Ignorance was bliss but bliss was hell

I mentioned in an earlier piece a writer called Victor Serge. I described him as an Anarchist a man who passionately believed in the cause of humanity a Belgian who spent over 17 years in Russia during the years of the revolution,, Who lived through the rise of the Bolsheviks and the suppression of dissent, as Russia descended into totalitarianism.


The purges under Stalin who suffered a psychosis and feared his own shadow. The reign of terror that produced a State Apparatus, the GPU a political police that knew no boundaries in terms of human oppression and the use of terror to suppress any form of dissent. 
No one was free from a knock on the door, the interrogation, the falsification of evidence and the trumped up charges which led to death or deportation to central Asia, Siberia. Even the men at the top of the apparatus that propagated the injustices, themselves became the victims and were shot.
Only Stalin was free from the terror and he had his own demons to deal with.  Molotov and a few others survived, but many, over time were denounced and disappeared.
It wasn't only at the top but the whole of Russian society which was ravaged. The land owning bourgeoisie were stripped of their possessions and shot or deported to labour camps in their thousands, the peasants were to die in their millions of starvation through the collectivisation and the massive inefficiencies which entailed. The intelligentsia were pummelled into submission but in many cases retained their spirit of dissent and we have today the memories of those times, seen through the eyes of these brave men and women.





The West was of course complicit (Roosevelt and Churchill) in all of this because they needed a bulwark against Fascism and the enormity of Russia was eventually the main force that brought the most efficient fighting machine to its knees outside Stalingrad !!    

What stands out in the writings of the dissident authors is their love of Russia and its people. Mother Russia with its extreme climate and equally extreme history seems to have fostered a people who could bear literally anything, accept the most horrendous privation and yet find a way to live !! I suppose that the country being so huge and the people being remote from others, they had no yardstick to measure the condition they lived in.
Ignorance was bliss but bliss was hell !!!