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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23705 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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"Wrecking" is when someone sabotages the Soviet Union. At first they thought they would be a very productive utopia. By implementing socialism it would automatically transform into prosperity and advancement in every way. Then that didn't happen. By the 1930s it was clear they were getting stuck somehow. So Stalin determined there must be "wreckers" purposefully harming society and particularly sabotaging industry. Such people were identified, tortured into confessing and executed. Then their torturers were tortured and executed. Then the torturer-torturers were tortured and executed. And so on. One indeed wonders why this enlightened society failed to progress into a sci-fi eutopia.

Anyways it's commie talk for "saboteur". As invented or at least popularized by Stalin himself.

Then their torturers were tortured and executed. Then the torturer-torturers were tortured and executed.

Is this factual?

The campaigns of collectivization and industrialization were initiated in 1929. Both of these essentially entailed show trials, local purges and waves of terror directed at 'wreckers', 'saboteurs', 'hoarders', 'terrorists' and other so-called anti-revolutionaries. The leaders of the state security service (GPU, formerly Cheka) who carried these out were so-called Old Bolsheviks, that is, participants of the revolution and civil war, not appointed by Stalin and generally lacking a sense of personal loyalty to him which he found suspicious. The short story is that these officials and their subordinates were purged during the great terror wave of 1937-38. The state security commissar who carried this out was himself purged in 1940 by his successor who was then himself purged after Stalin’s death.

I'm aware that there were great purges of leading figures, generals and officers, etc. But I wonder if these cycles of killing were separate from the butchery of commoners, or not. The sadists who were employed in the gulags and tortured millions to death - were they met with a similar, deserved end during these cycles, too?

I'm not sure it makes sense to ponder this subject. It can surely be stated that the executors of the wholesale repression of kulaks, Cossacks and 'treasonous' ethnic minorities etc. were themselves repressed afterwards but not for the reason that they committed atrocities. It was due to the peculiar logic of Stalinism and the overall nature of totalitarian systems which operate by the rule that nobody is beyond reproach or suspicion regardless of position or rank and everyone is to live in a constant state of dread.

Everyone except Stalin himself? Was he ever investigated? He seems to have been the chiefest source of the terror, regardless of rank, for everyone else.

Nobody is beyond reproach or suspicion regardless of position except for the one supreme ruler who is revered basically as a deity, that is.

you really ought to watch Death of Stalin. It's probably the best black comedy of the last decade, maybe longer.

Second this, fantastic movie. Obviously not what really happened, but close enough to get you curious.

This website theorizes he may have been betrayed: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-death-stalin-180965119/

Otherwise, his servants merely stood by, too scared to intervene, when he had a stroke. Although it may not have helped if they did, because he gulaged the useful doctors, including the one who suggested he rest more.

His subordinates either had him poisoned and falsely portrayed it as a natural death, or deliberately withheld medical assistance in order to cause his death. In either case his death is on them, particularly Beria.

Yes, it's factual. It's maddening that people don't know this sort of thing, given our society's purported obsession with searching for any visible sign, marker or dogwhistle of genocidal totalitarianism, provided it's not visible signs, markers or dogwhistles of the genocidal totalitarianism that's considered super-cool and popular with large portions of the tribe most obsessed with the search.

I thought that literally happened in the 1930s with the NKVD iteratively denouncing and torturing their own members and leadership.

A cursory look at Google confirms this. Not every last torturer was himself later tortured. But there were waves of denouncements. Multiple cycles of this. I know it sounds like absurd parody, but it appears to have happened.

Wikipedia indicates (1 2 3) as follows:

  • 1936: Kamenev and Zinoviev are interrogated by Yagoda's NKVD and executed

  • 1938: Yagoda is interrogated by Yezhov's NKVD and executed

  • 1940: Yezhov is interrogated by Beria's NKVD and executed

  • 1953: Beria is executed

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