My Musings on Bolshevik Confiscation

Holodomor genocide

When the Bolsheviks started coming around the farms in Romania, the farmers met them with suspicion and refused to listen to Russian agents who spoke marginal Romanian.  Some fell for the ruse and the empty promises of socialism. Those who did not were eventually shot in front of the village as an effective terror tactic and their priests, who often preached against the Bolsheviks, were thrown from the church tower and killed, again in front of the entire village for maximum effect of brutality.

The city people did not have much to lose, of course, as you know, there were sweat shops everywhere and the lure of getting something for nothing, of getting even with the rich and stealing their stuff was too much for such poor and famished people. They fell for Bolshevism quite quickly. By the time they realized that the Bolsheviks had no intention of dividing what they stole but kept it for themselves, it was too late - guns had been confiscated, land, personal property, etc., and villagers had been moved by force into grey concrete block apartments in the city, built quickly and unsafely to house as many of them as possible.

The more prominent useful idiots such as journalists, doctors, engineers, teachers, professors, and other boot-licking lackeys had been killed too in order to frighten into compliance what was left of them so that they would become good little socialists and then communists if the communist party agreed to take them in.

My grandfather had buried a small tractor in his back yard but the neighbors told the Bolsheviks and they dug it up. They stole even his mantel clock so he could not tell time. The smirking Russian hanged it around his neck with a thick farm chain.

The Bolsheviks slaughtered his cow, the pig, the chickens, and all other domesticated animals that could have made a meal for the angry Russian soldiers who were the "liberators" at the end of WWII. They took the family jewels and all the money.

During WWII, the Germans had been garrisoned at the edge of the village (Romania was allied with Germany in World War II, Ploiesti had rich oil reserves and several refineries to process it into gasoline) and they seldom took anything from a farmer without asking and without just compensation.

I have no sympathy for the Nazis and their evil war machine and empire, but their doctors took care of the village sick according to my grandfather. One skilled surgeon stitched the face of mom's best friend (10 years old), who had been bitten by a horse that had ripped her entire right cheek off. There was no cost to the family and minimum scarring. In other words, the Russian soldiers and the Bolsheviks that followed in their footsteps were worse than the German soldiers during WWII and at the end of the war.

Hitler conquered his people through total bribery at first. When he took over the Social Democrat Party, they had a little over three dollars in their treasury and argued whether they should spend it to buy a rubber stamp or save it; the Weimar Republic was a total disaster and people were suffering economically. How hard was it for him to promise economic reforms and a better standard of living and actually delivering on those promises? He was a charismatic speaker and he became a "Gott" overnight. He promised a Volkswagen for every family. Germany prospered under his rule but then he showed his real face and started demonizing certain groups of people, confiscated their businesses and wealth, invented the faux superior race, and the rest is history.

You already know what Stalin did to his people and the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainian farmers at Holodomor in 1932-1933..