I haven’t read Vasily Grossman’s best-known novel, Life and Fate. It took around twenty years after his death for Soviet authorities to sanction its publication in the 1980s. His stature as one of the Great Russian writers seemed confirmed. But he was born 12th December 1905 in the village of Berdichev to a Jewish family, which is a Ukrainian town. His mother and family and the large Jewish population of over 41 000 of an aggregate population of around 54 000 were murdered by the Nazis outside their town. ‘Shoah with a gun’, Grossman termed it.
Ironically, Grossman would surely have followed the same fate by the Soviet authorities he served. Stalin’s Jewish purge after the so-called doctor’s plot was on its second wave, which would have swept him away if Stalin hadn’t died.
His article, The Hell of Treblinka, he termed ‘Shoah by gas’ was approved by Soviet authorities. He also wrote about the siege at Stalingrad being the turning point of The Great Patriotic War.
His highly acclaimed short fiction, such as In the Town of Berdichev was admired by other Soviet writers such as Isaac Babel. And Babel appears in a later story, Mama. The latter was a kind of warning, not to get too close to those in power who are themselves purged as Babel was by the forerunners to the NKVD.
I was largely unmoved by Grossman’s fiction. I know I was meant to feel some kind of awe. The historical weight also added a kind of taken-for-granted consensus that this was great fiction. I get it that. I’m meant to like stories and plays like Anton Chekov’s The Lady and the Dog and The Cherry Orchard, but really they just bore me like something you had to revise for some exam I’ll never pass. Life is more than that as Grossman understood.
I prefer his essays and reports. The Hell of Treblinka, based on first-hand experience and second-hand reports to him from those that had been in Hell, was ahead of its time. It told how it is and how easily the world slipped into Fascism. For the moron’s moron Trump and his supporters, it sounds a familiar clarion call to hate and despise others based on eugenics and geography.
People became unpeopled. In the conveyor belt of Treblinka, they were robbed of citizenship, their home and their freedom. They were transported to a wilderness. Penned and squeezed into a station and robbed of their belongings, papers and photographs of loved ones. They were stripped naked and shaved. No one was sure what human hair was harvested for, but psychologically, it pushed them into compliance. Lined up in rows of five. Surrounded by barbed wire on ‘The Road of No Return’ with the black uniform of SS guards on one side and grey Wachmanner conscripts on the other. They were beaten with the butts of machine guns and rubber hoses. Alsatian dogs trained to attack the genitals were released. For the guards this was just another day. 20 000 to 60 000 unpeople were piling up and carriages shunted down the tracks were waiting to be brought for processing into the station. Schneller. Schneller.
Grossman suggests that Stalingrad did not change the way—mostly—Jews were murdered, but how they processed the raw material, their bodies. Himmler himself visited Treblinka and had a look at the hundreds of thousands of rotting corpses covered over in pits. He ordered that they should be exhumed and burned. Germany and Germans who had participated in and committed these atrocities were no longer sure they would not be held to account. The un-people might be given a voice. Himmler’s strategy was to burn the evidence.
Some monsters were more monstrous than others. SS Sepp, for example, delighted in murdering small children.
‘Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half.’
Others carried sabres and whips and heavy gas piping. They would fling children still alive to roast on death pits.
‘We hear of women trying to hide little babies in heaps of blankets and trying to shield them with their own bodies.’
Ironically, as an atheist, who disavowed his Jewish heritage, Grossman finds consolation in the image of hope in humanity of The Sistine Madonna. He avows it shows, although tortured and crucified, ‘what is human in him continued to exist’.
I hope it continues to exist in us, but I get less sure. Amen. Read on.
Vintage Classics has republished Babi Yar. A.Anotoli (Kuznetsov) describes Babi Yar as ‘a document in the form of a novel’.
What the author means by that is in the first line of the first chapter, Ashes (after the Preface): ‘This book contains nothing but the truth.’
Kuznetzov was born in 1929 in Kyiv. His mother was Ukrainian. His father a Soviet who was relocated when the Germans invaded, 21st September 1941. As a twelve-year old, he lived in Kyiv was his mother, grandfather and grandmother when the Nazis came. His mother was a schoolteacher and lessons had been in Russian. Now school lessons were in German. She left to work in a factory. He kept a diary in Russian when he was fourteen. In the Preface this is explained more fully. His text was in Russian (translated into English). The capital spelt Kiev. Not Kyiv in the Ukrainian format.
He also noted as a writer in the Soviet Union he wasn’t allowed to write the truth. ‘Anti-Soviet stuff’ had to be removed before it could be considered for publication.
‘Social realism requires an author not to describe, not so much what really happened, as to what ought to have happened, or at any rate what might have happened.’
Stalin, for example, confiding to Churchill that he had to deport and starve to death around ten million Ukrainians. This wouldn’t appear in Soviet literature, even after Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev denounced the Georgian’s excesses. Official sources, Kuzntesov suggests, put the figure nearer seven million.
‘A Chapter of Reminiscences’, chapter 1: Cannibals would not be published in the Soviet Union. More likely, the author of such a chapter would be murdered or sent to Siberia, which was much the same thing.
The worst famine in the Ukraine’s long history occurred under Soviet ruin in 1933. It is the first thing I can remember clearly in my life.
My father drawn and tired was sitting on a stool, telling his story.
He had just returned from Uman, where he had helped put through the collectivization of the farms.
“So we forced the peasants to join the collective farms at the point of a gun…But they refused to work. They simply hung around doing nothing with their hands in their pockets…
So we told ‘em: “Either the collectives or death.” They replied, “We’d sooner die.”
“But what they eat—that is beyond belief. There are no longer any frogs or mice about and not a single cat is left. They cut the ordinary grass and stubble for food. They peel the bark off pine trees, grind it down to a powder and cook pancakes from it. And there’s cannibalism everywhere.’
Babi Yar was a ravine close to where Kuznetsov as a boy lived.
‘The river bed was of good course sand, but now for some reason or other the sand was mixed up with little white stones.
‘I bent down and picked one of them to look more closely. It was a small piece of bone, about as big as a fingernail, and it as charred on one side and white on the other. The stream was washing these pieces of bone out of somewhere and carrying them down with it. From this we concluded that the place where the Jews, Russians and Ukrainians and people of other nationalities had been shot was somewhere higher up.’
Left for dead, Dina Mironovna Promicheva was one of less than a handful who escaped the mass murder of around 68 000. Local Jews were shot in swathes by machine-gun fire. With history and hindsight, we know how mass murder works. Holocaust deniers start with the assumption it didn’t happen, and even if it did they dispute the numbers involved. Suggesting it was perhaps a few rogue guards. ‘Babi Yar no longer exists,’ even became Soviet doctrine. An attempt to fill in the ravine caused even more unpublicised deaths.
Sabra, the prickly symbolism of the new generation of Israelis, like to think they would have fought back then too.
Pronicheva’s eyewitness account makes nonsense of such generalisations. German propaganda was effective. Almost all Jews complied with the order to assemble. Even though the poorest of the poor were the Jews working on collective farms, Anatoli’s grandfather repeated what most were saying. ‘That’ll put paid to them getting rich at our expense’.
Artrem street was very long and the procession moved very slowly. People hired transport for their possessions. The sick and children were carried on people’s backs. When they reached the Jewish cemetery bordering Babi Yar and the gateway to their death, there was no turning back. Barbed-wire barriers had been set up to corral those about to be murdered.
Germans with Ukrainian police moved along a few people at a time. They dealt brutally with dissenters who disobeyed the order to get undressed and leave their belongings. Terror worked in keeping control and also to keep the crowd moving into corridors. Pronochieva tells how most people refused to believe they were being slaughtered, even when they could hear the machine guns. Disassociation and rationalisations of what was happening occurred. She felt an ‘animal terror’.
When she understood they were being executed those around her were naked and struck dumb. They passed through a long corridor formed by soldiers, who hit out with clubs to the ribs, stomach and groin. Screamed at them to keep moving. Those who fell, the dogs held by soldiers pounced on. When they came to the end of one corridor, they were beaten again. A steep wall of sand blocked off where people were being machine gunned. Their bodies falling into the ravine and being buried in the sand quarry.
The Red Army had run away and surrendered in their millions. The Germans set up prison camps and let them starve to death. Following the retreat of 1941, the building in the Palace of Labour used by the secret police of the Ukrainian Republic was used by the Nazis for the same purpose.
‘Sometimes people on the streets outside could hear screams coming from the basement. It was generally believed that as far as ordinary mortals were concerned, they could only enter the building. It was very rarely that they came out again.’
A trip to Babi Yar was the most likely outcome. Anatolis’s grandfather and grandmother had been serfs. Soviet rule did not bring freedom. He was nostalgic for old times. When, for example, ‘A beggar hung out his socks to dry; Another beggar pinched them’.
Although their daughter was a schoolteacher, book burning meant little to them. His grandfather, like many others, welcomed German rule with a bout of looting. Education was not for the masses. Adolf Hitler’s speech, 27th April, 1923, set the tone, which sounds familiar.
‘What we have to do next is to change our whole system of education. We are suffering from far too much education. Importance is attached only to knowledge, but excessively clever people are the enemies of action, what we need is instinct and willpower.’
Hunger was the teacher. German propaganda promised a great new life for those who volunteered to work in the Third Reich. Blocking off streets and picking up men and women to work in factories and farms proved more effective. Anotoli’s schooling finished aged 12. He was sent to work until he 14 and could be deported West for labour.
‘The old maths teacher at our school, Balystuk, died of hunger. Towards the end he tried to work as a labourer. The factories were reopened and workers were given a wage of 200 roubles a month.
A loaf of bread in the market then cost 120 roubles, a tumbler-full of underground wheat 20 roubles, a dozen potatoes 35 roubles, and a pound of lard 700 roubles.’
Work did not set you free. ‘Man lives to eat.’ Anotolis’s conclusion was based on his experience of starvation. He suggest of the majority of people on earth labour for little gain. ‘And it’s not because they prefer it that way, but because there is no other way for them.’ Life is brutal and short. A good meal makes heaven on earth.
Babi Yar is a memorial to the truth. The author reminds us not to forget those cries. But he also offers a belief ‘no major crime against society can remain undetected’. He finished his book in 1969. He started writing it as a boy in his mother’s cramped house. He asks, ‘is there more barbarism ahead?’ The answer, of course, is being played out now, not only in Ukraine. Russia, China, India and all nations including those in the West that have scapegoated minorities and refugees and embraced nationalism. Read on.
Over 100 days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Already the West has grown weary of fuel and wheat shortages and high prices. The eighth year of war. Russia occupying Crimea and Donbass regions, and almost twenty per cent of Ukraine since then, creating a land border, including access to the Black Sea. Catherine Belton’s prescient book is early and late. The modus operandi is in the title.
Ryzard Kapuscinski’s Imperium is instructive how it works. He was writing in 1994. Pre-Putin, the Yeltsin era.
‘The fall of communism in the state occurred relatively bloodlessly, and in ethnic Russia, completely bloodlessly. The great Ukraine announced its independence without a single shot being fired. Likewise Belorussia.
…It is interesting that blood flows only when blind nationalism enters the fray, or zoological racism, or religious fundamentalism—in other words the three black clouds that can darken the sky of the twenty-first century.’
In order to understand Russia and the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Ryzard Kapuscinski uses the analogy of another Russian writer, Yuri Borev who compares it to a train journey.
‘The train is speeding into a luminous future. Lenin is at the controls. Suddenly—stop, the tracks come to an end. Lenin calls on the people, for additional, Saturday work, tracks are laid down, and the train moves on. Now, Stalin is driving it. Again the tracks end. Stalin orders half the conductors and passengers shot, and the rest he forces to lay down the tracks. The train starts again. Khrushchev replaces Stalin, and when the train comes to an end, and he orders that the ones over which the train has already passed by dismantled and laid down before the locomotive. Brezhnev takes Khrushchev’s place. When the tracks ends again, Brezhnev decides to pull down the window blinds and rock the cars in such a way that the passengers will think the train is still moving forward.’
Boris Yeltsin brings in advisors from The Chicago School. They tell him to sell the train and the track and give everyone an equal share. Winner takes all. A new train with McDonalds and widescreen TV and a new track.
Putin is at the controls—indefinitely. Episode after episode of him wrestling bare-chested with bears and oligarchs is played on widescreen TV. His henchmen make early-morning visits to those that refuse to pay the market price in roubles for a ticket, or want to change the channel.
Catherine Belton tells the reader how Putin, with the help of the KGB, took over Russia, and threatened the world with nuclear annihilation. She offers a synopsis of who’s who in the Russian orbit that circles their supreme leader. He’s President for life. And the President can dismiss the Prime Minister, and any other public appointed body down to street sweeper. His inner circle get first pick on any deal worth around $40 million. State governors, for example, can haggle and war with each other their share, internecine battles that can lead to imprisonment and death, but one of Putin’s favourite sayings is it’s a private matter. Putin is number one, and unless fealty is paid, it becomes a public matter because that’s a private matter.
The first names on Putin’s inner circle, the siloviki:
Igor Sechin—Putin’s trusted gatekeeper. Like Putin, a former KGB operative from St Petersburg. He took payment of bribes and kept accounts, of who owed what. As Deputy Head of the Kremlin he helped organize Putin’s takeover of the Russian oil sector on which Russia’s wealth is largely based. Known as ‘Russia’s Darth Vader’ for his ruthless plotting against others. The power behind the throne. You don’t get to see Putin without seeing Sechin.
Nikolai Patrushev, former head of Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB.
Viktor Ivanov, former KGB, served with Putin in Leningrad KGB.
Viktor Cherkesov, former KGB, who ran the St Petersburg FSB.
Sergei Ivanov, former Leningrad KGB, and one of the youngest generals in Russian’s foreign intelligence.
Dmitry Medvedev—a former lawyer. Deputy to Putin when he ran the administration and kickbacks as Mayor of St Petersburg. Deputy head of Putin’s Kremlin administration. Chief of Staff for Putin’s Presidency, then President, with Putin as Prime Minister. Obama famously thought Medvedev was a man he could work with, in the same way that George W. Bush (junior) looked into Putin’s eyes and said he’d seen his soul.
Putin’s custodians, KGB-connected businessmen.
Gennady Timachenko, former KGB, worked his way through the ranks of the Soviet trade to become the first traders of oil products.
Yury Kovalchuk, former physicist, who joined with other KGB-connected businessmen to take over Bank Rossiya, which according to the US Treasury, became Putin’s bank.
Arskady Rotenberg, former Putin judo partner, who became a billionaire under Putin’s presidency.
Vladimir Yakunin, former KGB, worked undercover in the UN in New York, then joined Bank Rossiya.
The Family—Yeltsin
Valentin Yumashev, former journalist. He gained Yeltsin’s trust while writing his memoirs. Appointed Kremlin chief of staff in 1997. Married Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana in 2002.
Tatyana Dyachenko, Yeltsin’s daughter, but also his gatekeeper.
Boris Berezovsky, former mathematician, who made his fortune running trading schemes for carmaker AvtoVAZ. Wangled his way into Yeltsin’s family. Acquired Sibneft oil.
Alexander Voloshin, former economist. He started working with Berezovsky on privatisation of Russian assets. Transferred to the Kremlin, 1997 to work as Yumashev’s deputy.
Roman Abramovich, oil trader. He became Berezovsky’s protégé, but outmanoeuvred him and took over his business. Banker to the Yeltsin family, bowed to Putin after a period of Siberian exile. Sent to London, poisoned (Polonium?) when tried to intervene at the start of Ukrainian war, possibly out of favour, and therefore in danger.
The Yeltsin-era oligarch who crossed Putin’s men.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former member of the Communist Youth League. He became one of the most successful businessmen of the perestroika era in the 1990s.
Mobsters and footsoldiers for the KGB—St Petersburgh.
Ilya Traber, former Soviet submariner, who became a black-market antique dealer in the perestroika years. A go-between for Putin’s security services and the Tambov organised- crime group controlling St Petersburg’s most strategic and lucrative assets, the sea port and oil terminal.
Vladimir Kumarin, Tambov organised-crime boss (‘night governor’).
Moscow footsoldiers and mobsters.
Semyon Mogilevich, former wrestler, known as ‘the Brainy Don’, who at the end of the eighties became banker to the leaders of Russia’s most powerful and organised crime groups, including the Solntsevskaya, funnelling cash to the West. Set up a criminal empire for drugs and arms trafficking. Recruited in the seventies by the KGB.
Sergei Mikhailov, (alleged) head of Solntsevskaya organised-crime group—Moscow’s most powerful—with close ties to the KGB. Criminal arm of the Russian state. Cultivated links with Donald Trump in the eighties.
Vyacheslav Ivankov (‘Yaponchik’), dispatched by Mogilvvich to Brighton Rock, New York, to broaden the Solntsevskaya criminal empire.
Yergeny Dvoskin, Brighton Beach mobster. He became a Russian ‘shadow banker’ after moving back to Moscow with his uncle Ivankov. The Russian security services helped them funnel tens of billions of dollars for clearing in the West.
Felix Sater, (Dvoskin’s best friend). A key business partner of The Trump Organisation, developing a string of properties for Trump to cash in and keep the Organisation from bankruptcy, while retaining high-level clearance from Russian intelligence.
The irony of the moron’s moron getting elected in 2016 is not that there was a cause for celebration in the White House, but jubilation and celebration in the Russian White House. Never had there been such a useful idiot in high office. Nigel Farage and little trumpet, Boris Johnson were also a useful gift. Brexit knocking five to fifteen percent off Britain’s gross domestic product and dividing the country. Scotland, for example, didn’t vote to be poorer.
Putin, after Chechnya and Syria, invasion of Ukraine was an act of hubris. Oil and gas goes up in price and pay for his imperialistic adventure. As the West withdraws from Russia, there is a return to the old ways of KGB, and a Soviet world protected by wealth and power that Putin knows well. What emerges from Belton’s book is a cowardly man, much like Boris Johnson, promoted for the wrong reasons, but now he’s in power he intends to stay there. He’s already killed many Russians in the false-flag operations that got him elected President with an overwhelming majority after the Yeltsin perestroika experiment. There’s no reason he will suddenly stop killing citizens of his own country and others.
Will Putin’s People use nuclear weapons? Perhaps you may remember at the start of the ‘action’ his official media were talking about such things; speculation. He took on the West and went on a disinformation spending spree that elected a US President and helped through Aaron Banks fund Brexit for Boris. There is a familiar pattern of saying before doing. And blaming someone else like in the Salisbury poisoning debacle of nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Perhaps, a long-range missile, said to have come from Ukraine—and a ‘tactical, nuclear strike’ in reply. I wouldn’t bet against it. Putin’s a gambler with a grudge who thinks he’s owed big time.
Matthew Zajac is an actor. Acting is a precarious profession. The same old faces crop up with regularity. Trying to make a living from acting is akin to trying to make a living from writing. I’ve did a few shifts as an extra. I’ve no interest in being the next what-ever-you-call him/her. Writing, well, that’s a different story.
Writing is my game. I don’t expect to make a living from it. And with over one million self-published books appearing on Amazon every year if you’ve been paying attention, as I have, then you’ll know why.
Matthew Zajac in his downturn between acting and being invisible wrote his own play, The Taylor of Inverness. He took it to the Edinburgh Festival, and with the help of a fiddler, and some projections acted out the part of his dad. It received plaudits. Plaudits don’t pay the rent.
Next his—let’s call it an award winning play, because if it didn’t win something Edinburgh’s culture elite have fell asleep at the wheel—is taken up by BBC Scotland. The peasants up North, us, receive a fraction of the BBC budget to produce content for the fraction of the British population that are interested in that type of thing.
Matthew Zajac gets to play his dad again, for the cameras, in his award-winning play. He gets to travel to his father’s birthplace which was part of Poland until 1939, then in Stalin’s pact with Hitler, became part of the Soviet Union and designated as part of the Ukraine. His dad, Matthew’s grandfather, was Polish, and his grandmother, Ukrainian. The programme also becomes one of those finding about your past kind of road trips where the viewer see nice scenery and meets quaint folk that don’t speak our lingo. Money for old rope.
Zajac’s father told him (and us) how was fox is hunted in his birthplace. Cornered in a field, a fox runs in ever decreasing circles until its captors can bludgeon it to death.
Ukraine used to be thought of the bread-basket of Russia. Soil so rich that to plant a stick was to grow a tree. I’m going off at a tangent here as Zajac did with his da’s story. His dad was buried in Inverness. Whisper it, as a head mason. He was flexible about religion and risen through the ranks. (My understanding is you can be both a Roman Catholic and a Mason, as my da’s pal, Jimmy Mac, was). Zajac’s dad, despite coming from the Ukraine, fought with the Polish army for Britain in the second world war against their common enemy, Nazi Germany.
It all kind of adds up. Before the first world war Glasgow was booming and growing at a rate faster than London. In the interwar years this growth declined, but it was still enough of a metropolis to take a refugee from the Ukraine and for him to find a job as a tailor in Glasgow. And then head to the back of beyond to Inverness to find a shop of his own, a life of his own, a new life and kids. It’s the refugee made good narrative.
The Ukraine of the interwar and postwar years was one of bloodshed. Let me fling some figures at you. 20 million dead. Stalin brought the Ukrainians to heel by mass starvation. Most children under ten would die first. Millions more sent to gulags such as those in Siberia. Ukrainian nationalists fighting the Soviets who had ‘liberated’ them shot and their families deported. Acts of savagery, mass murder and rape. Teenagers, in particular, in the vanguard.
Let’s remember the death camps in the East and the Jews. Jewish tailors that had trained Zajac’s dad. We know around six million Jews were exterminated. But around half, as they were here, were taken into forests and fields and shot.
Zajac finds in the old reels of his father’s tape something unnerving. His story of being swept up by the Soviet machine and being deported to Uzbekistan has a facsimilia of truth. His escape along the Soviet railway, with its own gauge system for train that took three months, seems possible. He joins the British Army.
An alternative story and shadow self emerges that is completely compelling as narrative, as history, or as drama, and a combination of all these. This is much-watch TV. It shouldn’t be given a graveyard slot on BBC Scotland, but a Sunday night slot at 9pm. The kind of slot Small Axe: Mangrove demands and gets because Steve McQueen is a somebody. Zajac is a Scottish yokel, he’s give what he’s got and likes or lumps it territory. Listen up, I watched both and Zajac is better. Watch and learn what a thing man is.
Here we have Claud Cockburn’s maxim as a rule of thumb, ‘Never believe anything until it has been officially denied’.
Director David France’s documentary shows clearly that gay lives don’t matter in Chechnya, or in Russia, generally. Imagine George Michael had went missing at the height of his pomp and Margaret Thatcher (Section 28 legislation) came on the telly and told you, he wasn’t missing. And there was no such thing as gay people in Britain, and if there was ‘They are devils, subhuman.’ They should be taken to their families to be killed.
This is the rhetoric not of Thatcher, but of Ramzan Kadyrov, a Vladamir Putin appointed strongman, leader of the Chechnya Republic telling the public how it is in relation to Chechan’s George Michael and gay community. Imagine, instead of George Floyd being choked to death by policeman while other cops watched him die, you had police trophy footage of men and women beaten to death at the side of the road and raped to show they are dealing with the gay plague, the lesbian problem. Transsexual doesn’t register. Kadyrov labelled men that love men and women that love women, subhuman, not human and that’s the way they are treated, a problem that needs to be solved or eradicated.
Anna Politkovskya, Chechnya: A Dirty War 1999-2002 gives us context. Vladimir Putin’s ‘anti-terrorist campaign’ destroyed the Chechnya capital, Grozny in a way we’ve become familiar with television pictures and reports of the indiscriminate Russian bombing of Syria and Ukraine and the targeting of, for example, hospitals. Terrorists are those on the ground. Chechnyans were labelled by Putin a ‘nation of criminals’. In February 2001, Politkovskya was detained and threatened with rape by senior Russian officers when investigating a Russian torture centre. Perhaps she was naïve to think there was just one. Refugees talked of the indiscriminate murder of children, pregnant women, old men. Putin won the war in Chechnya as he’s winning the war in Syria and the Ukraine. Anna Politkovskya had made enemies in high places. On 7th October 2006 she was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block in central Moscow. Three Chechens were arrested, but acquitted and re-arrested.
Truth does not need to be subversive, but it does need to be true. France shows how it works in Chechnya. After a police raid around 2017, a gay man’s phone was taken from him and examined. We usually use words like forensic her—forensically examined—for links to other crimes to do with drugs or other offences so the authorities can label them criminal. Terrorist is a popular word choice. What the officers found was gay messages and images. Gay men, or women, were taken to Argun Prison in Grozny and tortured, with many beaten to death, reminiscent of Lubyanka and Stalin’s reign of fear. Victims were forced to give names of other gay men or women that the police could roll up, torture and kill, to get other names. This reign of fear France labels a Gay Purge, which is denied by authorities in Grozny and Moscow, using the logic that such people don’t exist and even if they did, there’s no official notification of it or them. While at the same time, Ramzan Kadyrov promises to ‘cleanse the blood’ of Muslims and eliminate those people that don’t exist.
France’s film follows Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transsexual (LGBT) activists in Moscow, such as Olga Baravov, who have helped Chechnyan LGBT victims escape. We follow, for example, Akmad aged 30, (not his real name). Identities are protected by digital remastering because of a risk of reprisals at home in Chechnya. The rescue of ‘Anya’, aged 21, takes the viewer from Moscow to Grozny and had elements of a thriller. ‘Anya’s’ uncle told her he’d out her as a lesbian unless she slept with him and she had to be smuggled out. LGBT activists helped provide an underground ‘railway’ and safe houses. They try and relocate victims of torture and state violence. Asylum seekers of whatever sexuality are not popular (America, as you’d expect, is not on their list). Canada figures strongly. 151 victims processed by LGBT activists in Moscow, 44 men in women seeking asylum when filming took place.
‘Anya’ disappeared from her safe house. Olga Baranov and her child had herself to seek asylum in Canada after been outed by the Russian authorities. Moscow was not safe with its anti-gay rhetoric and threat of reprisals.
Maxim Lapunov, his real name, returned from asylum and challenged the authorities in Chechnya and accused them of state torture, placing a deposition in the Russian Municipal Courthouse. His digital mask protecting his identity was dissolved. The case was, of course, flung out. For Putin acolytes, gays don’t exist in Russia or Chechnya, and even if they did, they law does not exist to protect the likes of them. Lapunov claimed he’d take his case to the European Courts of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Watch this space, if he’s not disappeared or dies mysteriously, he might just do that, but I doubt it.
George Orwell recognised ‘to be corrupted by totalitarianism’— for example, the moron’s moron in the Whitehouse—you ‘do not have to live in a totalitarian country’, the un-United States of America. We’re all corrupted now. Putin the strong man goes from strength to strength. Ramzan Kadyrov does not have the final word. He does what he’s told. The gay purge hurts no one—that counts—and nobody is counting.
Books are holy relics and none more so than this love letter to the lost. The Great Patriotic War as it is sold to the Russian people by the capitalist oligarchs is something to which they can hold on to. Something to which they can be proud. Forget the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and Stalin’s deal with Hitler and the division of Eastern European countries such as Poland. Forget the millions killed in countries such as the Ukraine by Stalin’s policy of mass- starvation ‘Death-by-hunger’ when parents ate their children. The Second World War started in earnest for the USSR with Operation Barbarossa on Sunday, 22 June 1941 with the Nazis attacked their former allies looking for a swift victory. Stalin and the USSR held on at Leningrad. Twenty million Russians died. Think of that for a second. Millions more mutilated.
These are the fragmented memories of a forgotten race. Women who fought in the war. Women who survived and had to remain silent, because it was a man’s war. And women who fought were not real women, but front-line whores. There is a heart for love and a heart for hate. Many remember a sign by the side of the road when entering German territory for the first time, crosses. ‘Here she is accursed Germany.’
Fragments.
SUDDENLY WE WANTED DESPARATELY TO LIVE
Tamara Stepanovna Umnyagina
Junior Sergeant in The Guards, Medical Assistant.
I already went barefoot. What did I see? The train station near Mogilev was being bombarded. And there was a train carrying children. They started throwing them through the window, little children – three or four years old. There was a forest nearby, so they ran towards the forest. The German tanks drove out and the tanks drove over the children. There was nothing left of those children.
Bella Isakovna Epstein,
Sergeant, Sniper
I came back different…For a long time I had an abnormal relation with death. Strange I would say…
They were inaugurating the first streetcar in Minsk, and I rode on the streetcar. Suddenly the streetcar stopped, everybody shouted, women cried. ‘A man’s been killed!’ And I sat alone in the car. I couldn’t understand why everybody was crying.
Albina Alexandrovna Gantimurova
Sergeant Major, Scout
Berlin…a boy came running towards me with a submachine gun—a Volksssturm. The war was already over. The last days. My hand was on my submachine gun. Ready. He looked at me, blinked and burst into tears. I couldn’t believe it—I was in tears, too. I felt sorry for him; there was this kid standing with his stupid submachine gun. And I shoved him towards a wrecked building, under the gateway: ‘Hide,’ I said…He took my hand. He cried! I patted his head.
odonnellgrunting 