The Harsher the Putin Regime Becomes, the More Likely Russians will Rise Against It, ‘Russian Partisan’ Telegram Channel Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 4 – One of the most widely accepted Kremlin claims about the Soviet past is that no one rose against Stalin, the Russian Partisan telegram channel says; but in fact, it was precisely Stalin’s attack on the peasantry and the population in the early 1930s that triggered what can only be called Russia’s “second civil war.”
    Only when the Soviet regime softened under Khrushchev and Brezhnev did such risings largely disappear, the telegram channel says. And that has an important lesson for today: the more Stalinist the Putin regime becomes, the more likely Russians will ultimately rise against it (t.me/rospartizan/2841 reposted at  kasparov.ru/material.php?id=67508FB44D6DB).
    There were hundreds of peasant uprisings when Stalin sought to collectivize the peasantry, and these not only involved approximately 500,000 people but also forced the Soviet regime to use regular army units against them, something contemporary sources acknowledged because they could not hide it but that many now forget.
    The widespread notion that the Russian people will bow to those in power regardless of what those rulers do has led even many dissidents to downplay the possibility of revolt. When Solzhenitsyn suggested that Russians hurried to bow down to the Bolsheviks after 1917, that was widely accepted but sparked outrage among those who knew better.
    Perhaps the most famous of the rejections of Solzhenitsyn’s contention came from Yuri Srechinsky, the deputy editor of New York’s Novoye russkoye slovo, who published a pamphlet arguing that Russians resisted and rose in revolt against the Bolsheviks as much or even more than other nations in the empire.
His booklet, How We Submitted? The Price of October (in Russian), deserves to be better known (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-century-of-russian-revolts-against.html), as does the point he and the Russian Partisans telegram channel makes.