A Red Boyhood

Growing Up Under Stalin

Anatole Konstantin

"The terror did not bypass the NKVD, either. The new chief, Yezhov, began exterminating Iagoda's men, who knew too much; now the old torturers were tortured by new torturers and the old executioners were executed by new executioners. They were so terrorized that, as I read later, sometimes, upon hearing a knock at their office door, they jumped out of the window or put a bullet through their heads." Page 16 

"While I admired America in spite of such propaganda, an aricle in the newspaper made me wonder about some of its leaders. Accoring to this article, the American vice president, Henry Wallace, and the president of the Far Eastern Institute, Owen Lattimore, traveled in Siberia and visited a Gulag concentration camp. Upon returning to the United States, they reported that these Gulag camps were actually rehabilitation centers whose inmates were healthy, well-fed, slept in clean beds with white sheets, and worked with great enthusiasm. One of them, I believe it was Hentry Wallace, said that he had the privilege of shaking the hadn==nd of the greatest industrialist in the wold, the head of the For Eastern Gulag!

I had assumed that most educated people in the world knew from hisotr about the Potemkin villages, but these two obviously did not. Potemkin was chief minister to Catherine the Great. To prevent her from seeing how people really lived, he buildt properous-looking houses along the highway that he know she would travel but these houses were only facades, with nothign behind the front walls." Pages 151-152

"As far as we were concerned, from a practical point of view, the only difference between the Communists and the Nazis was that the Nazi's killed innocent people because of their ethnic affiliation, while the Communists killed innocent people because of political class affiliations, real or imaginary." Page 179

Book 62