Some rabid anti-communist told be to read this book as proof of a Soviet genocide in Ukraine.
I did a quick search and saw it being passed around and referenced in anti-communists circles like /r/ENOUGHCOMMIESPAM, but I haven’t seen any leftist evaluations of this book or this author. So is anyone familiar with this, and how seriously should I take it?
My take is that anyone who got sent to the gulag probably did something to deserve being there
Yeah fuck you Osip Mandelstam, poetry deserves death
Do you know why he was arrested?
Because he wrote an anti-Stalin poem?
:gulag:
It’s a dope way to die, I guess. Suicide by poem.
We are living, but can’t feel the land where we stay,
More than ten steps away you can’t hear what we say.
But if people would talk on occasion,
They should mention the Kremlin Caucasian.
His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live-baits,
And his accurate words are as heavy as weights.
Cucaracha’s moustaches are screaming,
And his boot-tops are shining and gleaming.
But around him a crowd of thin-necked henchmen,
And he plays with the services of these half-men.
Some are whistling, some meowing, some sniffing,
He’s alone booming, poking and whiffing.
He is forging his rules and decrees like horseshoes –
Into groins, into foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows.
Every killing for him is delight,
And Ossetian torso is wide.
For what it’s worth, I don’t actually think he deserved to be imprisoned or killed. There’s plenty of valid criticism to be made of the Soviets’ repression of artistic expression. At the same time, I understand why they felt the need to handle it in the way that they did.
Thank you for being sincere. To be honest, I find talking to Westerners/Americans about the USSR really exhausting. It all feels like either one big meme or a purely theoretical argument, not people’s lives. When I look at my family, and at their other Soviet friends, and how the culture there is now more generally, I just feel like… it left so much indirect trauma and fucked with their way of thinking. I don’t think of free speech as the most important right blablabla. But it also makes me uncomfortable when my parents watch some random short film about a girl getting arrested for reading a book on a tram and their first reaction is “ahahahhaha serves you right, idiot, you have to read it by candlelight in the dead of night, duhh.” I don’t know if, in hind sight, repression was worth it.