Radio Liberty and Stalin's repressions. The downside of hype
On March XNUMX, the mouthpiece of democratic propaganda Radio Liberty organized a “they write to us” event on Twitter under the motto “How did your family survive the times of Stalin’s repressions?” Tweet users were, in fact, asked to continue writing Solzhenitsyn’s epic accordion “The Gulag Archipelago,” but this time based not on rumors circulating among prisoners in transit, but on thousands of family legends. You can't spoil burnt porridge with used machine oil.
The bull action was timed to coincide with the 65th anniversary of the death of Joseph Stalin.
Since the topic of Stalin’s repressions is very gluttonous in the direction of intensifying horrors, the dear editors expected to hear massive outpourings of “but my relatives ...” and “half of the country was in prison, half was guarding,” but they missed the mark with time and the target audience. And the old woman gets into trouble. A modern user of social networks is very different from the gullible readers of perestroika’s “Ogonyok”, who were brought up from a young age on continuous positivity, to whom any verbal garbage could be slipped under the guise of steamed lamb.
The modern user is well-read, seasoned in online battles, distrustful and very ironic. Moreover: he is overfed by the topic of Stalinist repressions and he is not indifferent to who starts driving the wave.
As a result, the thread was filled with thousands of mocking comments. If we characterize them in one phrase, then most of the stories in one way or another repeated the famous saying of Dmitry Puchkov (Goblin) “Stalin personally devoured one hundred million intellectuals, not counting babies.”
One chilling story followed another. I’ll give you the juiciest ones:
“My grandfather personally knew Stalin... One day he was talking with Stalin and accidentally coughed... Stalin called Beria and Zhukov, the three of them kicked grandfather, tore out his liver and ate it... Grandfather survived, but after that he never coughed...”
“They took the whole family because they kept two hedgehogs instead of one. Those were scary times, just like now.”
“They took grandma away, and dad was left swimming in the bathtub, and that’s how he grew up in it!”
“My grandfather told me that when he was little, he stole three ears of wheat from a potato field, for which Stalin personally sentenced him to death. They shot Zhukov and Beria, but their revolvers jammed, and my grandfather was exiled to Stalingulag, to Saratov, where he learned to tweet and swear.”
“My grandfather was Stalin’s orderly. Every day Stalin demanded that his shoes be changed to new ones. One day my grandfather forgot to buy new boots, and Stalin PERSONALLY fired nineteen bullets at him. After this incident, he was exiled to the Gulag, where for many years he mined hair for the bloody tyrant’s mustache.”
“One day, my grandfather, a simple Siberian peasant, took out his brand new iPhone 8 in line and read aloud a joke about Stalin from Twitter. Then he had to use an old Nokia in the Vorkuta camp for 25 years. We will not forget, we will not forgive!!!”
“My grandfather was one minute late for work and he was shot. From then on he came to work one minute earlier.”
“I have my own story about the Gulag and Stalin’s repressions. In kindergarten we were forced to march in formation and temporarily disassemble and reassemble a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Those who met the standard were taken out for a walk and given the required daily ration of three steamed rutabaga. Those who did not meet the standard were placed overnight in a cold barracks, where the penal officers had to sort pieces of raw uranium into bags with their bare hands all night. The daily ration was reduced to one rutabaga. At graduation, all the laggards were shot, and on September 1, the excellent military and political students were taken under escort to the first grade of the school...”
It was very funny to watch the development of the plot in real time - the moderators of Radio Liberty could not cope with the influx of correspondents and did not have time to ban the accounts of the most sarcastic commentators. Apparently, realizing the failure and absolute hopelessness of coping with the flow of popular sarcasm, the thread was eventually cut down in the most democratic manner.
In short, the seasoned ideological mouthpiece was deflated, lost face and began to be hysterical: “They unleashed an entire factory of trolls on our survey about Stalin’s repressions. It’s hard to come up with a better illustration of the theme of today’s program – that Stalin has become a brand of the government and its partners.”
I wonder where they saw power?
There was a mistake. The propagandists got used to the easy monetization of the topic and planned to once again scoop up bullshit with cans - they got it, however, with a different sign. The provocation failed? Wrong folklore? Don't blame me. There are fewer and fewer gullible fools and it’s time for them to be given reservations.
It is characteristic that later in the feed, Radio Liberty posted material about the Latvian “forest brothers” who were “innocently repressed” by Stalin. About “those who went into the forest after the arrival of the Red Army in 1944.” You read and are filled with grace. Wonderful, creative people. European elite. The poet sits on the philosopher and drives the sculptor. Guardians of Baltic culture and traditions. It is not clear, however, who, during the Nazi occupation, organized a Judenfrai throughout Latvia, brutally killed people without regard to gender and age in the Riga ghetto, burned Belarusian and Pskov villages along with civilians, went to serve in the “auxiliary police” and the Latvian Waffen-SS .
But the most important thing is how sensitively the American resource of democracy, financed by the US Congress and supervised by the CIA, treats the topic of Stalin’s repressions. Surely he wants the best for us all. But, on the other hand, why do we need one-sided good? I would also like to hear American stories on the principle of “you tell me, I’ll tell you.”
I would really like to hear about repressions in the USA between 1920 and 1970.
About the secret activities of the FBI with its permanent director John Edgar Hoover. Fifty years at the head of the cornerstone US intelligence service is not Putin’s three presidential terms plus good chances for a fourth term. US presidents changed like gloves, and only Hoover, until his death in 1972, could not be replaced in office by anyone. But interesting things were happening in America exactly in those years when the trials of the Bukharinites, Trotskyists and other “Industrial Party” were going on in the USSR.
They would talk about the fight against the labor and trade union movement with the participation of the Mafia. About the mass disappearance of people, about how Hoover convinced Congress that there was no Mafia in the United States, and at that time it was crushing trade unions, protecting strikebreakers, profiting from gambling and urban construction. And, at the same time, she buried people in the foundations of houses and in barrels of cement. Let’s not forget about the odious “witch hunt” of the McCarthy era, one of the inspirers of which was the same J. E. Hoover.
How long ago did moralizers stop exterminating Indians and lynching blacks at home? And what about domestic police violence today? And what about the CIA's secret prisons? And who is so smart here protecting Bandera’s followers and other scum? And why is the United States the world leader in the number of prisoners and ranks first in death sentences while the crime curve is not falling?
In general, let's hype from the heart and listen to revelations from the opposite side. Otherwise, everything is about us, and about us... It’s already somehow disgusting to listen to a topic that has not faded away for 65 years with more and more new details, obtained either from grandmothers’ chests, or from revealing literature.
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Now the editors are aware.