of soldiers fired into the crowd. It was revealed thirty years later that 23 people were killed, and 116 arrested. Of those arrested, seven were convicted of sedition and executed, while others received prison terms ranging from 10 to 15 years. The news was kept out of the Soviet press. Months later, unofficial reports in the West referred to "hundreds" of deaths and in 1976, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago would report that there had been more than 70 deaths. The Soviet government would finally confirm the killings on June 3, 1989, in an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda.
This day in history: On this day in 1967, Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn took a stand against censorship by the government of the USSR, signing his name to, and mailing, 250 copies of a letter mailed to members of the Union of Soviet Writers and to editors of literary newspapers and magazines. In order to avoid the risk of anyone other than himself being blamed for the contents, he addressed each of the envelopes, in his own writing, prior to the Fourth Writers' Congress. Listing eight instances where he had been silenced by the government, he complained that his work had been "smothered, gagged, and slandered" and called on the recipients to work toward abolishing censorship and defending Union members against unjust persecution.
"Can you name any time in human history, when looking back, you believe the censors were the good guys? The censors are always pretty much the villains." Robert Kennedy Jr
This Day in History: A Communist newspaper in Russia said the quiet part out loud on this day in 1969.
The Soviet government newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, whose audience was the young Communist Party members who belonged to the Party's youth wing, the Komsomol, published an unusually frank admission that the Soviet Union lagged behind the capitalist Western nations in almost every aspect of economic development. Noting that a 1961 prediction by former party leader Nikita Khrushchev— that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States in its standard of living by 1970— was not going to happen and was not even close to occurring, the newspaper survey presented statistics that Soviet citizens had 6.75% as many automobiles, one-fourth the number of radios, less than half as much new clothing and half as much meat and dairy products as Americans. The survey noted, however, that the Soviets were ahead in the number of physicians, the amount spent per student on education, and the amount of housing construction.
This Day In History: All activities of the Soviet Communist Party was suspended on this day in 1991. Paul Craig Roberts once said: "We should all be thankful to the Soviets, because they have proved conclusively that socialism doesn't work. No one can say they didn't have enough power or enough bureaucracy or enough planners or they didn't go far enough."
Some were simply shot; others were tortured to death or sent to die as slave labor in the concentration and labor camps.The Soviet regime had ruled Russia and the other 14 component republics of the U.S.S.R. for nearly 75 years, since the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 led by Vladimir Lenin and his communist cadre of Marxist followers. During that almost three-quarters of a century, first under Lenin and especially Josef Stalin and then their successors, historians have estimated that upwards of 64 million people – innocent, unarmed men, women and children – died at the hands of the Soviet regime in the name of building the “bright, beautiful future” of socialism.
Millions Dead
The forced collectivization of the land under Stalin in the early 1930s, alone, is calculated to have cost the lives of nine to twelve million Russian and Ukrainian peasants and their families who resisted the loss of their private farms and being forced into state collective farms that replaced them.
Some were simply shot; others were tortured to death or sent to die as slave labor in the concentration and labor camps in Siberia or Soviet Central Asia known as the GULAG. Millions were slowly starved to death by a government-created famine designed to force submission to the central planning dictates of Stalin and his henchmen.
Millions of others were rounded up and sent off to those prison and labor camps as part of the central plan for forced industrial and mineral mining development of the far reaches of the Soviet Union. In the 1930s and 1940s, Stalin’s central plans would include quotas for how many of the “enemies of the people” were to be arrested and executed in every city, town and district in the Soviet Union. In addition, there were quotas for how many were to be rounded up as replacements for those who had already died in the GULAG working in the vast wastelands of Siberia, northern European Russia and Central Asia.
By the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s the Soviet system had become increasingly corrupt, stagnant, and decrepit under a succession of aging Communist Party leaders whose only purpose was to hold on to power and their special privileges. In 1986 a much younger man, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had worked his way up in the Party hierarchy was appointed to the leading position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R.
Gorbachev's Attempt to Save Socialism
Gorbachev had introduced to two reform agendas.
Gorbachev believed that the Soviet Union had taken several serious wrong turns in the past. But he was not an opponent of socialism or its Marxist-Leninist foundations. He wanted a new “socialism-with-a-human-face.” His goal was a “kinder and gentler” communist ideology, so to speak. He truly believed that the Soviet Union could be saved, and with it a more humane collectivist alternative to Western capitalism.
To achieve this end, Gorbachev had introduced to two reform agendas: First, perestroika, a series of economic changes meant to admit the mistakes of heavy-handed central planning. State enterprise managers were to be more accountable, small private businesses would be permitted and fostered, and Soviet companies would be allowed to form joint ventures with selected Western corporations. Flexibility and adaptability would create a new and better socialist economy.
Second, glasnost, political “openness,” under which the political follies of the past would be admitted and the formerly “blank pages” of Soviet history – especially about the “crimes of Stalin” – would be filled in. Greater historical and political honesty, it was said, would revive the moribund Soviet ideology and renew the Soviet people’s enthusiastic support for the reformed and redesigned bright socialist future.
However, over time the more hardline and “conservative” members of the Soviet leadership considered all such reforms as opening a Pandora’s Box of uncontrollable forces that would undermine the Soviet system. They had already seen this happen in the outer ring of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe.
The Beginning of the End in Eastern Europe
In 1989 Gorbachev had stood by as the Berlin Wall, the symbol of Soviet imperial power in the heart of Europe, had come tumbling down, and the Soviet “captive nations” of Eastern Europe – East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria – that Stalin had claimed as conquered booty at the end of the Second World War, began to free themselves from communist control and Soviet domination. (See my article, “The Berlin Wall and the Spirit of Freedom.”)
The Soviet hardliners were now convinced that a new political treaty that Gorbachev was planning to sign with Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Federation Republic and Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, would mean the end of the Soviet Union, itself.
Already, the small Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were reasserting the national independence they had lost in 1939-1940, as a result of Stalin and Hitler’s division of Eastern Europe. Violent, and murderous Soviet military crackdowns in Lithuania and in Latvia in January 1991 had failed to crush the budding democratic movements in those countries. Military methods had also been employed, to no avail, to keep in line the Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. (See my article, “How Lithuania Helped Take Down the Soviet Union.”)
Communist Conspirators for Soviet Power
People all around the world saw Yeltsin stand atop an army tank outside the parliament building asking Muscovites to resist this attempt to return to the dark days of communist rule.
On August 18, 1991, the hardline conspirators tried to persuade Gorbachev to reverse his planned political arrangements with the Russian Federation and Soviet Kazakhstan. When he refused he was held by force in a summer home he was vacationing at in the Crimea on the Black Sea.
Early on the morning of August 19, the conspirators issued a declaration announcing their takeover of the Soviet government. A plan to capture and possibly kill Boris Yeltsin failed. Yeltsin eluded the kidnappers and made his way to the Russian parliament building from his home outside Moscow. Military units loyal to the conspirators ringed the city with tanks on every bridge leading into the city and along every main thoroughfare in the center of Moscow. Tank units had surrounded the Russian parliament, as well.
But Yeltsin soon was rallying the people of Moscow and the Russian population in general to defend Russia’s own emerging democracy. People all around the world saw Yeltsin stand atop an army tank outside the parliament building asking Muscovites to resist this attempt to return to the dark days of communist rule.
The Western media made much at the time of the apparent poor planning during the seventy-two hour coup attempt during August 19 to the 21. The world press focused on and mocked the nervousness and confusion shown by some of the coup leaders during a press conference. The conspirators were ridiculed for their Keystone Cop-like behavior in missing their chance to kidnap Yeltsin or delaying their seizure of the Russian parliament building; or leaving international telephone lines open and not even jamming foreign news broadcasts that were reporting the events as they happened to the entire Soviet Union.
The Dangers If the Hardliners had Won
Regardless of the poor planning on the part of the coup leaders, however, the fact remains that if they had succeeded the consequences might have been catastrophic. I have a photocopy of the arrest warrant form that had been prepared for the Moscow region and signed by the Moscow military commander, Marshal Kalinin.
It gave the military and the KGB, the Soviet secret police, the authority to arrest anyone. It had a “fill-in-the-blank,” where the victim’s name would be written in. Almost 500,000 of these arrest warrant forms had been prepared. In other words, upwards of a half-million people might have been imprisoned in Moscow, alone.
The day before the coup began, the KGB had received a consignment of 250,000 pairs of handcuffs. And the Russian press later reported that some of the prison camps in Siberia had been clandestinely reopened. If the coup had succeeded possibly as many as three to fourmillionpeople in the Soviet Union would have been sent to the GULAG, the notorious Soviet labor camp system.
During the coup attempt Moscow had a surrealistic quality, as I walked through various parts of the center of the city
Another document published in the Russian press after the coup failed had the instructions for the military authorities in various regions around the country. They were to begin tighter surveillance of the people in the areas under their jurisdiction. They were to keep watch on the words and actions of everyone. Foreigners were to be even more carefully followed and watched. And their reports to the coup leaders in Moscow were to be filed every four hours. Indeed, when the coup was in progress, the KGB began to close down commercial joint ventures with Western companies in Moscow, accusing them of being “nests of spies,” and arrested some of the Russian participants in these enterprises.
Fear Underneath a Surreal Calm
During the coup attempt Moscow had a surrealistic quality, as I walked through various parts of the center of the city. On the streets around the city it seemed as if nothing were happening – except for the clusters of Soviet tank units strategically positioned at central intersections and at the bridges crossing the Moscow River. Taxi cabs patrolled the avenues looking for passengers; the population seemed to go about its business walking to and from work, or waiting in long lines for the meager supplies of everyday essentials at the government retail stores; and motorists were as usual also lined up at the government owned gasoline stations. Even with the clearly marked foreign license plates on my rented car, I was never stopped as I drove around the center of Moscow.
The only signs that these were extraordinary days were the grimmer than usual looks on the faces of many; and that in the food stores many people would silently huddle around radios after completing their purchases. However, the appearance of near normality could not hide the fact that the future of the country was hanging in the balance.
Russians Run the Risk for Freedom
Russians of various walks of life had to ask themselves what price they put on freedom.
During the three days of that fateful week, Russians of various walks of life had to ask themselves what price they put on freedom. And thousands concluded that risking their lives to prevent a return to communist despotism was price they were willing to pay. Those thousands appeared at the Russian parliament in response to Boris Yeltsin’s appeal to the people. They built makeshift barricades, and prepared to offer themselves as unarmed human shields against Soviet tanks and troops, if they had attacked. My future wife, Anna, and I were among those friends of freedom who stood vigil during most of those three days facing the barrels of Soviet tanks.
Among those thousands, three groups were most noticeable in having chosen to fight for freedom: First, young people in their teens and twenties who had been living in a freer environment during the previous six years since Gorbachev had come to power, and who did not want to live under the terror and tyranny their parents had known in the past. Second, new Russian businessmen, who realized that without a free political order the emerging economic liberties would be crushed that were enabling them to establish private enterprises. And, third, veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, who had been conscripted into the service of Soviet imperialism and were now determined to prevent its return.
The bankruptcy of the Soviet system was demonstrated not only by the courage of those thousands defending the Russian parliament, but also by the unwillingness of the Soviet military to obey the orders of the coup leaders. It is true that only a handful of military units actually went over immediately to Yeltsin’s side in Moscow.
But hundreds of Russian babushkas – grandmothers – went up to the young soldiers and officers manning the Soviet tanks, and asked them, “Are you going to shoot their mother, your father, your grandmother? We are your own people.” The final act of the coup came when these military units refused to obey orders and seize the Russian parliament building, at the possible cost of hundreds or thousands of lives.
Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
Again the people chanted: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”
On that clear, warm Thursday of August 22, that huge mass of humanity that had assembled in a large plaza behind the Russian parliament stood and listened as Boris Yeltsin told them that that area would now be known as the Square of Russian Freedom. The multitude replied in unison: Svaboda! Svaboda! Svaboda! – “Freedom! Freedom, Freedom!”
A huge flag of pre-communist Russia, with its colors of white, blue and red, draped the entire length of the parliament building. The crowd looked up and watched as the Soviet red flag, with its yellow hammer and sickle in the upper left corner, was lowered from the flagpole atop the parliament, and the Russian colors were raised for the first time in its place. And again the people chanted: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”
Not too far away from the parliament building in Moscow, that same day, a large crowd had formed at Lubyanka Square at the headquarters of the KGB. With the help of a crane, these Muscovites pulled down a large statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police that stood near the entrance to the KGB building. In a small park across from the KGB headquarters, in a corner of which rests a small monument to the victims of the Soviet prison and labor camps, an anti-communist rally was held. A young man in an old Czarist Russian military uniform burned a Soviet flag, while the crowd cheered him on.
The seventy-five-year nightmare of communist tyranny and terror was coming to an end. The people of Russia were hoping for freedom, and they were basking in the imagined joy of it.
Freedom’s Hope and Post-Communist Reality
The demise of the Communist Party and the Soviet system was one of the momentous events in modern history. That it came about with a relatively small amount of bloodshed during those seventy-two hours of the hardline coup attempt was nothing short of miraculous – only a handful of people lost their lives.
The last twenty-five years have not turned out the way that many of the friends of freedom in Russia had hoped.
Indeed, post-communist Russia saw a contradictory, poorly organized, and corrupted privatization of Soviet industry, plus a high and damaging inflation in 1992-1994; a severe financial crisis in 1998; a return to authoritarian political rule following Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 1999; two bloody and destructive wars in the attempted breakaway region of Chechnya; widespread and pervasive corruption at all levels of government; state controlled and manipulated markets, investment, commerce, and the news media; assassinations and imprisonments of political opponents of the regime; and significant nostalgia among too many in the country for a return to “great power” status and the “firm hand” of the infamous Stalinist era. Plus, Putin’s recent military adventures in Crimea, Ukraine, and Syria.
Nonetheless, for those of us who were fortunate enough to be in Moscow in August 1991, it remains in our minds as an unforgettable historical moment when the first and longest-lived of the twentieth century’s totalitarian states was brought to the doorstep of its end. The Soviet Union, finally, disappeared off the political map of the world on December 24, 1991 with the formal breakup and independence of the 15 Soviet republics that had made up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The Soviet nightmare of “socialism-in-practice” was over.
Richard M. Ebeling is BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He was president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) from 2003 to 2008.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
This day in history: Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union on this day in 1927. Many have wondered if Soviet Russia would have been better, and less violent under a Trotsky rule.
Historian Lesley Chamberlain wrote this in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, "We are left weighing a multiple tragedy, of a man so loyal to an ideology he died for it; of an ideology that in one form or another killed millions; and of a 20th century in which political radicals world-wide called themselves Trotskyists and believed that Lenin was good and Stalin bad, that even if the Soviet Union was a degenerate workers' state, the real thing could be established elsewhere. Trotsky had people killed. But . . . [he] was not a bad man."
To this, Ilya Somin responded: "Well, let's see. Trotsky was responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, helped mastermind the establishment of one history's worst totalitarian regimes, and broke with Joseph Stalin in the 1920s in part because he thought that Stalin wasn't going far enough in extending Soviet totalitarianism at home and exporting it abroad. Other than that, he was a helluva guy. If that record isn't enough to qualify you as a "bad man," I don't know what is." Source
Trotsky believed that Socialism can only be instituted by brute force: “It is quite clear that if our problem is the abolition of private property in the means of production, the only road to its solution lies through the concentration of state power in its entirety in the hands of the proletariat, and the setting up for the transitional period of an extraordinary regime…Dictatorship is necessary because this is a case not of partial changes, but of the very existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this basis. Only force can be the deciding factor…Whoever aims at the end cannot reject the means.” [The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 738.]
Trotsky also supported the dissolution of the family: “The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called ‘family hearth’ — that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters.” [Revolution Betrayed]
Additionally, we have Trotsky to thank for the weaponized use of the term "Racism." "Trotsky did not ‘invent’ the word ‘racist or racism’. However, Trotsky certainly popularized the word(s) and made ‘liberal’ use of them in his two-volumed book ‘History of the Russian Revolution’. Perhaps more to the point here is that Trotsky was among the very first to ‘leverage’ the word ‘racist’ and his smearing definition or concept of it as useful means to his own political ends, which was not limited to but included fomenting dissent and sparking division amongst the populations. Trotsky was one of the first to ‘weaponize’ the word ‘racist’, using it (s) as propaganda; as tool of mass manipulation and as a way of smearing and silencing opposition. In doing so, Trotsky becomes a big reason why the definition of ‘racist’ or ‘racism’ is now so broad and so broadly applied—even ubiquitously—by today’s left, hence diluting it’s true power and meaning. By his cynical use of the word ‘racist’ and his opportunistic, amorphous over-application, we might even say Trotsky was the first to effectively denigrate the sad, ponderous depth and weight of the word’s true meaning as well as the tragedy of it’s consequences for history’s very real victims of actual racists."~Dan Kidd
Trotsky was murdered with an ice pick in Mexico in 1940 by a fellow Communist. Perhaps his exile and his violent death should tell us all we need to know about the ideology he lived by and defended.
In 2005, the now-famous ice pick was slated to go to auction to be sold for the highest price. A proper Capitalist ending to a Socialistic disaster.
