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Leonid Bronevoy on Stalin
My sudden emergence from Dreamwidth retirement is thanks to a rewatch of 17 Moments of Spring, which led me to this 2014 newspaper interview with Leonid Bronevoy (aka Gestapo Müller) about Stalin and the Soviet Union. Given the current state of affairs in Russia, it is perhaps just as well for Bronevoy that he died in 2017.
"Everything that happened in the Soviet Union, even in the most terrible fairy tales, is a horrible, absurd, horror film that dragged on for 70 years: so heavy that we still haven't come away from watching it and can't get used to any other picture.
Just pay attention: how many people know about the atrocities in Stalin's camps, about the barges that were flooded with dissidents, about the shootings right at workplaces, about the millions of orphans - children of enemies of the people - and yet there are those who want to call Volgograd Stalingrad again, or go to the rallies of the Communist Party, which Yeltsin failed to ban only because vodka got in the way, and shout: "Stalin! Stalin!"
Fools, do you even know what you're shouting? I'll tell you a terrible thing: even Hitler is better than Stalin! Yes, yes, and although I hate Hitler, I respect him half a gram more, because at least he didn't touch his own Germans, but this fellow mowed down everyone: Ossetians, Georgians, Russians, Ukrainians....
And decades later we have someone like Zyuganov, trying to prove to many millions of people that Stalin is more precious and valuable than Pushkin, because he did more ...
I wanted to be heard! It's not only necessary to remind ourselves how the system, which we still glorify and praise, poisoned people (at best - killed, at worst - forced others to kill), it is absolutely necessary! So that there's no going back to it, so that not even a single thought arises in anyone's head that it was good there, in that time! - Well, what can be good when half the country is in jail, and the other half are jailors?
By the way, those who were jailors are still alive - those who were in jail are almost extinct, but I, whose childhood was spoilt, whose birthplace - Kiev, the most beautiful of cities - was poisoned, and who have memories of how our family was scattered all over the Soviet Union (my father cut down trees in Kolyma, my mother wandered around towns and cities, and I wandered barefoot all over the place)*, have always said and will always say: don't you dare, don't you dare yearn for hell - you should remember good, not evil!
All our troubles, by the way, come from the fact that we do not remember the good. For example, what did those who fought get for this victory, who needs them as a result? Seven or 10 years ago on TV, a programme filmed in Russia and Germany showed an old front-line soldier lying without legs in a smoke-dirtied corner, with hideously ugly prosthetics lying around (who made them?), and then - Munich, a cosy house, flowerbeds, sandy paths... On one of them an old man is walking briskly to his Mercedes - a former Wehrmacht soldier: you can't tell that he's lost both of his legs! So who won, you ask, us or them?
Or our comrade Stalin and all the subsequent comrades and gentlemen, who absolutely do not care about the fact that people's health was ruined by the war, all so that they can now drive around in expensive cars and buy watches that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars?
During the war years, we, the ragged, hungry, louse-ridden, weak and wretched, were sheltered in the Central Asian republics. Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Tajiks took the evacuees into their homes and shared their last bite of food with them, and now in Moscow their children and grandchildren aren't considered human, and in Kiev, I'm sure, where they hardly ever see them, they sniff squeamishly and call them by this humiliating name "guest workers". And why don't Russians - I ask - pay back the "guest workers" for helping the evacuees, why don't they compensate them with money from the oil? Did they [the "guest workers"] not spend money on us then, or does anyone think that sweeping streets and plastering walls is the only thing these "guest workers" are good for? If so, then we, the victors, are no better than the Nazis who divided nations into superior and inferior ones - worthy children of the Father of the Nation, either way....
I have no right to give advice on how to live; after all, I don't know how myself. Anyone and everyone can reproach me with the fact that I received prizes, awards and titles in the USSR, that my father was one of the most cruel investigators of the Kiev OGPU, sadistically interrogating people, beating money and testimonies out of them... I can't change the path I've travelled or my biography, but I'm convinced that you can't go back to the past, and no order, no gain in the world is worth the price of a single tear from a person you've hurt.
I am grateful that I could speak out, and that I was heard, and if others hear and understand, it means that everything was not in vain - our meeting, our conversation, and life itself..."**
The interview is from the BULVAR GORDONA newspaper, No. 48 (500) December 2014, but I found it here on DW: https://systemity.dreamwidth.org/4420456.html (translated by DeepL and then tinkered with by me to make the English flow better).
* According to Wikipedia, Bronevoy and his mother were evacuated to Soviet Kazakhstan during the war; he subsequently went to drama school in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, so he knows what he's talking about when he mentions the kindness shown by the Central Asian Republics to evacuees. I can confirm via my Tajiki friend Akbar that Bronevoy is also correct when he describes the Russian treatment of guest workers from these countries.
** Wikipedia further informs me that "His [Bronevoy's] name appeared on a petition against the Russian annexation of Crimea. However, he told TASS that his name was placed without his permission, adding that he supported Vladimir Putin and Russian actions in Crimea." Obviously I'm not in a position to say which of these actions reflected Bronevoy's true feelings on the matter.
And finally, a picture of Bronevoy in his iconic role as Gruppenführer Müller of the Gestapo.
"Everything that happened in the Soviet Union, even in the most terrible fairy tales, is a horrible, absurd, horror film that dragged on for 70 years: so heavy that we still haven't come away from watching it and can't get used to any other picture.
Just pay attention: how many people know about the atrocities in Stalin's camps, about the barges that were flooded with dissidents, about the shootings right at workplaces, about the millions of orphans - children of enemies of the people - and yet there are those who want to call Volgograd Stalingrad again, or go to the rallies of the Communist Party, which Yeltsin failed to ban only because vodka got in the way, and shout: "Stalin! Stalin!"
Fools, do you even know what you're shouting? I'll tell you a terrible thing: even Hitler is better than Stalin! Yes, yes, and although I hate Hitler, I respect him half a gram more, because at least he didn't touch his own Germans, but this fellow mowed down everyone: Ossetians, Georgians, Russians, Ukrainians....
And decades later we have someone like Zyuganov, trying to prove to many millions of people that Stalin is more precious and valuable than Pushkin, because he did more ...
I wanted to be heard! It's not only necessary to remind ourselves how the system, which we still glorify and praise, poisoned people (at best - killed, at worst - forced others to kill), it is absolutely necessary! So that there's no going back to it, so that not even a single thought arises in anyone's head that it was good there, in that time! - Well, what can be good when half the country is in jail, and the other half are jailors?
By the way, those who were jailors are still alive - those who were in jail are almost extinct, but I, whose childhood was spoilt, whose birthplace - Kiev, the most beautiful of cities - was poisoned, and who have memories of how our family was scattered all over the Soviet Union (my father cut down trees in Kolyma, my mother wandered around towns and cities, and I wandered barefoot all over the place)*, have always said and will always say: don't you dare, don't you dare yearn for hell - you should remember good, not evil!
All our troubles, by the way, come from the fact that we do not remember the good. For example, what did those who fought get for this victory, who needs them as a result? Seven or 10 years ago on TV, a programme filmed in Russia and Germany showed an old front-line soldier lying without legs in a smoke-dirtied corner, with hideously ugly prosthetics lying around (who made them?), and then - Munich, a cosy house, flowerbeds, sandy paths... On one of them an old man is walking briskly to his Mercedes - a former Wehrmacht soldier: you can't tell that he's lost both of his legs! So who won, you ask, us or them?
Or our comrade Stalin and all the subsequent comrades and gentlemen, who absolutely do not care about the fact that people's health was ruined by the war, all so that they can now drive around in expensive cars and buy watches that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars?
During the war years, we, the ragged, hungry, louse-ridden, weak and wretched, were sheltered in the Central Asian republics. Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Tajiks took the evacuees into their homes and shared their last bite of food with them, and now in Moscow their children and grandchildren aren't considered human, and in Kiev, I'm sure, where they hardly ever see them, they sniff squeamishly and call them by this humiliating name "guest workers". And why don't Russians - I ask - pay back the "guest workers" for helping the evacuees, why don't they compensate them with money from the oil? Did they [the "guest workers"] not spend money on us then, or does anyone think that sweeping streets and plastering walls is the only thing these "guest workers" are good for? If so, then we, the victors, are no better than the Nazis who divided nations into superior and inferior ones - worthy children of the Father of the Nation, either way....
I have no right to give advice on how to live; after all, I don't know how myself. Anyone and everyone can reproach me with the fact that I received prizes, awards and titles in the USSR, that my father was one of the most cruel investigators of the Kiev OGPU, sadistically interrogating people, beating money and testimonies out of them... I can't change the path I've travelled or my biography, but I'm convinced that you can't go back to the past, and no order, no gain in the world is worth the price of a single tear from a person you've hurt.
I am grateful that I could speak out, and that I was heard, and if others hear and understand, it means that everything was not in vain - our meeting, our conversation, and life itself..."**
The interview is from the BULVAR GORDONA newspaper, No. 48 (500) December 2014, but I found it here on DW: https://systemity.dreamwidth.org/4420456.html (translated by DeepL and then tinkered with by me to make the English flow better).
* According to Wikipedia, Bronevoy and his mother were evacuated to Soviet Kazakhstan during the war; he subsequently went to drama school in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, so he knows what he's talking about when he mentions the kindness shown by the Central Asian Republics to evacuees. I can confirm via my Tajiki friend Akbar that Bronevoy is also correct when he describes the Russian treatment of guest workers from these countries.
** Wikipedia further informs me that "His [Bronevoy's] name appeared on a petition against the Russian annexation of Crimea. However, he told TASS that his name was placed without his permission, adding that he supported Vladimir Putin and Russian actions in Crimea." Obviously I'm not in a position to say which of these actions reflected Bronevoy's true feelings on the matter.
And finally, a picture of Bronevoy in his iconic role as Gruppenführer Müller of the Gestapo.
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