Maxim Gorky wrote: "Inside the country our craftiest enemies are organizing a food famine against us, kulaks are terrorizing collectivist peasants with murders, arson, and various acts of villainy."
Peculiarities of the term's use
From 1921 to 1931 Gorky lived abroad, mostly in Italy.
Having returned to the USSR, he energetically joined the total hunt for "enemies" and "spies." In 1929-1931 Gorky regularly published articles in Pravda, which later formed the collection "Let Us Be on Guard!" These works by Gorky call for seeking out saboteurs among those around oneself who have secretly betrayed the cause of communism. The best-known article in the collection is "If the Enemy Does Not Surrender, He Is Destroyed" (1930); its title became a kind of motto for all of Soviet policy.
At the same time, Gorky, like the punitive organs he so admired, needed no evidence whatsoever to attach the label "enemy." In his view, the most vicious enemies were those against whom there was no evidence. "Gorky does not merely sing in the chorus of accusers — he writes the music for that chorus," notes the Swiss researcher G. Nivat.
The language of these articles by the "humanist writer" is striking: people are constantly called flies, tapeworms, parasites, semi-human creatures, degenerates. "Among the mass of workers of the Union of Soviets there operate traitors, turncoats, spies… It is entirely natural that the workers'-and-peasants' power beats its enemies like lice." At the same time Gorky extolled the "historically and scientifically grounded, truly universal, proletarian humanism of Marx-Lenin-Stalin" (the article "Proletarian Humanism"); he admired "how simple and approachable wise Comrade Stalin is" ("Letter to the Delegates of the All-Union Congress of Shock-Worker Kolkhozniks").
Preserving his long-standing hatred of the peasantry, Gorky reminded readers that "the peasant's strength is a socially unhealthy strength, and that the cultural-political, consistent work of Lenin-Stalin is directed precisely at eradicating from the peasant's consciousness this 'strength' of his, for this strength is… the instinct of the petty proprietor, expressed, as we know, in forms of zoological brutalization" ("Open Letter to A.S. Serafimovich," 1934). Let us recall that this was published in the years when the most hardworking and thrifty peasants ("kulaks") were being shot or exiled to the permafrost zone.
In support of the OGPU-fabricated "Industrial Party case," Gorky wrote the play "Somov and Others" (1930). In keeping with this absurd trial, it features saboteur engineers who deliberately hold back production out of spite toward the people. In the finale comes "just retribution" in the form of OGPU agents, who arrest not only the engineers but also a former singing teacher (his crime being that he "poisoned" Soviet youth with talk of the soul and old music). In the articles "To Workers and Peasants" and "To the Humanists," Gorky supports the equally absurd accusation against Professor Ryazanov and his "accomplices," who were shot for "organizing a food famine."
Gorky did not necessarily approve of all the repressions. The arrests of old Bolsheviks, fighters against "accursed tsarism," troubled him. In 1932 he even expressed to the chief of the Chekists, G. Yagoda, his bewilderment over the arrest of L. Kamenev. But the fates of the millions of ordinary people condemned to death did not provoke any such bewilderment in him. In 1929 Gorky visited the Solovki camp. One of the juvenile prisoners, seeing in him a defender of the oppressed, risked telling him about the monstrous living conditions in the camp. Gorky was moved to tears, but after his talk with the boy (who was shot almost immediately afterward) he left rapturous praise for the jailers in the Solovki camp's "Guest Book."
In 1934, under Gorky's editorship, the collection "The Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal" was published. The book endorses all the deranged accusations of those years: that engineers, for instance, were poisoning women workers with arsenic in the factory canteens, secretly breaking machinery. The concentration camp is portrayed as a beacon of progress; it is claimed that no one dies there (in reality, at least 100,000 prisoners died building the White Sea Canal). Speaking before the canal's builders on August 25, 1933, Gorky admired "how the OGPU re-educates people," and spoke with tears of tenderness about the Chekists' excessive modesty. According to A.I. Solzhenitsyn's assessment in "The Gulag Archipelago," in the book "The Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal" Gorky was the first in Russian literature to glorify slave labor.
Fun Facts
- In the recent history of Russia, a food famine was organized at the power plants of RAO UES, which is a record for a market economy. "Cold weather has set in, our children are unshod, unclothed, hungry, fainting from hunger at school." Notably, people from Nizhny Novgorod turned out to be involved in this affair.
See also
- Officialese