It was a gray day in Moscow, and a 7-year-old girl was on the way to the train station. Her mother had gone to the hospital to deliver, and the girl was being sent to her aunt. In the streets, she remembers, were soldiers with rifles, and everywhere people in shock, some openly weeping.
Why are they crying,” she asked her father. It was March 5, 1953.
“Stalin has died,” her father said.
A friend and colleague told me this story. She also said that in a little bag her father took with him to work each day he packed a toothbrush, razor and extra underwear, in case he didn’t return.
I could relate. Also having Russian heritage, I knew of the Soviet dictator’s reign of terror. My relatives, German-Russian farmers on the Kuban steppe in Southern Russia, were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. One died in a gulag. Another was shot. My Tanta Anna as a teenager was forced to work in a logging camp.
Meanwhile, my friend grew up under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. In a famous speech, Khrushchev had shocked the party by condemning Stalin’s crimes, coining the phrase, “cult of personality.”
In the following years, she excelled at the university, earning a doctorate. and began a career teaching math. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, she, her husband and their parents left Moscow and settled in New England. We taught together in Massachusetts.
As I had tea with her one day between classes, we talked about Stalin and the power he had over people. I recalled a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago describing a Communist party meeting in the 1940s, where, after Stalin had spoken, the audience jumped to its feet to applause. The applause continued. It didn’t stop. Looking around, members were afraid to stop clapping. Would someone notice? Would they be on the slow train to Siberia?
Similar scenes occurred in Nazi Germany. In a 1936 photograph of a rally held at a shipyard, one German worker stands in a crowd with his arms folded. He is the only one not giving the Nazi salute. Once a loyal member of the Party, August Landmesser had fallen in love with a Jewish woman. After his engagement was discovered, he was expelled from the Party, and his marriage application denied. They had a daughter.
In 1937 Landmesser attempted to flee Germany with his family, but was arrested at the border. The Gestapo also arrested his wife, who delivered their second child in prison. Sent to the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, she was murdered along with 14,000 others.
After three years in a concentration camp, Landmesser was forced into the German Army. He went missing in Croatia.
Many are the lessons we can draw from history. One we cannot ignore, however, is that authoritarian, autocratic governments cause great harm, not only to democratic institutions, but to vulnerable people.
As we begin life under a second Trump administration, millions of our neighbors are threatened with deportation. These include hundreds of thousands of DACA students and millions under temporary protected status (TPS) or awaiting action on their requests for asylum.
In the coming days, how shall we respond. Will we clap? Will we fold our arms? Will we speak what we believe? Will we act to safeguard the lives and liberties of others?
Ben Jacques Stories 