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Amnesia and moral degradation of nostalgic Communists. Op-Ed by Victor Pelin


https://www.ipn.md/en/amnesia-and-moral-degradation-of-nostalgic-communists-op-ed-by-7978_1092285.html

“Against the background of the aforementioned, the plea by the Communist press of the Republic of Moldova to commemorate the 98th anniversary of the Bolshevik uprising of Tatarbunar looks strange. Or the Communist press wanted yet to transmit a subtle message full of allusions to us? We will soon see and realize...
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Defective chronological benchmarks

The approaching 100th anniversary of the late Soviet empire makes the national Communist propagandists manifest themselves somehow. They remembered that 98 years ago, on September 15-18, 1924, the Tatarbunar uprising occurred. This way they wanted to show that the Bessarabians opted for the Bolshevik regime and fought against the Romanians. It’s true that a tragic event with global echoing happened in Tatarbunar, being caused by Bolshevik agents. There is no doubt that such events should be studied thoroughly and covered correctly so as to learn the necessary lessons from them. What the Bolsheviks failed to do by organizing the Tatarbunar uprising could be achieved later in stages: firstly, the creation on October 12, 1924 of the Moldovan Autonomous  Soviet Socialist Republic as part of Soviet Ukraine as a bridgehead against Romania; then in 1940 by annexing Bessarabia, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Secret Protocol.

The Communist propagandists have acted in a predictable way. They emphasize only what suits them by using the authority of particular globally known intellectuals to give weight to their propaganda approaches. In the case of the Tatarbunar uprising, it is French writer Henri Barbusse, who wasn’t a simple Communist but was even a Stalinist who after the death of Lenin said: Stalin is Lenin today! However, by their selective-speculative attitude, the Communist propagandists offer us a great occasion for complementing the image of Bolshevisms, showing to us its grin of fierce beast, as it actually was. We will not do this arbitrarily, as they do, but will make use of really anniversary data. This way, we could recently celebrate at least five reverberating jubilee data related to the accomplishments of the Communist regime:

  • in 2019 it was 100 years of the signing of the decree on forced labor camps;
  • in 2021 it was exactly 100 years of the Tambov peasant rebellion against the Bolshevik;
  • this year it has been 90 years of the Holodomor – the famine organized in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR);
  • this year it has been 75 years of the famine organized in the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR);
  • also, this year it has been 60 years of the rebellion of workers from the Soviet city Novocherkassk.

Barking up the wrong tree...

Surely, besides the aforementioned accomplishments, we can yet find many occasions for commemorating the jubilees of the crimes committed by the Soviet Communist regime. But it is enough to stop at the above-mentioned to do away with the amnesia of the nostalgic Communists. For the purpose, we will reproduce a series of data and explanations that are designed to help us, including to realize the fact that the Romanian authorities, by suppressing the Bolshevik uprising in Tatarbunar, in fact intended to protect the citizens from what already happened in Soviet Russia before 1924 and was to happen later in Gulags during collectivization and industrial campaigns accompanied by the organized famine. Certainly, by suppressing the Tatarbunar uprising, the Romanian authorities had a too zealous behavior that cannot be justified. But we should yet analyze things in comparison.

So, the nostalgic Communists commemorated the Tatarbunar uprising, but ignored the 100th anniversary of the issuing of the Decree of the Central Executive Committee of Russia (CECR) on forced labor camps. It’s regrettable as the new generators should know that the idea of concentration camps belonged to the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin who back in 1918 informed his mates by telegraph about the necessity of triggering “mass merciless terror against kulaks, priests and other dubious persons… who should be held in concentration camps…”. Consequently, in the 1930s, Lenin’s intervention was extended by Stalin all over the USSR, taking the shape of Gulags. From this viewpoint, writer Henri Barbusse was surely right when he stated that Stalin is Lenin today! The problem is that over 50 years had to pass for the intellectually of the left in Europe to radically change their attitude to the Soviet regime. This happened only after the publication, in 1973, of the basic work of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn –  The Gulag Archipelago. Over 20 million people passed through the Soviet Gulags and approximately 1.5 million of them died.  

Not at all accidentally, the nostalgic Communists ignored the 100th anniversary of the anti-Communist peasant uprising of Tambov region that occurred in 1920-1921. Didn’t really the peasants from southern Bessarabia hear anything about the forced labor camps in Soviet Russia and about the Tambov peasant uprising that was actually a real war that covered almost 8,000 localities? To suppress the uprising, the Soviet regime mobilized over 55,000 soldiers with military equipment, namely: 463 machine guns, 63 canons, 8 warplanes, 4 armored trains and 4 armored cars, chemical weapons, etc. The most terrible events happened on May 12, 1921, when Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the real executioner of peasants, became commander of the Soviet units that were to suppress the uprising. Particularly Tukhachevsky introduced the practice of taking hostages from localities whose residents sympathized with the rebels. He practiced without any remorse the shooting of hostages if persons close to these continued the resistance fight. On June 12, 1921, Tukhacehvsky made an order to use chemical weapons against the rebel peasants so as to make them get out of the woods were they were hiding. The document concerning the use of chemical weapons is now kept at the State Military Archive in Russia. Over 14,000 peasants were killed in the Tambov uprising. This rebellion had yet a positive impact as the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin had to switch over from Prodrazvyorstka to the robbing of peasants by the impoverishing prodnalog (food tax). It’s regrettable that no one informed the peasants from Tatarbunar about the fate of the Tambov uprising participants – neither Communist writer Henri Barbusse no other progressive European intellectuals.

Also, not accidentally the nostalgic Communists say nothing about the 90th anniversary of the famine organized by the Soviet regime – Holodomor. Tens of millions of people suffered as a result of the famine staged in 1932-1933 and estimates show 3-4 million people died from starvation. The explanation is that the Bolsheviks needed to industrialize the USSR in order to do the world revolution. For the purpose, they needed money and the only source of income came from sales of agricultural products that were confiscated from peasants by force and sold abroad for buying materials and technologies needed for industrialization. So, the Soviet government left millions of people to die from starvation in order to achieve its goals. Nevertheless, many were saved by the Americans, until the latter realized that the famine was actually organized. Stalin’s correspondence with Molotov and other Bolshevik mates revealed the connection between the purchases of grain, collectivization and industrialization in 1920-1930: “The purchase of grain this year is the most important thing in our practice – if we do not succeed, everything will fail... If we gain with bread, we will succeed everywhere, both in domestic policy and in foreign policy… Force the export of grain. This is a matter of principle. This is now the major issue. If we export grain, we will have loans”. The famous Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin wrote about the famine used as a political factor by the Bolsheviks. Together with his friend Vladimir Bekhterev, who was a famous neurologist, they suffered from famine after the Bolsheviks started the civil war. In his work Hunger as a Factor, Pitirim Sorokin reached the following conclusions: prolonged starvation implies a sudden change in the nervous system, especially in the brain, destroying the whole mechanism of mental life, affecting its immunity, integrity and consistency of the constituent parts. This is primarily seen in the weakened unity of our “Ego”. Together with severe famine, fissures appear in the “self” – many, different “selfs” that struggle between them. Together with this, as you know, delirium, full destruction of conscience and personality follow. A person becomes like a ship that lost the helm and helmsman”. From social viewpoint, Sorokin’s conclusion is that famine suppresses “the reflex of freedom” that often comes into conflict with other reflexes, defeating these. The Republic of Moldova in 1946-1947 also went through the ordeal of organized famine that represented the prelude to collectivization.

Finally, we should also stop to the 60th anniversary of the rebellion of the Soviet workers from Novocherkassk, which was also ignored by the Moldovan Communists. This is important as the USSR in 1962 was already a pole of the bipolar world, an industrialized state with nuclear weapons and cosmic power. This happened after it confiscated a lot of enterprises and technologies from Nazi Germany that was beaten together with its allies in World War II. Nevertheless, the Communist power wasn’t ready to ensure a satisfactory level of nutrition for the population, which it was to also supply with personal care products. Respectively, on with the rise in the prices of a number of products and the low salaries, went on strike. Later, the strike degenerated into a spontaneous protest and then into a rebellion. Ultimately, the events fully degenerated together with the destruction by protesters of the executive committee of the city and attacking of branches of the State Bank and of militia sections. To suppress the uprising, there were used units of the Soviet Armed Forces, the Ministry of the Interior and KGB. At least 22 persons were killed. If only the rebels from Tatarbunar knew what life they would have in the USSR that disappeared in 1991 under the burden of inefficiency and own sins.

Conclusions

Lenin’s grandchildren, the Communists and their Socialist partners from the Republic of Moldova, recently called on the citizens to take part in an antigovernment protest that was mounted on September 18, 2022. Accidentally or not, the protest was associated with the 90th anniversary of the Tatarbunar uprising. The main slogan of the protesters was – Don’t stay on balconies as we are dying from starvation! The protest was organized by the Shor Party whose leader was sentenced by an ordinary court to 7.5 years in jail for stealing US$1 billion from banks when he administered these and who now lives in luxury in Israel, absconding from Moldovan justice. It seems that the Moldovan Communist-Socialists for Marxist ideological reasons should not support the corrupt banker who is in conflict with the law and who can be only a class enemy. But the Republic of Moldova is a wonder world in which Communist-Socialists leaders are former guests of the wedding party of the fugitive corrupt banker. This way, the Moldovan Communist-Socialists ignored the ideology, betraying both Lenin and Stalin. The latter was even a specialist in the expropriation of bankers. In such circumstances, we have to only exclaim: O temprora, o mores!

Against the background of the aforementioned, the plea by the Communist press of the Republic of Moldova to commemorate the 98th anniversary of the Bolshevik uprising of Tatarbunar looks strange. Or the Communist press wanted yet to transmit a subtle message full of allusions to us? We will soon see and realize...