It was all a part of his plan, Stalin that is. Or at least that’s what I hear. The lady in the red coat loves to spew random facts. She loves to show everyone how smart she is, her ignorance is as big as her belly. She loves to brag about her pure gold watch that her husband bought her for her birthday. Well congratulations, we are being forcefully taken away from our homes in cattle trains like animals but at least you can tell time. The whole two month ride I sat there trying to focus on my sewing and was always interrupted by her constant talking. But finally something useful came out of her mouth. She says this is all a part of Stalin’s plan to rid Lithuania of all its people so we can go and work to provide resources for the Soviets. She says we are to be deported to Siberia. I saw others being deported, many of my coworkers started to disappear but I never thought much of it; I thought I would be safe. But then my father and brother joined the Forest Brothers, the army resistance fighting against the Soviets, and my mother and I soon found ourselves leaving the only life we ever knew. I was forced out of my quiet, happy life as a seamstress to be forced into a cramped cattle train that smelled like sickness and death mixed in with tears of sorrow. Even worse I hardly had any room to do my needlework! But life off the cattle trains is even worse, we must work in the bitter cold and snow; of the desolate Altai mountain region chopping down trees to give to the NKVD guards so they can kindle their fires while we freeze to death. My life know goes according to Stalin’s plan and my vision for the future is as dull as my brown stringy hair that won’t fit into a bun anymore and my hazel eyes now see through a world of gray. My body...
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...lives joining the resistance for Lithuania’s freedom from the Soviets and I’d just go and run off with one. And my mother would lose her whole family, it’ll shatter her. I finish my days work and go back to my tent. It is almost sunset and I know he’ll be waiting for me. I don’t really think he is the enemy, he’s just doing his job for his own survival just like me. Maybe he really does love me and just wants to keep me safe. But I won’t meet him at the oak tree, he’ll have to go without me. While he rows away I’ll stay behind and work to support my mother and I. I’ll comfort her while she screams for my father’s and brother’s return. And every so often I’ll wonder what would’ve happened if I had ran away with but then I’ll quickly quiet those thoughts because I know I did what’s right. If I were to be but a traitor or die loyal to my country, then I’d rather die.
He goes with some other workers to a state run farm outside of Magnitogorsk to help repair tractors he remarks, “everything, in fact, had been thought of, he said, 'except good land and men to work it'.”7 This was the issue with Stalin's “revolution from above” be built these grand cities that were essentially just large plants like Magnitogorsk, but the people lived in horrible conditions, the collectivized farms that were meant to support the food supply for the workers of Magnitogorsk had bad land and nobody to work to the farms. In theory Stalin's plans could work, but the people, the land, the infrastructure could not feasibly attain the end result that was needed, it just wasn’t possible. For Stalin's plans to have worked he needed to be in the right place and the Soviet Union, and the unforgiving landscape just was not it. Things got so bad that Scott writes, “ the new Bolshevik government sent inspectors to every village to look for hoarded bread.”8 Scott writes, “ during the early thirties the main energies of the Soviet Union went into construction. New plants, mines, whole industries, sprang up all over the country” but he also recalls, “the new aggregates failed to work normally.
The United States and The Soviet Union were originally joined together by the want to defeat The Nazi army, in 1941-1945. The alliance remained, and strengthened, among the two until the end of World War II. At the end of World War II, a rupture between the two occurred. The differences began earlier, but there was a straw that broke the camels back. The reason The United States and The Soviet Union’s alliance did not work out is because The Soviet Union and The United States were complete opposites, The Soviet Union proved to be faulty, and they were never truly allies.
As a dictator Stalin was very strict about his policies, especially working. For instance. Stalin had set quotas very high , as they were very unrealistic. The workers had very long days, and under the rule of Stalin most people worked many hours in overtime, and resulting in no pay. Stalin treated workers very, very harshly. Those who did not work were exiled to Siberia or killed. Some may say you got what you deserved in Stalin’s time. Those who worked very hard for Stalin sometimes got bonuses such as trips, or goods likes televisions and refrigerators. The workers had to conform to Stalin’s policies . Stalin’s harsh treatment of workers received a very unwelcoming response, but in fact the liberal amount of goods that the workers had made, had in fact
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich takes place in a camp run by the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps. This camp is called a Gulag which was established for people who were working against the soviet union under the man named Stalin. You would go there for disobeying, not believing in what stalin wanted the perfect soviet society to be. One of the men named Ivan denisovich told his story about the life in the Gulags. When ivan was sent there for being a soldier. He would always wake up on time and do the work he was demanded of. But one of the days he fell ill. he hoped he was going to be put on the sick list. So that day he decided to lay in bed for a few minutes longer. Instead the guard so rudely does tell him to get up and said you're coming with me. When you disobeyed the guards orders you were sent to a prison cell.A guard named TarTar took him to the punishment cells for his tardiness but instead he makes him clean the floor in the guard room. This job was for After doing this he goes to eat breakfast which consists of bread and water. When he was done with breakfast he went to the doctor because he felt ill but the guy took his temperature and sent him to do some work. The only thing that kept him moving and fighting was having people he was close with which was necessarily his gang consisting of tiuryn, tsezar, aloysha a baptist not being able to have his own religion. As Shukhov he said “Come on, boys, don’t let it get you down! It’s only a Power Station, but we’ll make it a home away from home.” ( page, Schukov wanted to make knifes with the scrap metal he found. He wanted to be able to fight back with the soviet guards in hopes to go home. But when he was searched at first he remembered that ...
This demonstrates that the prisoners are part of a system where the needs of the collective are far more important than the needs of the individual (in both communism and in the prison.) It also reveals the corruption of the Soviet Union because it while it claims that everyone should be equal, the life of the prisoners in the camp are not valued at all. This could be due to the fact that prisoners in the camps aren’t viewed as people, but rather as animals that are being worked to their death.
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
If a person goes back in history of Ukraine, he or she can easily see why Stalin might target this place to install his idea in. Ukraine is the “breadbasket of Europe” in which the USSR gets its grain to feed its empire. In 1929, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union's Communist Party decided to introduce a program of collectivization to the farmers of Ukraine. This forced the farmers to give up all private property: lands, livestock, and farming equipment. By doing this Stalin hoped to feed the industry workers in the cities and export the product to other countries in hope to gain profit to help him fund his industry plans. Private farmers were to be completely being replaced by collective farming or known in Ukraine as kolkhozes. Many of these private farmers, who sought for independence, refused to join collective farming because it resembled early serfdom in that region. Stalin intr...
In 1941, 15 year old Lina Vilkas, her mother Elena, and 10 year old brother Jonas are taken out of their comfortable home in Lithuania by the Soviet police (the NKVD) where they are thrown into train cars along with many others. Prior to the family’s situation, their father and husband has already been captured by the NKVD. These innocent passengers can’t figure out why they have all been arrested and why they are forced to be held under harsh, unsanitary and malignant conditions. The train departs and travels miles and miles away from their homes. Weeks will pass, then months before they reach the unknown destination. Lina often wonders if she will ever see her father again and how she will ever find him.
The region known as one of the world superpowers lost dominance after seventy years of corruption and destruction. The Soviet union was the largest Communist bloc. It ended in 1991 because the economy that was government run could no longer sustain. What important things about the Soviet union should be placed in textbooks? Textbooks should emphasize the USSR’s size, The Great Terror, and their military strength, because they have shaped who this region is today.
But that wasn’t all. A few weeks later another letter arrived from the secret police telling me my mother would be deported to the east, whatever that meant. They didn’t explain it. They just said she was going to the east. But we knew from other people, from my classmates who had gone through the same thing with their parents, that going to the east meant going to labor camps and concentration camps, and with not much food and lots of
Multitudes of people were deported by the Soviets under the order of Josef Stalin during World War II, including Crimean Tatars and Lithuanians. One such example of the Soviet’s cruelty is depicted in the novel Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys: “He threw his burning cigarette onto our clean living room floor and ground it into the wood with his boot. We were about to become cigarettes” (5). Between Shades of Gray is narrated through the eyes of fifteen-year-old artist, Lina Vilkas. Soviet soldiers, known as the NKVD, take Lina and her family from Lithuania to labor in Siberian camps with little supplies and hope. As people around her die at the NKVD’s hands, she is forced to endure
Have you ever wondered what it was like in Soviet Russia, during the 1950s? In the realistic fiction novel Breaking Stalin's Nose by Eugene Yelchin, young Sasha Zaichik, who wants to be a part of the Young Soviet Pioneers, gets faced with a lot of trouble when he accidently chips the nose off a statue of Joseph Stalin, the communist leader. The theme of this story is that Sometimes you only have 2 options, one can be to take hope and one can be to take fear, and often times people choose fear, and especially when something so valuable is at stake. When Sasha accidently chips off the nose of a statue of Stalin, he is in constant fear of his life and punishment of the communists, but really he needs hope and love to control him. One reason is that Sasha fears that he will be
The general perspective of the Soviet Union was that the country was a dictatorship, specifically, an oppressive, brutal, top-down autocracy that guided all aspects of life of its people. From grocery stores having set quantities of goods, only purchasable by ration card, to strict, set times of work and off-duty hours, to censored press, The Soviet Union was indeed a dictatorial state. However, the people of the Soviet Union did not simply fall into line with the established rules of society- They had diaries, they wrote down their opinions about the government or their job, they wrote detailed memoirs of their life within the USSR. The people of the Soviet Union had some freedom, and it was even codified in the Constitution of 1936. Yet, scholars and most people in general still widely accept the notion that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian dictatorship. The question then arises: Why did the Soviet people have freedom, otherwise known as sociological ‘agency,’ to denounce others or write down their views about society, if the country was perhaps one of the most totalitarian and dictatorial countries to exist in human history? By analyzing Totalitarianism as scholars perceive it, as well as the Soviet system, along with examples from the people of the USSR, one will be able to realize that totalitarianism set the rules for society within the Soviet Union and provided its people with a distribution of power, which was used by those that understood the system and could act within the framework of the system.
While spending time in Kazakhstan, his desire to go out and fight grows stronger and stronger. Through much hard work and planning he eventually manages to enlist in a Polish Army division called Battalion 92, which helps maintain the railways which deliver supplies to the fronts. After nearly starving to death on an assignment in the Ural Mountains, he deserts the Battalion, escaping to Chelyabinsk, where he joins a military school. Upon completion, he is sent to fight at the front in a Polish Army Reserve, achieving his goal o...
The novel focuses on one man, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, as he tries to survive another day in the Soviet Union with dignity and compassion. The action takes place at a prison camp in Russia in the northeastern region called Ekibastuz. The location is pounded by snow, ice and winds of appalling and shocking force during winter and lasted for many weeks. The camp is very isolated as it consists double rows of barbed wire fencing around the entire area, making sure it is fully concealed and private, so that no prisoners can escape. The conditions of the camp are very harsh. It is a union where camp prisoners have to earn their food by working hard in their inadequate clothing during the extremely cold weather. Living conditions are almost unbearable; heavy mattresses do not include sheets, as an alternative it is stuffed with sawdust, prisoners only eat two hundred grams of bread per meal and guards would force prisoners to remove their clothing for body searches at temperatures of forty below zero. The building walls are covered in dull and monotonous white paint and it was untidy and unpleasant. “It’s constant chaos, constant crowds and constant confusion” shows that ceilings are most likely coated with frost and men at the tables are packed as tight and it was always crowded. Rats would diddle around the food store, because of the incredibly unhygienic and filthy environment the camp is and it was so insanitary that some men would die from horrible diseases. “Men trying to barge their way through with full trays” suggests that the living conditions are very harsh indeed and mealtimes would be chaotic, as every famished men would be rushing to receive food. However, not only did the place cause the prisoners to suffer and lose their...