Word: leninism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Once, at a meeting of political commissars, Lenin passed a note to Dzerzhinsky "How many vicious counter-revolutionaries are there in our prisons?" Dzeizhinsky's scribbled reply was: "Abou: fifteen hundred." Lenin nodded, made a cross on the note, and returned it to Dzerzhinsky. That night, on Dzerzhinsky's order, all 1,500 were shot. It turned out to be a mistake. As Lenin's secretary explained later: "Vladimir Ilyich usually puts a cross on a memorandum to indicate he has noted the contents...
Something Blue. Dzerzhinsky was succeeded by another aristocrat, Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky. Before the revolution Menzhinsky wrote a prophecy: "If Lenin ever reaches power in fact, and not in imagination, he will make a mess of it, the like of one made by Czar Paul I. ... Leninists are a clan of political gypsies, with a strong voice and a love for wielding the knout, imagining that it is their inherent right to serve as coachmen for the laboring masses...
After the revolution, Prophet Menzhinsky became the Leninists' knout. Lenin called him "the decadent neurotic." This policeman was interested in Persian art and higher mathematics. He wrote erotic poetry and read pornographic novels in his office between executions. He was plump, languid, soft-voiced, given to blue moods. He said: "Our task is to bring culture to the masses at a terrific speed." His OGPU, successor to the CHEKA,' brought death by execution and starvation to millions of Ukrainian and other peasants...
...said that Stalin had always had the best ideas went the police power. It was pure balm to the aging dictator when Beria recalled that in the old days Stalin used to call Lenin "the mountain eagle," and that Lenin in return called Stalin "the fiery Colchian." The man who put that on paper was the man Stalin trusted. He who expressed the Leader's truth so baldly must be the Leader's chief hunter of heresy...
...Prison Is a Prison." Beria, of course, has an office in the Kremlin; but he does most of his work in Lyubyanka Prison,* not very far from the tomb of Lenin, who said he would make a state without crime, police or prisons. In the old hopeful days it was called the "Soviet Home for Those Who Have Lost Their Freedom." These days, it is frankly known as Lyubyanka Prison, for, as an eminent Soviet journal wrote in a campaign against squeamishness: "A prison is a prison." On his rare public appearances with other Soviet big shots, Beria usually seeks...