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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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Tags: Forced-Labour History Russia Stalin
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himmelwerft
As far as I understood from the Russian text of the Politbureau statement, and the context of it’s use given in historical works, the OSO NKVD would be deciding whether to punish the “refugees” with 10 years imprisonment or not (the correct translation by the way would be “border-crosser” or “turncoat” (ßÕàÕÑÕÖçØÚ) vs. ”ÑÕÖÕÝÕæ = refugee” – the Soviet government did not consider people crossing the border as refugees at all, and did not use that word to define them – all people who entered the USSR illegally i.e. crossed the border not through a designated checkpoint having the necessary papers, were considered “turncoats”). So technically crossing the border was not an automatic 10 years imprisonment, but certainly a very likely one (again, from practice it seems that all those crossing the border weren’t automatically imprisoned).
The repression against the “perebezhchiki” intensified greatly in 1937-1938, and some historians (e.g. Petrov) link the Politbureau statements and law projects concerning them to the “Polish operation” which was run simultaneously with the Great Terror and was aimed at precluding new border crosses from Poland as well as detaining all people who crossed the border prior to 1937 (Yezhov estimated their number at ~100,000 during 1937 and it was a rough number since the Soviet government lost track of many of them); in 1938 the repression against them heavily intensified – even those who crossed the border before 1937 were subject to OSO-controlled hunts and especially heavy campaigns against immigrants ran in the Urals.
The operation was quite literally aimed at total control of former and present “illegal” immigration into the USSR.
Incidentally, it would be interesting to know if any nations have such extremely harsh punishment by law, regarding illegal immigration today? As far as I gather, quite recently Italy’s government proposed a law which would consider illegal immigration a crime punished by jail terms from 4 months to 6 years, but it’s only applicable if the migrant cannot be deported in due time; also some Asian nations, reportedly Singapore, practice imprisonment for the mere fact of illegal crossing.
With respect, one of your readers from Russia.
15 Jun 2009, 06:01
Mark Harrison
Thank you. I would be glad to improve my Russian but unfortunately the encoding of your cyrillic on this page has let us down, so I wonder what ”ÑÕÖÕÝÕæ” would be.
17 Jun 2009, 20:20
himmelwerft
Oh, it’s “bezhenets”.
18 Jun 2009, 09:15
Mark Harrison
Thanks.
18 Jun 2009, 11:42
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