{"id":2075,"date":"2010-08-01T22:18:21","date_gmt":"2010-08-01T22:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=2075"},"modified":"2010-08-01T22:18:21","modified_gmt":"2010-08-01T22:18:21","slug":"death-under-communism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/death-under-communism\/","title":{"rendered":"Death under communism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Reflecting on the <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2010\/08\/stalinist-justice\/\" target=\"_blank\">previous post<\/a>\u00a0and why the Slansky show-trial accused (and those similarly accused elsewhere in Eastern Europe at the time) were mostly executed, I remembered a chilling statement by Igal Halfin in his superb book about life under Soviet dictatorship:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In the Bolshevik tradition, death linked the individual in a final embrace with the brotherhood of the elect. Death could be a sublime, highly positive experience of self-sacrifice, or a negative experience, in which one\u2019s expulsion from the society of men was rendered eternal. The unidirectional structure of the official autobiography takes us nearer the meaning of death in Communism. If in order to realize one\u2019s true self one had to become a Party member, failure to do so meant cutting the story short. A life lost to the Party was a life aborted, an unfinished life, and it could be narrated as such. But nothing short of conversion to Communism fully satisfied the demands of the genre. This seemingly innocuous feature of Communist poetics inspired a morbid conclusion: the individual who was absolutely unable to see the light of Communism \u2013 human dross at best, a menace to universal salvation at worst \u2013 had to disappear; whereas at first Communist misfits were given a second and a third chance to reform, properly to complete their life\u2019s journey and become good Communists, from 1936 onward they were shot.&#8221; (p. 274)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>Reference:<\/em><br \/>\nIgal Halfin [2003]:\u00a0 <em>Terror in My Soul:\u00a0 Communist Autobiographies on Trial<\/em>.\u00a0 Cambridge, MA, USA:\u00a0 Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reflecting on the previous post\u00a0and why the Slansky show-trial accused (and those similarly accused elsewhere in Eastern Europe at the time) were mostly executed, I remembered a chilling statement by Igal Halfin in his superb book about life under Soviet dictatorship: In the Bolshevik tradition, death linked the individual in a final embrace with the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,35,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heroes","category-history","category-politics","p1","y2010","m08","d01","h22"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}