Repression
Red Square, Moscow 2009
This reminds me of the books I’ve read written by innocent people imprisoned by Stalin. Books such as those by Solzhenitsyn, Natalia Ginsburg, Alexander Dolgun, and others who suffered unspeakable atrocities by the communist regime. Deprived of every comfort the prisoners felt grateful if they could see just a bit of sky from their cell window. Those grim stories came to mind as I looked through the skylight of the GUM department store.
BTW. GUM is a lovely place now: an upscale store where you can shop for caviar, jewelry and the latest fashion.
BTW #2. “The Forsaken” by Tim Tzouliadis, an American author, tells of another aspect of this era. During the depression in the United States, hundreds of thousands of Americans applied for passports and permission to emigrate to the Soviet Union in response to a Soviet advertisement for workers. Times were hard here. They were hard in Russia, too, but as usual the Russians lied and painted a glorious picture of life in the USSR. This book tells of what happened to those Americans who did emigrate…maybe ten thousand…not a hundred thousand. Their passports were taken from them on entering Russia. Most never saw their passport again and were thus unable to leave the ‘worker’s paradise’ they had envisioned. I recommend this book as I do the books by the authors listed above.