How does an upstart regime strip members of an established elite of its humanity? Once the initial murders are committed, continue harassment through arbitrary arrests and debase the deposed class further by referring to any surviving members as “former” people. The Bolsheviks, who took power in Russia at the Revolution, treated the aristocracy this way. By following two aristocratic families, historian Douglas Smith shows that the Soviets may have wiped out the nobility as a class, but their attempt to crush the spirit of its members failed. We read with awe as former aristocrats face starvation and extreme hardship without complaint. It is faith that sustains them in concentration camps and prisons. Homes are stolen. Graves are desecrated. Children are denied education. Those still alive are sent to the Gulag. Mothers remain without news of their murdered sons for decades. The abuse that continued from 1917 through Stalin’s Great Terror is a shameful chapter in the history of Russia. Smith sets the record straight in his powerful new book Former People. I was very impressed by the author’s research and command of the material. The bibliography is seventeen pages long. Many of the sources are original documents, written in Russian. Smith reports that Eugene Lyons, Chief Correspondent for the United Press in 1928, “was stunned at the intensity” with which former people “‘were being pried out into the open and stepped on without pity.’” Lyons “could not conceive of how these people being thrown out of work and denied any means to make a living were to survive; what made it even worse was that to show any concern for these unfortunate souls was denounced as ‘bourgeois sentimentality.’” “Eighteen million inmates passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953. These inmates formed a nation of slave laborers without whose work Stalin’s plans never could have been realized.” To understand Putin’s Russia, read this book. Drawn largely from records suppressed by the Soviets, this extensively researched book fills a major gap in Russian history. Everyone know the fate of the Romanovs dynasty, but what about the enormously wealthy nobles lavishly ensconced below the imperial family? This is literally class warfare as the “former people,” the Bolshevik label for the vanquished aristocracy, are hounded, imprisoned and executed by the thousands, sometimes condemned by nothing more than hairstyle or softness of hands. When the Communists add other classes to their persecution list, their brutality attains the vertiginous level of the Nazis, especially heinous because they targeted not just ethnic groups but all their people. The figures are beyond staggering, so many millions more than the Holocaust that the reader is numbed by statistics so heinous as to lose meaning. Given the heavy subject matter, it’s perhaps inevitable that the book bogs down, but page skimming doesn't lessen its impact. Regardless of your opinion of the “former people,” you will not go unmoved by their plight. Eternally enigmatic Mother Russia remains a classic example of a nation getting the government it deserves, and I was left to ponder the great ironies that the serfs were equally bad off (if not worse) under the Bolsheviks, and that Tsar Putin is another autocrat in president’s clothing. The more things change…
What do You think about Verloren Adel (2012)?
Hope you all like my new book! Is it bad to say I did?!
—Tiddlycharlotte
