All entries for Saturday 02 May 2009

Truth in Humour; No Humour in Truth

In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn recounted the Stalin-era joke of the labour camp guard who asked a newly arrived convict about the length of his sentence.

The man says 25 years, but proclaims he is innocent!

The guard retorts that he must have done something because the innocent are only given 10 years.

There can be a grain of truth in humour; that's what makes it funny. In this case, it's a matter of historical record that millions of people suffered unjust imprisonment or execution in Stalin's time. It isn't funny when the victim says it; the joke is when it is said by the perpetrator.

This next bit isn't a joke.

On January 31, 1938, the Politburo of the party Central Committee in Moscow considered the problem of foreign refugees. (The document is in the Soviet archives collection of the Hoover Institution: RGANI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 11, folio 53). The minutes of the meeting record:

It has been established that foreign intelligence services are casting their mass espionage and sabotage network of agents into the USSR, mainly under the guise of refugees and those apparently seeking a political safe haven, better economic conditions in consequence of unemployment, deserters from military units and border security, and returning migrants and emigrants.

The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) resolves:

1. To propose to the USSR NKVD [interior ministry in charge of state security] to arrest immediately and subject to meticulous interrogation all refugees detained at the border, regardless of their motives for entering the territory of the USSR.
2. All refugees for whom it is established directly or indirectly that they entered the territory of the USSR with espionage, sabotage, or other anti-Soviet intentions -- to hand them over to the court of the Military Tribunal, with mandatory application of [death by] shooting. 
3. Cases of all refugees for whom it is established that they entered the territory of the USSR without ill intentions -- to hand them over for consideration by the USSR NKVD Special Asssembly, with application of the penalty of 10 years' imprisonment ... [emphasis added]

So: Guilty, death. Innocent, ten years. It didn't make me laugh.

Mark Harrison : 02 May 2009 01:32 |  Tags: Forced-Labour History Russia Stalin |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem