Snippet 3: Koba the Dread, Zachto? - Granite Grok

Snippet 3: Koba the Dread, Zachto?

stalinSnippet 3 of this series asks: What do you call the killing of twenty million people? It’s really not called anything at all in this country. Not a word. Not a phrase. It’s not mentioned at all.  Most do not know of the massive Soviet killing. Some Russians call it “the twenty million”.  But Amis has a better name.

Lenin pursued genocidal policies (de-Cossackization) and so of course did Stalin (see below). Indeed, most historians agree that if Stalin had lived a year longer his anti-Semitic pogrom would have led to a second catastrophe for Jewry in the mid-1950s. The distinction may be that Nazi terror strove for precision, while Stalinist terror was deliberately random. Everyone was terrorized, all the way up: everyone except Stalin.

Amis, Martin (2014-09-17). Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Vintage International) (Kindle Locations 1184-1186). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Because they were all innocent, the politicals. None of them had done anything.  On arrest, the invariable response was Zachto? Why? What for?… they are now arresting people for nothing.  Why, what for? That was the question you asked yourself each day in the gulag archipelago…

There are several names for what happened in Germany and Poland in the early 1940s.  The Holocaust, the Shoah, the Wind of Death.  In Romani it is called Porreimos—the Devouring.  There are not names for what happened in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953 (although Russains refer, totemically, to “the twenty million,” and to the Stalinshchina—the time of Stalin’s rule).  What should we call it?  The Decimation, the Fratricide, the Mindslaughter? No. Call it the Zachto? Call it the what for?

Amis, Martin (2014-09-17). Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Vintage International) (Kindle Locations 1043-1061). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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