Politics and Society Essay

â€Å"There was an old bastard named Lenin Who did two or three million men in. That’s 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 â€Å"gives the impression of a large and crude claylike figure, a golem, into which a demonic spark has been instilled.† He was nonetheless â€Å"a man who perhaps more than any other determined the course of the twentieth century.† â€Å"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 â€Å"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, â€Å"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, â€Å"‘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 Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941