Communists in the post-Czar Russia were a motley bunch. Some actually had aristocratic ancestors, others were professors and intellectually, and still others, like Josef Stalin, were what we in America would call "blue collar." Yet, of all the leaders and commissars that turned Russia from a land of rich aristocrats and poor ordinary people and starving peasants, only the strongest survived- the strongest and those who unbendingly agreed with the new leader, Stalin. Among those who fell by the wayside was Leon Trotzky and many intellectuals accused in the so-called purge trials of the Nineteen Thirties. Most were killed. Some sentenced to Siberia to the Gulags. One whop was sentenced, outlived most others and returned to write a book, called The Gulag Archipeligo was Alexander Solzhenytsin.
Solzhenytsin's book is massive": over 600 pages. But, most Americans - even those who read every page- surely cannot understand that Russia's politics, even to the present day- is incompatible with the sort of "democratic" political principles of many Western nations. For one thing, the author mentions capital punishment: "Up until 1905, the death penalty was an exceptional measure in Russia...in 1932-33 (they) shot people with special ferocity. In this time of peace, in December 1932 at one time 265 condemned prisoners were awaiting execution" (437). These were not murderers or criminals. Each of them was a political opponent of the powers-that-be- politicians, academics, intellectuals, even military officers who had sometime veered from the Stalinist dictums. Solzhenytsin also writes that "during those two years of 1937 and 1938, a half a million 'political prisoners had been shot throughout the Soviet Union, and 4800 blatnye- habitual thieves- in addition (438). He figures that about 1,700,000 had been shot by January 1, 1939. One must remember that the majority of these were not criminals, in the way we consi
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