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Beria's crime wave

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by baz (U14258304) on Sunday, 4th September 2011

  After Stalin's death in 1953, Beria, his chief of the secret police, released thousands of people from the Gulags and prisons in the USSR, in an apparent attack of liberalism.
  Most of those released were guilty of no crime that we would recognise, but many were hardened criminals who proceeded to murder, rape and do whatever hardened criminals do, with the result that the crime rate soared.
  
  My question is: was Beria a closet liberal; or was he planning to use the crime wave to justify a crackdown in which his political opponents would disappear without too much fuss?
  
  If the latter case is true, can anyone think of other instances when criminals have been allowed to run amok in order to justify the introduction of draconian policies?

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• Message 2

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Sunday, 4th September 2011

  baz
  
  Perhaps Beria genuinely believed the party line as Solzenitzn has explained- that "politicos" were more evil than criminals..
  
  We still get from time to time shades of that extreme left argument that criminality is just a strategy forced upon the working class by an exploititative situation in which they are collectively denied what is rightfully theirs.
  
  The argument goes on that once a society is established and everyone is accustomed to the suppression of the individual ego and the principle of -"From each according to his ability. To each according to his needs"- crime would disappear amongst all of those who could make sane rather than insane life choices.
  
  The idea of "true believers" is very unfashionable in this cynical age.. But when and where belief systems are current the existence of belief itself is not regarded as a kind of panacea that shields people from error.
  
  Moreover Beria may well have been fully aware as Chief of Police of the great inadequacies of the other vital arm of the law- the judiucial system. As we have just been reminded by the case of the hospital nurse arrested on sufficient preliminary evidence to warrant that police action, credible law and order can only exist when the Judiciary will actually stand up for justice..
  
  It is to the credit of Nelson Mandela's and Walter Sisulu's fellow members of the South African legal profession that the Judiciary refused to be a mere servant of the Nationalist Apartheid regime.. Stalin's judges seem to have been only too happy to do his will and have people be locked away, or when they were locked away without even their "due process" ignore the old English right of Habeas Corpus.
  
  As for your question - Perhaps Adolf Hitler's development of his Stormtropper thugs might be seen in this light. Once he was in power with the proper German Army to act for him, he could turn the regular army into his assassins with the Knight of the Long Knives.
  
  This was not unlike what happened in Russian revolutionary cells under Tsarism when the leader of a potential group would just randomly select one of the members to be murdered by the rest. For them it was an initiation ceremony and a "crossing of the Rubicon". There was no way back. And from the Night of the Long Knives to the swearing of a personal Oath of Allegiance to the Fuehrer by the entire Army there was a progression in Nazi power that one can project forwards with some kind of historical inevitability.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by Tas (U11050591) on Sunday, 4th September 2011

  Hi Cass,
  
  To each according to his needs"- crime would disappear amongst all of those who could make sane rather than insane life choices. Β 
  
  This reminds me of a quatrain from Omar Khayyam, as translated by Fitzgerald,
  
  "Myself when young
  did doctor and saint frequent
  and heard much argument about it and about,
  But always came out the same door door as in I went."
  
  In my younger days, I heard many such slogans such "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need," and so on.
  
  In those days many intellectuals of the left thought that they could fashion society according to their intellectual pleasure. However, society does not run that way.People are capable of great things, however there has to be a strong motivation to excel. And one of the prime motivators is, to not use a euphemism, human "greed.'
  
  That is why the Western world has been so successful; and that is why Feudalism converted to Capitalism. We do not need governments for many things, however the causes of the current economic depression/recession has shown that we do need strong government to regulate this "Greed". If we do not, we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
  
  Tas
  
  

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• Message 4

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  Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Sunday, 4th September 2011

  My question is: was Beria a closet liberal; or was he planning to use the crime wave to justify a crackdown in which his political opponents would disappear without too much fuss?  Beria was one of the four Politburo plotters, who, in all likelihood, murdered Stalin (the other three were Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin) in the wake of the showdown between Stalin and Politburo a few months prior to his death. Immediately after Stalin's death, power struggle between the plotters ensued, which ended up with Khrushchev on top and Beria being arrested and shot. Besides, the Beria amnesty of 1953 freed practically no inmates’ incarcerated under "political" articles, mostly the so-called "bytoviki", or various ordinance violators, and outright criminals. So, a "closet liberal" - I think not.

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• Message 5

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Sunday, 4th September 2011

  Tas
  
  As ever good to hear from you.. I thought of you a few minutes ago.. I am working on some thing I am calling "Modern Lessons from Medieaval History"-- you may enjoy reading it..
  
  It really started when I followed up reading a 1915 History of the Middle Ages by a Cambridge academic, by tackling a 1963 treatment of Europe in Renaissance and Reformation written by a Prof of the University of Colorado.. There are interesting American and Sixties resonances.
  
  Anyway I was just quoting a favourite book from 1935+1938 that referred to Western Civilization as "parvenu"- one of your words.. And he used it in the context of comparing the West with India and China.. In brief he said that rather in the way of upstart parvenus the West is all about how to act, with means being more important than ends. The Asian Civilizations are quite the reverse, that is so obsessed with ends that they can totally neglect the means.
  
  Thinking of that confidence of an age and culture that believed in Final Solutions and the ability of boffins in the human sciences to shape/control the Future, people using the phrase "the ends justifies the means" usually involve rather nebulous and very fanciful "ends" and very concrete, actual and factual "means".
  
  Apparently Hitler when asked in his early days for a programme of what the Nazis would do, said get power. Once we have power we will work out the precise ends.
  
  That author Stephen King-Hall actually gave the interesting example of a young new China after 1911 taking full note of the fact that Japan only avoided being swallowed up by undertaking its own form of westernisation and aquiring sharp teeth in the shape of a Navy made in Britain and an army made in Germany.
  
  Japan is perhaps the Asian model of how to embrace Western means without totally discarding Japanese ends and values. Inner peace and tranquility amidst the hustle and bustle.
  
  Regards
  
  Cass
  
  
  

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• Message 6

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  Posted by baz (U14258304) on Monday, 5th September 2011

  If I remember correctly, the post-Ceaucescu govt hired a lot of heavy miners to sort out some demonstrators in Bucharest. There was also the case in Sicily, during WWII, when U.S. troops used mafia connections to help re-take the island from the fascists.
  Obviously Kristallnacht, in 1938, was mob rule followed by a horrendous crackdown.

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Monday, 5th September 2011

  This all makes me think of the early Seventies when I was teaching in the school that has just commemorated the 50th anninversary of the Stavanger disaster.. Back in those days it was a Boys Secondary Modern and when I went there to teach in 1969 it still was, before becoming part of a mixed comprehensive in 1970..
  
  After a couple of years I realised that there were quite a few of these Croydon boys who seemed destined either for criminality or for some uniformed and disciplined organisation like the Police or the Armed Forces.
  
  Love and hate are so similar. And the people that we fight most instinctively are probably the people who most resemble us.
  
  That was certainly what I saw during my five years in that school. Almost invariably the two boys who one found rolling around on the floor fighting each other in their first weeks at secondary school then became best mates.
  
  In more inner city schools there tended to be less social cohesion, and fights and conflicts were more likely to result in a tacit agreement to give each other space.
  
  Cass

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• Message 8

  , in reply to message 5.

  Posted by Tas (U11050591) on Monday, 5th September 2011

  Hi Cass,
  
  I think India should be grateful to Britain for weaning it from all kinds of superstitions and a horrible world of customs ("sati") gone berserk to the modern world in thought and in practice. It is gratifying to see that in India, perhaps the only Third World country, where the British parliamentary system works, admittedly with certain Indian twists.
  
  You folks have done India so many favors, however, modern Indian don't realize this and think they invented everything for themselves.
  
  It is a sign of great maturity to understand where we come from, unfortunately this is beyond Indians at this point in time; perhaps later.
  
  Tas

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