Dear Andy,
You are really testing our civility. Once in America I had to fill out
health insurance form which asked about the age at death and its causes in
my family since 1900. While I stared puzzled counting the dead, my wife did
the calculations ahead: "No male in Derluguian's family has so far died of
natural causes in the twentieth century". Females fared better lasting
beyond eighty raising kids in widow households.
My grandpa was saved in 1930 when he refused to become the collective farm
accountant (he had 7 classes of education, a lot). The local OGPU simply
deported the entire family to the Kalmyk desert to work at the railway
construction. They ate prarie dogs and occasionally dried camel meat there,
which actually saved the family. In 1932 our village of
Staro-Velichkovskaya, a large Cossack settlement of over twenty thousand in
the outstandingly fertile Kuban province, was near completely obliterated
by starvation. It failed to deliver the punitive quota of grain assigned a
year before. The grain was needed to pay for the two Ford factories in
Michigan grounded by Depression. Ford was willing to sell the machinery at
a reasonable price but demanded cash scared by the Bolshevik debt defaults.
The factories were later sold nonetheless and became the Stalingrad and
Kharkov tractor factories. With the knowledge of US administration, Ford
included in the deal the tank-making equipment for the Kinney model, later
improved in the USSR into the famous T-34 -- a cheap and effective battle
tank, we still used them in Mozambique in 1984.
There is hardly a single family without such stories in Russia, let alone
in the areas of mass deportation like Chechnya or Ingushetia. My only
advantage is that professionally I can understand the logic of Stalin's
policy. Yet, I am not prepared to use this higher understanding as an
excuse.
Please, think again. You intelligent enough to realize that your body count
trick is essentially the same as denying that Nazis ever used gas chambers.
GULag was dismantled in the mid-fifties when it became economically
counterproductive and politically dangerous for the elite. Indeed, neither
Havel nor Gorbachev had the millions of political prisoners to release but
this proves nothing about "mature Stalinism".
There can be no political excuse for mass extermination of humans. I know
what I say with the sad advantage of close experience.
Yours,
Georgi
Georgiļ M. Derluguian
Department of Sociology
Northwestern University
1812 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, Illinois 60208-1330
USA
FAX (1-847) 491-9907
tel. (1-847) 491-2741 (rabota)