thanks for the akhmatova poem. At a time when young people in Russia think that
Stalin was a great and humane person these reminders should be spread as widely
as possible
mike
Subject: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Stalin's Death
here are two selections from Anna Akhmatova's Requiem
Prologue
In those years only the dead smiled,
Glad to be at rest:
And Leningrad city swayed like
A needless appendix to its prisons.
It was then that the railway-yards
Were asylums of the mad;
Short were the locomotives'
Farewell songs.
Stars of death stood
Above us, and innocent Russia
Writhed under bloodstained boots, and
Under the tyres of Black Marias.
Instead of a Prologue
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen
months in the
prison lines of Leningrad. Once, somebody "recognized" me. Then a woman with
bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me
called by
name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and
whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I answered: "Yes, I can."
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had
once been her
face.
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