Next
Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 27 Mar 2022

Taken: 27 Mar 2022

0 favorites     1 comment    95 visits

Keywords

Excerpt •
Image •
Gulag •
Author •
Anne Applbaum •

Authorizations, license

Visible by: Everyone
All rights reserved
95 visits

1930

1930
Comments
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Yet Stalin’s interest in concentration camps need not have had a rational source at all: perhaps Stalin’s obsessive interest in vast construction projects and toiling teams of forced laborers was concerned, somehow, to his particular form of megalomanical madness. Mussolini once said of Lenin that he “is an artist who has worked in men as others have worked in marble or metal.” This description may be better applied to Stalin, who literally enjoyed the sight of large numbers of human bodies, marching or dancing in perfect synchronization. He was captivated by the ballet, by orchestrated exhibition of gymnastics, and by parades featuring pyramids built out of anonymous, contorted human figures. Like Hitler, Stalin was also obsessed with the cinema, particularly Hollywood musicals, with their enormous casts of coordinated singers and dancers. He might have derived a different but related form of pleasure from the teams of prisoners who dug canals and built railway lines at his bidding. ~ Page 53

Where mossy cliffs and waters slumbered
There, thanks to the strength of labor
Factories will be built
And towns will grow.
Smokestacks will rise up
Under the Northern skies
Buildings will shine with the lights
Of libraries, theaters, and clubs ~ Medvedkov, a White Sea Canal prisoner, 1934
3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.

Sign-in to write a comment.