BAD CLASS ORIGINS OR DEHUMANIZATION?
At best, bad class origins rendered life precarious; at worst they constituted a preÂsumption of guilt that, in practice, led to hundreds of thousands of citizens being sent off to captivity and death.
In this sense, to quote Wladmir Berelowitch’s cruel quip, the Leninist regime was “a continuation of civil war by the same means.”[382] Two characters from Mikail Afanasyevich Bulgakov’s novel The Heart of a Dog express, at the very moment that these policies were being implemented, the imporÂtance of what they themselves call “heredity” in the distribution of social positions during the process of creating the new society:- You must understand what would happen if we were discovered. Neither you nor I â€?given our social origins' will have the least chance of getting away with it, in spite of the fact that we should be first offenders. At least, I suppose your origins are not of the right sort, are they, dear boy?
- What a hope! My father was a police investigator in Vilnius, replied Bormental bitterly, finishing off his cognac.
- Well, there you are then, what more could you ask? That is a bad heredity. Hard to imagine anything more damaging. By the way, though, I'm wrong, mine is worse still. My father was a cathedral archpriest.[383]
There is no better description of the Stalinist turn of 1929 as a mechanism for the radical dehumanization of the class enemy, meaning the designation of kulaks as a social category fated for physical extermination, than Vasily Semyonovich GrossÂman's:
The fathers were already in prison, and then, at the beginning of 1930, the authorities began to round up the families too. [...] They called small children “kulak brats.” “You're BloodsuckÂers” they yelled “Bloodsuckers.” And the “bloodsuckers” were white as sheets - they hardly had a drop of blood left in their veins.
[.] They'd convinced themselves that the kulaks were evil, that it was best not even to touch them. They would not even sit down to eat with one of “those parasites.” The kulaks' towel[s] were unclean, their children were disgusting, their young women were worse than lice. The activists looked on those who were being dispossessed as if they were cattle, or swine. Everything of kulaks was vile, and they had no souls, and they stank, and they were full of sexual diseases, and worst of all, they were enemies of the people [.] And the truth is that I truly didn't think of them as human beings. “They're not human beÂings, they're kulak trash!” - that was I heard again and again, that's everyone kept repeating.[384]This passage from this book, which represents the peak of his work as a novelist, illustrates just how important it is not to separate the beliefs that stem from dehuÂmanization, according to parameters that remained those of witchcraft and superstiÂtion, from the implementation of a voluntarist program of political and social engiÂneering. As Lynne Viola demonstrated, the moral blackness of the kulaks, as people of the past (byvshie liudi), was rooted in their genealogy, “because class was often in practice treated as a genetic trait in the 1920s and 1930s.”[385]
Beginning in 1937, Stalin launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing throughout the Soviet Union. Families and individuals were targeted on the basis of their backÂgrounds and their national, ethnic, or linguistic, identities: German-speaking RusÂsian citizens, German refugees who had fled Nazism, Poles residing in Ukraine and Belarus, Tatars in Crimea, Koreans who had been persecuted by the Japanese auÂthorities in Manchukuo and had sought refuge in eastern Siberia, and many other populations, especially on the borders of the empire (Finns, Estonians, Black Sea Greeks). These groups were presented as threats to the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union.
In the case of the Chechens and the Ingush, the government planned and partially carried out the destruction of their societies. What draws the attention of historians of the early modern era are the methods the administration employed to achieve the reÂsults they sought to obtain through ethnic cleansing.[386] Deportation across regions had the virtue that it weakened societies, owing to high mortality rates during the jourÂneys, but also to the fact that scattering individuals and families over vast areas led to the withering away of traditional ties. After the disaggregation of the pre-existing society and the integration (political, cultural, economic, matrimonial, etc.) of the deportees into host societies, the targeted nationality might in the end be extinguished due to a lack of individuals who would wish to identify themselves as such. There is nothing surprising about this line of reasoning for early modernists who have studied, for example, the strategy of annihilation by dispersion that the crown of Castile emÂployed against the Moriscos of Granada following the bloody Alpujarras civil war of 1568-1570.[387] Is not this model of liquidation essentially similar to the one that EdÂmund Spenser described with regards to the Gaels of Ireland in his notorious A View of the Present State of Ireland?[388] Whether we are talking about the Moriscos or the Gaels, we should note that it was not genocide that was committed between the sixÂteenth and seventeenth centuries, at least not according to the definition that this term would take on in the twentieth century. However, what took place was a combination of forced migration, the destruction of families and clans, which imposed exogamy on the next generation, and the cultural repression of languages and beliefs that took the form of a damnatio memoriae. Taken as a whole, these measures were intended to erase these populations right down to their memory. And yet, we cannot say that either the English or the Spanish monarchies presented themselves during these periods as political regimes founded upon the primacy of racial hierarchy.
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