Kilder med arbejdsspørgsmål til 'Folkedrabets aktører'

Dannelsen af det hemmelige politi

Arbejdsspørgsmål:

1. Hvorfor skal det hemmelige politi, ifølge Lening, dannes?
2. Hvilker beføjelser skal det hemmlige politi tildeles?

Kilde 1: Dannelsen af det hemmelige politi - december 1917

Lenin on the organisation of an extraordinary commission to fight counter-revolution

[Letter to Dzerzhinskii, December 19, 1917]

In connection with your report today dealing with the struggle against sabotage and counter-revolution, is it not possible to issue the following decree: 

STRUGGLE AGAINST COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND SABOTAGE 

The bourgeoisie, landholders, and all wealthy classes are making desperate efforts to undermine the revolution which is aiming to safeguard the interests of the toiling and exploited masses. The bourgeoisie is having recourse to the vilest crimes, bribing society's lowest elements and supplying liquor to these outcasts with the purpose of bringing on pogroms. The partisans of the bourgeoisie, especially the higher officials, bank clerks, etc., are sabotaging and organising strikes in order to block the government's efforts to reconstruct the state on a socialistic basis. Sabotage has spread even to the food-supply organisations and millions of people are threatened with famine. Special measures must be taken to fight counter-revolution and sabotage. Taking these factors into consideration the Soviet of People's Commissars decrees: . . . . 

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE EXTRAORDINARY COMMISSION TO FIGHT COUNTER-REVOLUTION [Decree of the Sovnarkom, December 20, 1917] 

The Commission is to be named the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission and is to be attached to the Soviet of People's Commissars. [This commission] is to make war on counter-revolution and sabotage .... The duties of the Commission will be: 
• 1. To persecute and break up all acts of counter-revolution and sabotage all over Russia, no matter what their origin. 
• 2. To bring before the Revolutionary Tribunal all counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs and to work out a plan for fighting them. 
• 3. To make preliminary investigation only - enough to break up [the counter-revolutionary act]. The Commission is to be divided into sections : 
o (a) the information [section], 
o (b) the organisational section (in charge of organising the fight against counter-revolution all over Russia) with branches, and 
o (c) the fighting section. 
The Commission will be formed tomorrow..... The Commission is to watch the press, saboteurs, strikers, and the Right Social-Revolutionaries. Measures [to be taken against these counter-revolutionaries are] confiscation, confinement, deprivation of [food] cards, publication of the names of the enemies of the people, etc. 

Kilde: http://www.dur.ac.uk/a.k.harrington/cheka.html

En sovjetborgers baggrund for at blive gerningsmand

Arbejdsspørgsmål

1. Hvad er sovjetborgerens begrundelse for at gennemføre kornindrivelserne?
2. Hvordan retfærdigør sovjetborgeren det, han gør på trods af det, som han ser?

Kilde 1: En sovjetborgers erindring fra korninddrivelserne i 1932-1933 

I heard the children… choking, coughing with screams. And I saw the looks of the man: frightened, pleading, hateful, dully impassive, extinguished with despair or flaring up with half-mad, daring ferocity. “Take it. Take everything away. There’s still a pot of borscht the stove.

It’s plain, got no meat. But still it’s got beets, taters’n’ cabbage. And it’s salted! Better take it, Comrade citizens! Here, hang on. I’ll take of my shoes. They’re patched and repatched, but maybe they will have some use for the proletariat, for our dear Soviet power.”
It was excruciating to see and hear, all this. And even worse to take part in it … And I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I musn’t give in to debilitating pity. We’re realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the Five Year Plan.
With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible – to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousand and even millions of peoples, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and’ stupid realism,’ the attribute of people who could not see the forest for the trees’.
That was how I reasoned, and everyone like me, even when … I saw what ‘total collectivization’ meant – how they ‘kulakized’ and ‘dekulakized,’ how they mercilessly striped the peasants in the winter of 1932-3. It took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to buried grain. With the others, I emptied out the old folks’ storages chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the woman’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside; that in the days to come the people who lived there would be better off for it, that their distress and suffering were result of their own ignorance of the machination of the class enemy; that those who sent me – and I myself – knew better than the peasants how they should live, what they should sow and when they should plough.
In the terrible spring of 1933 I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women’s and children’s distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses – corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots, corps in peasant huts, in the melting snow of the old Vologda, under the bridge of Kharkov … I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. Nor did I curse those who had sent me out to take away the peasant’ grain in the winter, and in the spring to persuade the barely walking, skeleton, - thin or sickly – swollen people go into the fields in order to ‘the Bolshevik sowing plan in chock – worker style’.
Nor did I lose my faith. As before, I believed because I wanted to believe.     

Kilde: Conquest, Robert: The Harvest of Sorrow, New York 1986, side 232-233.