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Two Quatrains And A Couplet For Comrade Commissar Trotsky
Comrade, that locomotive---HISTORY---
pursued you like a grim monstrosity;
sent by the so-called Workers' Paradise
that you helped raise on Lenin's basest lies.
The state (for which your victims, Comrade, bled
and died, murdered and martryed ruthlessly)
decided you, Old Bolshevik, should be
rewarded with an icepick through your head.
The Soviet Union, like you, is now dead:
and of its SINS, not near enough is said.
Starward
[*/+/^]
I just recently started
I just recently started reading The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsen, and only vaugely being familiar with the Soviets before, I'm appalled to learn about how atrocious the U.S.S.R really was. Hitler usually gets the MVP in the hall of infamy, but the sheer length of time that people suffered mercilessly under the reign of the soviets astonishes me to this day. Outlawing God, and the freedom to worship Him as you see fit, always has tremendous, unfathomable consequences. I am thankful to live an America, in spite of its many faults.
"Paper is patient." - Anne Frank
Thank you for the comment.
Thank you for the comment. Being an adolescent in the seventies, I was taught that Hitler was the ultimate evil; and, while the Soviet Union was our enemy, the focus was on communism as an economic system, not as a social system. The murders of the Romanovs (and, believe it or not, the executioners even killed Alexei's dog), the wholesale maryrdoms of countless Orthodox Christians and the maniacal destruction of their churches (one was even made a public lavatory, with toilet stalls all throughout the building), and the savage attitude of Joe Stalin toward Lenin's surviving associates (the so called Old Bolsheviks, most of whom were liquidated in the Moscow trials in the 30's)---all of these were hardly, if at all, mentioned. When I went up to college for my first term as a freshman, I read Pasternak's Zhivago during finals week (I read it for fun, not for an assignment), and then I began to realize---only just began to realize---how horrific it was and how Lenin and Stalin sort of out-Hitlered Hitler. I actually converted to Orthodoxy from the Baptist churches in 2014, because of the Romanovs' example.
Some years ago, I came across a suggestion from some historian (I now forget who) that Lenin's primary motive n bringing communism to Russia was not because he had an affection for the Russian people and wanted, in a misguided way, to improve their situation (and I don't question that they had it rough under the czars); but that Lenin was motivated by a need to avenge his older brother, who had been executed for trying to assassinate the previous Czar, and communism was a way to rally the Russian People to his cause so that, when empowered, he could carry out his vengeance under the guise of "Revolution." Supposedly, Lenin---who had been raised in the Orthodox Faith---reverted to it desperately on his deathbed, and died pleading for forgiveness.
Another joke I heard was that industrialization turned Russia into one bleak, dismal, and dull landscape which featured only two colors---concrete and steel. The joke was that if you look at pictures of Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, who was incredibly ugly, you would think he rebuilt Russian in his wife's image; or at least as an analogue to her personality. Supposedly, after taking power, Lenin awared himself an entire floor of the Kremlin as living quarters. His suite of rooms was in the middle of the floor; his wife's suite of rooms was on one end of the floor, and his girl friend's suite was on the other end. After a busy day of drawing up lists of people to be executed, he had three choices on stand-by for wherever he wanted to spend his evenings.
Starward