Introduction
Nadezhda Mandelshtam was the wife of one of the most famous Russian poets whom the world lost because of Stalin’s regime. Osip Mandelshtam was one of the hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalinism who died in GULAG. There is much literature on Stalin’s repressions and totalitarianism, but a personal story always seems to be most sincere. Mandelshtam’s memoir forms an understanding of the nature of Stalinism – terror. Everybody was its victim; everybody sought oblivion; everybody stayed silent.
Main body
To start, every Soviet citizen was a victim of Stalin’s regime. Russian intelligentsia like Osip Mandelshtam himself was the number one enemy of the regime as those were free people in their minds. However, there were also peasants, ethnic minorities, and even bureaucrats and Stalinism ideologists, as Mandelshtam claims (297). Indeed, the Central Committee existed in a state of constant internal repressions. Victimization of the population was the essential element of Stalin’s regime of terror.
Furthermore, oblivion is described in Mandelshtam’s memoir as a widespread practice (298). As Mandelshtam writes herself, among her generation, “only a very few have kept clear minds and memories” (298). Instead, people immersed themselves in work, so that routine replaced the memories of the terror. It is a sad irony that Stalin’s regime was incredibly proud of its Stakhanovite movement, the people who reached unbelievable results in socialist labor competition were highly praised. In reality, this was a symptom of the common desire to escape the depressing reality of terror.
Finally, terror only survives in silence. People built distance between themselves and the crimes of the regime. Mandelshtam observes the common excuses for such behavior: either it is that people must have been arrested for a good reason or that nobody wanted to do anything with the arrests occurring every night in their buildings (298). Only little girls that she describes had something to say to the regime, as children are the strongest facing fear (520). The silence was the critical element contributing to the stability of that regime.
Conclusion
To conclude, Stalin’s regime was indeed totalitarian as the fear of its terror existed even in people’s minds. All Soviet citizens were victims, no matter what class or any other group they belonged to. As Mandelstam describes it, people found peace only in oblivion and hard work, seeking to lose the memory of this terror. Probably most importantly, everybody preferred to stay silent out of fear.
Work Cited
Mandelshtam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope: a Memoir. Atheneum Publishers, 1970.