Politics and Society Essay Example for Free

Politics and Society Essay â€Å"There was an old bastard named Lenin Who did two or three million men in. Thats a lot to have done in But where he did one in That old bastard Stalin did ten in.† ― Robert Conquest[-0] According to the historian Robert Conquest, Joseph Stalin gives the impression of a large and crude claylike figure, a golem, into which a demonic spark has been instilled. He was nonetheless a man who perhaps more than any other determined the course of the twentieth century. Any adult inhabitant of this country, from a collective farmer up to a member of the Politburo, always knew that it would take only one careless word or gesture and he would fly off irrevocably into the abyss. (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition. (Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, According to some reports, entire groups of men were taken in one swoop by the NKVD. Almost all the male inhabitants of the little Greek community where I lived [in the lower Ukraine] had been arrested, recalled one à ©migrà ©. Another reported that the NKVD took all males between the ages of seventeen and seventy from his village of German-Russians. In some stories, the police clearly knew they were arresting innocent people. For example, an order reportedly arrived in Tashkent to Send 200 [prisoners]! The local NKVD was at its wits end about who else to arrest, having exhausted all the obvious possibilities, until it learned that a band of gypsies (Romany) had just camped in town. Police surrounded them and charged every male from seventeen to sixty with sabotage. In the city of Zherinka, Ivan Ivanovich had his wife sew rubles [Soviet currency] into his coat because the NKVD was taking all the men in his town. (Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalins Russia, 1934-1941