Communist dictators who killed millions
of their innocent citizens
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America is burning
with repulsive Marxist fever which has reached a scorching level. Like sharks circling
mad in bloody waters, the mainstream media, academia, the Democrat Party, and
its American supporters are engulfed by Marxist fever and stirred into a daily frenzy
devoid of logic and truth, ready to impeach our president and deport anybody who
is not a Democrat Socialist.
The social/racial
justice warrior activists are determined to replace the “evil capitalism” they suddenly
detest and reject, with “equitable, classless, non-racist, and socially just socialism/communism.”
They have no idea what socialism and communism really are but that is of no
consequence - they just want their promised “free stuff.”
Community
organizers and agitators from the media, Hollywood, academia, Democrat
Socialist and Communist Congresspeople, and the Communist Party USA are telling
them that in Marxist utopia they will never have to lift another finger to provide
for themselves, the government will do it for them. It sounds intoxicating and
enticing to useful idiots and low information voters - except that it is one
big, fat lie.
Some
Americans have always been in love with Bolshevism and Communism, stemming from
their ignorance, naivete, and gullibility. Past and present Americans have chosen
to visit Cuba and Russia with a large entourage or to move permanently to the former
Soviet Union, praising their socialist/communist blissful and superior way of
life.
Aside from
Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who chose to honeymoon in the
former Soviet Union and praised its clean metro and cheap concert tickets (government
subsidized), many groups of Americans moved to Stalin’s “paradise” after the
Russian Revolution. None were as famous as the Finnish Americans.
The New York
Times wrote on August 24, 1931 that “6,000 Americans will work in Russia;”
Peter Filene wrote about “Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917-1933;” and Andrea
Graziosi wrote about “Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia, 1920-1940: Their
Experience and Their Legacy.”
Who were
these idealistic Americans who chose to move to the former Soviet Union despite
warnings from our government to stay away from the scourge called Bolshevism?
The first
group, according to Susan Jacoby and Yelena Khanga, writing in Soul to soul:
A Black Russian American family, was comprised of black Americans, “communists
and non-communists, [who] were recruited as agricultural experts to Central
Asia to aid in cotton production.”
Another
group was comprised of foreigners who were recruited as skilled workers
and experts in Ukraine and Ural Mountains (Kharkov, Cheliabinsk, Mangitogorsk, Kuznetsk)
to work on large industrial construction projects. John Scott wrote about this
experience in his book, Behind the Urals: An American in Russia’s City of
Steel.
Jewish
Americans migrated to
Eastern Siberia to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan created in 1931 by
Stalin for them. The area was located just north of Manchuria. Robert Weinberg
described its establishment and history in his book, Stalin’s Forgotten
Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated
History, 1928-1996.
The fourth
group, Finnish Americans, encompassed, along with Finnish Canadians, 25 percent
of the foreign labor force in Karelia, a region in northwest Russia which
bordered Finland. Lawrence and Sylvia Hokkanen described them in Karelia: A Finnish
American Couple in Stalin’s Russia.
According to
Emily Weidenhamer, writing on December 12, 2005 in geohistory. today, these
Americans chose to go to the Soviet Union because of the labor situation in
America following the Great Depression. Many were promised employment in the
Soviet Union and a better life and success. https://geohistory.today/finnish-americans-ussr-disillusionment/
But the Finnish
Americans were already wealthy, they did not leave for economic reasons. They
owned “homes, cars, farm equipment, and the like. They paid their own way to
the Soviet Union, and they emigrated with entire families.” It is safe to speculate
that they were motivated by their political beliefs.
Mark Stodghill
quoted Mayme Sevander in “Harsh Lessons in Idealism,” who said, “We were not
traitors. It must be understood that we were the children of idealists. Their idealism
was worded in communist ideals – that there should be equality for all.”
(Duluth News Tribune, Dec. 15, 1996, p. 1E)
Emily Weidenhamer
wrote that “The Finnish American community in the United States was often
politically radical, heavily influenced by left-wing socialist and communist
movements. This trend was rooted, in part, in the Finnish national awakening,”
an outlet for the Finnish immigrants who labored in lumber camps and mines
under horrible working conditions. The anger that they and other foreign
immigrants had to endure such unfair working conditions expressed itself in
membership in radical political movements, labor unions, socialism, and
communism. (Eugene Van Cleef, The Finn in America, pp. 28-29)
According to
Carl Ross, the non-political Finns, conservative members of the Lutheran
Church, who disliked the radical movement which tainted all Finns, were alleged
to have petitioned the immigration officials to deny Finnish socialists’
entrance to the United States.
Mayme
Sevander’s father is alleged to have said to potential Finnish recruits:
“Karelia…
needs strong workers who know how to chop trees and dig ore and build houses and
grow food. Isn’t that what we Finns have been doing in the United States for
the past thirty years? And wouldn’t it be wonderful to do that same work in a
country that needs you, a country where there is no ruling class, no rich
industrialists or kings or czars to tell you what to do? Just workers toiling
together for the common good?” (Mayme Sevander, They Took My Father, p.
19)
As it turned
out, the Finns discovered rather quickly that there were two classes, the
proletariat and the communist apparatchiks, there was a ruler, Stalin and the
Communist Party’s Politburo, and the common good was not common, it was the
good of the Communist Party elites. And the proletariat had to toil hard for
equal and paltry wages.
The departing
Finns who caught the “Karelian fever” appealed to “comrades” left behind to
rally around communists in America:
“We the
undersigned, leaving behind this country of capitalistic exploitations, are
headed for the Soviet Union where the working class is in power and where it is
building a socialistic society. We appeal to you, comrades, who are staying
behind, to rally round communist slogans, to work efficiently to overthrow
capitalism and create the foundation of a Republic of Labor.”
As many who
have experienced communism, we can only imagine what had happened to the
foreigners who chose to move to and stay in the Soviet Union. They experienced
the human cost of Stalin’s forced collectivization and pogrom against the kulaks,
peasants who owned their farm and could hire labor.
Kaarlo Tuomi
wrote:
“All the
stations were packed with hordes of exiled peasants from the steppes of Russia and
Ukraine… They were literally dying of starvation before our eyes; rags hung on
one, and the silent entreaty of the children was unbearable as they went back
and forth through the train begging for bread… ‘You can’t make an omelet
without breaking some eggs,’ Lenin once quipped, and we accepted this grimly.
But it was easier to joke about broken eggs than to see broken people and hear
their pitiful cries.” (quoted by Widenhamer from Kaarlo Tuomi, pp. 121-122)
The Finns
eventually fell victims to Soviet xenophobia and forced Russification, many
being tricked into changing their citizenship. A large portion disappeared in
gulags and other prisons, never to be seen again. Some were lucky and were able
to reclaim their American citizenship and return to the safety of the
capitalist U.S.
Anything
Finnish was outlawed eventually by the Soviets. Arrests and purges followed in
order to force the Finnish group to comply with Stalinism. If both parents were
arrested, younger children were placed in orphanages and the “children lost
their ethnic identity.”
A study
published in Finland in 1934 described that the Finns had been so deceived by
the Soviet utopia that “even the most red-hot communists have turned snowy
white in their political opinions in a very brief period.”
Michael Gelb
wrote in 1993 Karelian Fever: The Finnish Immigrant Community During Stalin’s
Purges that “virtually all those who could leave Karelia did.”
After the communist
Finns realized what Soviet life was really like, how dreadful and dreary, many returned
to the capitalist America. Perhaps more Finns would have gone back but Russian authorities
held their Soviet passports and did not allow them to go back to the United
States.
Under communism,
if one was issued a passport and visa for a specific trip, once they returned, if
they were not able or smart enough to defect to the West, they had to surrender
the passport to the police. A trip and the visa had to be approved months prior
to departure and most of the time the petitions were denied.
The excited Finnish
communists who left capitalism in America in order to build socialism in the
Soviet Union quickly learned that it was a system based on fear and imprisonment
of body, mind, and soul.
Mayme Sevander
was unable to suitably describe the deep-seated fear but she admitted that “Russians’
lives have been ruled by fear since the days of Ivan the Terrible. As adopted
Russians, we American Finns shared that fear.”
Determined
to repeat disastrous Marxist history, today’s American communists and other low
information agitators, activists, and voters, who plan to replace capitalism
with socialism, are carrying the Bolshevik torch and the same Karelian communist
fever from the turn of the 20th century.
A comment from my friend Rostislav in Tasmania:
ReplyDelete"Many thanks, dear Ileana, for another good article of yours! I’d like to add that some ten years ago a honest Russian historian Yuri Dimitriev discovered in the North-Karelian forests’ Sandarmokh depth a huge (thousands of skeletons!) secret cemetery of innocent victims shot by Stalin’s henchmen during the thirties. Soon after it Dimitriev was sent to rot in prison by the Putin’s henchmen, in spite of many public protests… You know, it’s rather sad to see that for the U.S. media (both for the MSM and for the conservatives) the old idiocy about the “stolen presidential elections” does remain the only reason to mention Russia, while there is no interest at all to the continuing – under the cruellest police repressions in the best Securitate fashion - mass Russian demonstrations against the utterly corrupt and criminal regime of Putin. Well, probably it’s just one more sign of the “repulsive Marxist fever” your article is about?
With deep respect and every good wish from Tasmania – Rostislav."