Charles' way

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

Please remember what I wrote in my "enlightment trash" essay about the 
Stalinist regime: just a  part of  it:

If the singularity of the Shoah is a very special combination of social 
fantasies and industrialized mass murder, the Stalinist Gulag system is a 
consequence of universal paranoia. In contrast to Nazism where you exactly 
could know if you were an enemy or not (it was - so to speak - the 
"advantage" of Nazism), during the Stalinist regime you never knew if you 
were a "friend" or not, a "comrade" or a "class enemy". This often changed 
from one day to another. I give you an example for this. In the midst of the 
nineties, I met in a town in East Germany near the Polish border a 
Russian-jewish journalist whose name is Boris Schumatsky. Boris lived in 
these times half a year in Moscow, half in Berlin and wrote articles for 
German and Suisse newspapers and features for Deutschlandradio Berlin, among 
other things about the Russian-Czechenyan conflict. In Goerlitz which was the 
name of the East-German town he gave a lecture about the "Homo sovieticus", 
an analysis of the Russian society in Foucaultian categories. The thesis of 
his lecture was that the whole Soviet system based on the principles of the 
Red Army, even in the social microcosm, f. e. in families or company groups. 
Everybody was a soldier and a potential spy, betrayal could be everywhere at 
any time. You couldn't trust anyone, not your father, not your mother, not 
your children. In this climate of universal suspicion, in the last instance, 
you couldn't trust yourself, and this was the basis of 70 years Bolschevism 
in the Soviet Union, Boris explained.

In 1999, Boris published a book in German "Sylvester bei Stalin" ("Sylvester 
at Stalin's") in which he wrote a kind of family chronicle. In this 
"genealogy" he wanted to reconstruct the structure of stalinism on the basis 
of the fate of his forefathers.
I was very astonished as I read that Boris' great-grandfather whose name was 
also Boris Schumatsky was a famous member of the Bolschevist elite after the 
October Revolution. First Boris Schumatsky sen. was the leader of the Red 
Army in Siberia and helped the communist insurgents in Mongolia. In the 
twenties he became the Soviet ambassador in Teheran, in the thirties leader 
of the Soviet film production: two fotos shows him together with Charly 
Chaplin (B. S. sen. had some influence to the storyboard of "Modern times") 
and with Stalin - during the famous "congress of filmmakers" 1935 in Moscow 
he is standing directly beside him. B. S. sen. couldn't like Eisenstein - he 
was to "avantgardistic" for him. And Stalin and B. S. sen. were rivals from 
the very beginning because B. S. sen. did everything to minimize Stalin's 
influence as long as Lenin lived. 
On sylvester 1937/38 B. S. sen. received a phone call. Stalin invited him to 
the sylvester party in the Kreml. B. S. sen. refused the invitation politely, 
he said to Stalin he wanted to be together with his family. A few weeks 
later, Boris Schumatsky sen. was arrested and never seen again. His 
great-grandson assumes that he was shot in a Siberian Gulag camp 1941 shortly 
before the German invasion.

Full text on my homepage: http://www.beepworld.de/members/kwp. link: 
aufklaerichtengl


Kurt-Werner Pörtner