Talk:Joseph Stalin/ User:207.81.89.222's 23:18, 3 Apr 2004 version of the article
I have a lot of quarrels with the below. Basic flaws in reasoning, for example. Consider: "It was understandable how a slave society like dynastic Egypt could accomplish an engineering marvel like the building and rebuilding of the Great Pyramid. Slaves can be whipped into breaking their backs pulling and hauling great stones. But how can engineers, scientists, and creative men be flogged into 'laying the golden eggs' of original invention?"
You might address that question to Werner von Braun. Wasn't he the head of a group of engineers, scientists, and creative men who laid golden eggs within a slave society only 60 years ago? But the question is flawed at its heart, with regard to Egypt. There was a lot more to the creation of the pyramids than manual labor, "hauling great stones" etc. There was craftsmanship and engineering inventiveness there. I gather the writer wants us to conclude that there must have been something commendable about the social climate within the former Soviet Union to generate ITS golden eggs. But the attempted contrast with Egypt doesn't make that point, if that IS the point. And if it isn't ... what is?
--Christofurio 15:08, Apr 5, 2004 (UTC)
Totalitarian Paradigm of Stalinist Society
An awareness that a paradigm is operating in one?s thinking signals a more advanced and scientific stage of historical thought. This awareness was not present in those who introduced the theories for Stalinist society referred to above. These theories arose mainly in the 1950?s due to opponents of the Soviet regime, such as Roy Medvedev, a Soviet reformer who was mainly addressing a Russian audience, and to professional historians who worked in quasi-governmental capacities as propagandists, like the very influential Robert Conquest, whose office at Harvard was largely an adjunct of the Pentagon. Conquest?s status was acknowledged by McGeorge Bundy, designer of the foreign and national security policies for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Bundy euphemistically and somewhat obscurely called Conquest-type grafts of historical study with practical politics "a high measure of interpenetration between universities with area programs and information gathering agencies of the government of the U. S." (Cited in Ford, C., Donovan of OSS, Boston, Little, Brown and John, 1970, p. 111). Analytical, critical, self-conscious, scientific historical modeling is not the stock-in-trade of reformers, advocates, and propagandists, who purvey their paradigms unconsciously, working in smooth, tacit agreement with others sharing the same paradigm, whatever their language, nationality, profession, or professional status.
A new breed of non-Marxist historians is emerging in the West to challenge the dominant (totalitarian) paradigm. They already stand wrongfully accused of being "revisionist" and of wishing to "exculpate" Stalin, Beria, Yezhov, and other former Soviet leaders of their "crimes." But, in a little-noticed statement made by Conquest himself in the Preface to what has been considered his "seminal masterpiece" of Kremlinology for the era, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, he said, in 1990, "The Great Terror [his book] still had to rely to a large extent on émigré, defector, and other unofficial [my emphasis] material." Conquest saw his role writing on this subject as one of "balancing and assessing incomplete, partial, and uneven material" (op. cit., p. viii). His method needs to be more ingenuously described as a "finessing" or "smoothing out" of the "facts," many of which he here admits to be doubtful to begin with, coming from hostile sources! The "tool" he used to abrasively sandpaper these "facts" is the totalitarian paradigm of Stalinist society (to be defined below, in this section). Conquest noted, in the same Preface, that he was not working, "as with the writing of modern Western history," by the "deployment...of adequate and credible official archives" (ibid.). The default method he used instead is usually only applied in historical work on ancient history, where the loss of artifacts, documentation, and archival material is accepted as "par for the course." It is not acceptable for the writing of modern history. Now that many heretofore-closed USSR archives have been opened, this approach to the subject must be completely superseded. In the same Preface, Conquest acknowledged a pre-glasnost? "Khrushchevite contribution" to his "facts." However, as will be detailed in what follows, it has justifiably been said that Khrushchev (like Trotsky) seduced the West into belief. Khrushchev, either out of a shrewd knack for testing Western gullibility or out of sheer idiocy, once claimed for a short time that he "shot Beria" himself.
In what follows, the reader can judge for himself to what extent Conquest?s own admissions, in The Great Terror, of chiseling one fact and flat-ironing another to correct "unevenness" produces books which are closer to fiction than to history (there is an "in-between" area too). The disturbing difference is that the characters and places referred to in Conquest?s works are not the Karamazov brothers or Chekhov?s black monk and demon wood, but rather bear the names of real Twentieth Century people and places and are presented as real events. This is not merely a matter of accidentally or intentionally omitting or glossing over facts that are inconsistent with a ruling paradigm, though this is certainly involved. This is, rather, a matter of molding and altering "facts" to better fit the paradigm, so that one perforce views a distant reality (e.g. the "Stalin years") through the paradigm because one has only such altered facts (thanks to Conquest?s "hard work").
A significant example of simple omission to perpetuate a paradigm can be taken from Conquest?s reputedly "authoritative and exhaustive study" The Great Terror. There is only a single clause (part of a sentence) in the entire book referring to the Lockhart/Ambassadors? Conspiracy. There is no suggestion whatsoever that this plot could have played any part at all in inspiring the Terror (the ostensible subject of the book) or in poisoning Anglo-Soviet relations (a secondary book theme). Quite the reverse: there is only Conquest?s sardonic allusion to the "hysteria" of the first Soviet President Yakov Sverdlov, who, Conquest avers, commented after the shootings of Lenin and Uritsky that "the assassins would turn out to be ?hirelings of the English and the French?" (Conquest, op. cit., p. 45). There is no indication as to whether or not Conquest is actually quoting Sverdlov or someone else here, or quoting the general sentiments of a "Sverdlov-type," or whether he is quoting or paraphrasing anyone else. There is no footnote or reference (of which the book is full in other places) in the context of this potentially paradigm-threatening subject. Here the specific threat to the totalitarian paradigm is that the paradigm asserts an alleged "excess of paranoia" among Soviet leaders as the significant "psychic" generator of the Great Terror, whereas notice of the Lockhart conspiracy seems to ground Soviet "xenophobia" and suspicion of the West in tangible political and material reality. What Sverdlov actually appears to have known or heard about the shootings is what the brilliant first CheKa head Felix Dzerzhinsky discovered in foiling the Lockhart conspiracy, facts Dzerzhinsky uncovered about who was behind the plot. He had arranged that one of the Letts who met to conspire directly with Reilly was a CheKa man! There is some justification for Conquest?s allusion to the "French" in this clause, since a little-known Soviet film produced in Moscow in 1966 (now available in the West through a Canadian publisher; see Bibliography) claims the involvement of a French ambassador in the Lockhart/Ambassadors? Plot. However, there is more to Conquest?s reference to the French here than thoroughness or mere gratuity. This is a clear propaganda ploy. The French, in a great deal of bigoted popular thinking in the English-speaking world, have the unfortunate reputation of accusing and executing innocent victims throughout their history, from the Christian martyr and saint Joan of Arc, to the Jewish French general staff officer Captain Dreyfus, to Mata Hari, the beautiful exotic dancer shot as a "spy."
Everyone understands in a rough-and-ready way how propaganda controls the presentation of a subject by omission. This is tantamount to omission of facts in order to uphold a paradigm which they do not fit well or outright controvert. Over forty years ago, the now defunct Institute for Propaganda Analysis, a think tank once very unpopular with government agencies and especially with large private business corporations (who are heavy propaganda purveyors in their commercial advertising campaigns), listed this kind of omission technique as one of seven devices in common use in propaganda. The Institute named this device "card stacking," which consists of selecting and using facts to give a false or misleading idea, attempting to make out the best case possible for one?s own side and the worst for the opponent?s by carefully using only those facts which back up the propagandist?s point of view. This point of view upheld or broadcast in this way may be an artificially fabricated one temporarily concocted solely as a "psy war" tactic to weaken a belligerent enemy state, or it may be a fervently held belief, in which case it can be traced to a controlling, dominant paradigm. There is more of the latter in Conquest than the former, but there are some of both throughout his works. This results in his being a very "natural" propagandist - perhaps the most effective and convincing kind. The Zinoviev letter mentioned above is completely omitted from The Great Terror, but this can be "justified" as a being a subject more fit for "studies" in "British political history," not of the Great Terror. This is clearly a weak argument and an artificial point of view. Yet Conquest was "careful and thorough" enough to mention "rumors of the French" in connection with the shootings of Lenin and Uritsky. This is a propaganda device the same Institute for Propaganda Analysis dubbed "Transfer." Using this technique, the reputation of some other person or organization is expected to be carried over to some subject or program the propagandist is discussing or broadcasting. In this case, one is expected to connect Sverdlov?s suspicions as to the identities of the shooters with pronounced French paranoia and injustice of bygone days, thereby "exhibiting" the first rumblings of early Bolshevik "hysteria," inevitably leading (according to the totalitarian paradigm) to the Great Terror, Yezhovshchina, the Moscow Show Trials, etc.
In the omission technique, a paradigm plays a passive role. The paradigm is what the omission upholds. In a later section on a little-known Communist Party functionary named Kovalev, a detailed examination will be made of the more complex situation in which a paradigm acts affirmatively and aggressively to actually alter facts, reshaping and remolding them to produce fiction rather than history.
In Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, a pair of relatively new and more scientific non-Marxist historians than the Cold War produced, J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning, concisely delineate the most common or shared paradigm of the Stalinist era of Soviet history, one they label the "totalitarian model." In order to challenge or test this model against the wealth of new facts about Soviet history now flowing from Soviet archives opened since glasnost?, they summarize the totalitarian model as follows:
"The Soviet system under Stalin consisted of a nonpluralist, hierarchical dictatorship in which command authority existed only at the top of the pyramid of political power. Ideology and violence were monopolies of the ruling elite, which passed its orders down a pseudo-military chain of command whose discipline was the product of Leninist prescriptions on party organization and Stalinist enforcement of these norms. At the top of the ruling elite stood an autocratic Stalin whose personal control was virtually unlimited in all areas of life and culture, from art to zoology. Major policy articulation and implementation involved the actualization of Stalin?s ideas, whims, and plans, which in turn flowed from his psychological condition. By definition, autonomous spheres of social and political activity did not exist at all in Soviet society... . ...the Soviet populace and rank-and-file party members remained outside the political process, objects to be acted upon or manipulated from above but never historical actors in their own right." (op. cit., pp. 1 - 2).
If this description of Soviet society sounds familiar or "obvious" to readers not directly acquainted with over forty years of scholarly monographs and books which affirm and use it, that demonstrates to what extent the "totalitarian paradigm" is "shared" even by intelligent laymen.
From the 1960?s on, many metropolitan U.S. high school and preparatory school teachers taught Soviet history and sociology in the same breaths with George Orwell?s novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. During the same era, Nineteen Eighty-Four figured prominently in numerous undergraduate college discussions of "Stalinism" wherein one of the three warring totalitarian police states in Orwell?s book was identified with the Soviet Union and Stalin was compared to "Big Brother." The NKVD was likened to Orwell?s "Thought Police." Conway Zirkle, an American critic of Lysenko, complained of what he called "Russian verbalism" in official Soviet discourse, propaganda, and publications. He considered this to be an anomalous lexicon and use of language, which were immediately compared to "Newspeak." Soviet "distortions of truth" matched to "doublethink." The continuous rewriting of Soviet history, such as airbrushing purged commissars out of photographs or eliminating their names as entries in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, was compared to the flushing of ideologically threatening historical facts down Orwell?s "memory hole."
It is interesting to note that tampering with what is sometimes regarded as a privileged, inviolable, and even sacred record of history, the photographic record, which is discussed and fully illustrated in David King?s popular The Commissar Vanishes, literally occurs without protest or even awareness right under the noses of Americans. King?s book protests its use in Stalinist society. However, he seems to be unaware that U.S. government agencies that would seem to have little need for such tampering are constantly employing it. The U.S. Postal Service, for example, recently decided to issue a commemorative stamp honoring the seminal Black American blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who is credited by professional electric guitar players of wider appeal, such as Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, as having been among their major inspirations and influences. After examining the only two extant photographs of the chain-smoking Johnson, both of which portrayed him with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, the Postal Service decided to airbrush the cigarette away, leaving what looks like an inconspicuous scar on Johnson?s mouth. (See "Thank You for Smoking," by Peter Brimelow, American Smoker?s Journal, Fall issue, 1994.) This might appear to be a trivial alteration of historical fact compared to effacing Yezhov from a photo in which he strides beside Stalin across a bridge, but, if it is so trivial, why were artists working for the Postal Service ordered to do it? The answer is that it was decidedly not trivial to somebody in authority. What is most remarkable is that alterations and "adjustments" of this kind are being done so freely and on so wide and thorough a scale throughout the U.S. today. The practice is now common for high governmental authorities, petty lower government agencies, news media of all kinds, textbooks, television programs, etc. Among the highest governmental authorities, such as the U.S. State Department or Department of Defense, there might be a reasonable expectation to "change history" in exceptionally important circumstances in order to protect national security secrets or to hide embarrassing, covert government operations (sometimes called "black ops"). The fact that history "needs changing" on postage stamp art too is evidence that it is done on a rather casual and widespread basis. Here Orwell?s model of totalitarian society, which is abstract and of general application, seems particularly appropriate.
The previously mentioned comparisons between Stalinist and Orwellian societies have been committed to writing, both highbrow and low. However, it is actually false to say that in these discussions, comparisons were being made between what was known about Soviet society with the society in which the hero of Orwell?s book, Winston Smith, lived, the details of which are known only by reading the novel. Instead, what was actually going on was that students and Kremlinologists alike were, in a coarse manner, using the model of a (fictitious) society given by Orwell to "explain" and "understand" a (real) society (the Soviet Union) about which little reliable historical and sociological information was available. This was not a case in which two societies about which details were known were being directly compared, but rather this is a situation in which a very strong variant of the totalitarian model (Orwell?s) was being used to "understand" Soviet society and political life.
This was done for a reason which is usually justified: one of the most important roles a paradigm has is to fill in the gaps in one?s knowledge, which were - and to a large extent still are - very great in the West for Soviet society. Krementsov has referred to these "blanks" as a "black box" where it concerns the history and actual workings of the Politburo. For example: suppose one has no knowledge about how Stalin came to be called "Generalissimo Stalin" and the commander-in-chief of the Soviet army. Suppose one does not know whether or not, for example, the Politburo, which was an elite executive committee of about ten members who represented the Central Committee of the Communist Party, actually gave Stalin this title by appointing him to this post. Using one version of the standard, shared totalitarian paradigm outlined by Getty and Manning above, in which Stalin?s power is supreme, all-encompassing, and brooks no opposition due to the pseudo-military chain of command and terror running from Stalin down the "pyramid of power" through the NKVD, one simply fills in the gap in one?s knowledge and states that Stalin was "self-appointed." This is in fact what was done for the 1975 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica?s Macropaedia article on Stalin referred to above, i.e., the author of the article, Ronald Francis Hingley, a Fellow of St. Antony?s College, Oxford, asserted Stalin?s "self- appointment" without having any way of consulting the (at the time closed) Russian-language archival records of Politburo proceedings, or minutes of meetings of the Council of People?s Commissars, of which Stalin was chairman at the time. Hingley did not even know when he wrote the article if such documentary historical records existed. He was not even sure if there was a "black box"! In short, he had no evidence whatsoever for his "authoritative" statement on this subject in the Encyclopedia Britannica article. He had only the dominant paradigm and deductions that could be made from it.
Stalin?s "self-appointment" here is really more of a prediction (about "the past") made by Hingley using the totalitarian paradigm, a prediction that may or may not turn out to be correct as more and more material comes to light from the newly opened archives, of which the fraction now available is alone expected to keep historians busy for decades. If this "self-appointment" prediction turns out to be incorrect in the light of hard, new evidence, and if similar predictions of the totalitarian paradigm turn out to be wrong, any specific versions or variants of models of Soviet society based on the totalitarian paradigm must be amended or abandoned. A suitable amendment in this case would be to downgrade the pre-eminent role of Stalin?s power and of "Stalin?s caprice and vainglory" in the general paradigm or in specific models based on it. A specific amendment already suggested by Soviet insiders is that Stalin mistakenly believed the Politburo was ready to have him step down (a "fact" which, if true, is more of a direct challenge than an amendment to the dominant paradigm), so they appointed him "Generalissimo" to strengthen his spirit by showing their complete confidence in him during the war crisis.
Many readers will undoubtedly want to cut to the chase and simply know whether or not Stalin was self-appointed. This would seem to be a simple factual matter to which the subtleties of "paradigm choice" (and logical deductions from them) are irrelevant, just as choice of paradigms is irrelevant to how an automobile carburetor works or to a fuel?s octane rating. But "Stalin?s self-appointment" is a case in which a paradigm - or something! - must fill in a gap in one?s knowledge (not so with a carburetor or fuel octane). The situation is more like ones in which faith determines belief. Which "fact" one accepts as to "Stalin?s self-appointment" is determined by which paradigm one accepts. However, there is one very important difference between this and religious belief. Which paradigm best fits the other known facts about Stalinist society is not a matter of faith. It is an empirical matter, that is, a matter to be resolved by evaluating facts. Since this is so, fact-omission and ignorance are obviously relevant. Belief in a particular paradigm that is mainly a fiction may flourish for the same reason that many religious beliefs flourish: ignorance of nature, evolution, authorship and transmission of "sacred texts," historical omissions, etc. When Kremlinologists ignore already known or newly surfacing facts which do not fit their accepted paradigm, their belief in the paradigm then shares many features of religious belief, or other basic belief systems in which children are reared. In this case, the next step is also taken, which is taken in the case of religious thinking too: paradigm choice begins to work tyrannically from the "top down" to enable one to sort out the "facts which are true" from ones which are "spurious facts" (e.g. "don?t accept anything Molotov says in Molotov Remembers about Stalin and Yezhov that contradicts what Khrushchev said in Khrushchev Remembers").
Adjustments of a theoretical model are made in order to fit new facts as they are discovered, as is done in theoretical modeling in the physical sciences. If no such tinkering or adjustments are possible, the facts must reign supreme and the paradigm itself may be in jeopardy. This is called a paradigm crisis. One is beginning to occur now in Kremlinology. A new paradigm of Stalinist society may emerge, one at least as well able to explain facts recognized by the dying paradigm and to incorporate the growing number of newly discovered ones, thereby showing superior strength.
If one loses sight of the fact that what one regards as a "fact" is actually a prediction made by using a paradigm (as in the example given above of Hingsley?s belief in Stalin?s "self-appointment"), one can then fall into circularity: mistaking the predictions of one?s paradigm for facts, one can then confusedly use these "facts" - mistakenly believing them to be "raw factual evidence" now - to "support" the paradigm, when they are actually predictions and outcomes of belief in the paradigm. This has been done for decades by Western Kremlinologists in their discussions of Stalinism. It represents a degenerate stage of paradigm use and cries out for a paradigm crisis. In this kind of circular boondoggling, making a guess or inference using a paradigm is euphemistically referred to by historians as having made "an educated guess," i.e., a guess which fraudulently passes muster and deviously seeks to validate itself as being informed, - which it is not. It is only paradigmatic.
In the early 1960?s, a dilemma arose for Western democracies. Many articles and lectures were presented both before and since that time on the "inferiority" or even "depravity" of the Soviet system. Yet certain superiorities were only thinly disguised by the most mendacious, repetitive propaganda. For example, the political economist Mancur Olson (whose ideas shall be discussed in greater detail further on), wrote and lectured extensively on the supposed economic inferiority of communist systems and on systems that do poorly economically, he said, after abandoning communism. (See, for example, his "Why is Economic Performance Even Worse After Communism is Abandoned," Center for Study of Public Choice, Fairfax, VA, 1993.) In the essay referenced, Olson glibly and blandly referred to the Soviet Union?s mere "initiation of flight in space," which he calls a "prestige coup" (op. cit., p. 22). This conceals the real accomplishments of the Soviet Union in this field, achievements so awesome as to have inspired very grave concern at the time in the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department. The Soviet Union did not merely "initiate" space flight, it sent Sputnik One into Earth-orbit, making it recorded history?s first artificial satellite. Two years later, the Soviets shocked and awed the world - especially scientists - with the first close-up images of the moon?s surface taken from a lunar probe. Then, on April 12, 1961, "cosmonaut" Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. This was being done all the while American schoolchildren and young scientists watched television programs like "Tales from Tomorrow" and "The Outer Limits," as well as late afternoon re-runs of episodes of "Flash Gordon," on which their fathers and mothers had dreamed and wondered even before television. What was science fiction for Americans, was reality for many of the peoples of the Republics of the Soviet Union. Soviet officials did not hesitate to cite these accomplishments as evidence of the superiority of communism as a form of social and economic organization.
As a result, on April 20, 1961, only eight days after the Gagarin flight, President John F. Kennedy inquired of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, "Is there any...space program that promises dramatic [my emphasis] results in which we could win? ...Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man?" (Quoted in "Was the Race to the Moon Real?" by John M. Logsdon and Alain Dupas, Scientific American, vol. 270, no. 6, June, 1994, p. 37). As this memorandum shows, the truth was the opposite of what Mancur Olson claimed. While the Soviet Union consistently obtained prestigious results, it was not the Soviet Union that sought "prestige coups" or "propaganda showpieces," as Olson said, but rather the United States of America. Pursuant to Kennedy?s suggestions, Lyndon Johnson consulted Werner von Braun, who had been the leading rocket expert of a team of Nazi scientists from another kind of socialist system which, as Bertrand Russell observed, was more different philosophically from the Western democracies and the Soviet Union than they were from each other: the "National Socialist" system of the Third Reich. These rocket engineers, had they been captured by the Soviets, would probably have been tried as war criminals. The Soviets may have tolerated no use of them. However, Von Braun proved of singular worth to the U.S. He gave the remarkably accurate and prophetic advice that the U.S. "did not have a good chance of beating the Soviets to a manned laboratory in space," but "we [sic!] have a sporting chance of sending a three-man crew around the moon ahead of the Soviets." (To a gambler, a "sporting chance" usually means somewhere between one-in-five and one-in-three odds, though it is not clear exactly what "odds" von Braun was giving the U.S. here.) He went on to say that despite this dim forecast, the U. S., oddly enough, had "an excellent chance of beating the Soviets to the landing of a crew on the moon" (ibid.), which would appear to the layman to be the most difficult, sensational, and "advanced" of all of Kennedy?s suggested feats of space flight. Von Braun said that an "all-out crash effort" would be needed. Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy?s secretary of defense, then stated that this flight to the moon would be "a major element in the international competition between the Soviet system and our own," a "part of the battle along the fluid front of the cold war" (ibid.). There was no science about it. The NASA objective of a manned lunar expedition was conceived, organized, and indeed delivered (the American Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969) as the purest of propaganda ploys (and the most expensive ever seen), the very thing each and every Soviet scientific achievement has been labeled as being. (Further implications of this "space race" that are pertinent to Soviet science and Lysenkoism will be discussed in Part II of this essay.)
Thus a social system condemned as "Orwellian" and a "slave state" in which intellectuals and free thought were "repressed," supposedly motivated and held together by police terror, had gained capabilities clearly superior to anything the world had ever recorded. It was understandable how a slave society like dynastic Egypt could accomplish an engineering marvel like the building and rebuilding of the Great Pyramid. Slaves can be whipped into breaking their backs pulling and hauling great stones. But how can engineers, scientists, and creative men be flogged into "laying the golden eggs" of original invention? Can threatening a man and his loved ones with arrest, torture, and death induce a fecund and ingenious imagination? If so, many ambitious artists in the West would have long since submitted to such threats and blackmail if only to hear the voices of the Muses. Or was this the diabolical outcome of the Soviet Union?s new and officially endorsed Pavlovian psychology of the type sensationally portrayed in film The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a remarkable new way to make scientists creative and productive drones? As pointed out at the outset of this essay, the U.S. claimed to have clearly proven at least one kind of superiority for their social system by defeating the fascist systems of Germany and Italy, which had really been crushed by the Soviet system, the Red Army, and Soviet weaponry. With all eyes on the remarkable photographs Soviet scientists had taken of the lunar landscape, the U.S. was desperate for an American flag to be planted on the moon first. A society that the Western world had sought to belittle and undermine since its inception, aiding and abetting its internal enemies, as well as sending equally dangerous new ones of its own training into its midst, a society ravaged and torn in World War II far beyond anything all of the Western nations together had suffered, had made a strong case for itself.
- This was lifted from "Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View" by Philip E. Panaggio - see http://www.geocities.com/redcomrades/chap5.html Stormie 23:34, Apr 3, 2004 (UTC)