General Discussion

Botany

(70,539 posts) Thu Aug 30, 2018, 09:08 AM Aug 2018

Nice Joe Stalin talk by Trump ..... "(the) Enemy of the People."

Link to tweet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_people

An "enemy of the people" could be imprisoned, expelled or executed, and lose their property to confiscation. Close relatives of enemies of the people were labeled as "traitor of Motherland family members" and prosecuted. They could be sent to Gulag, punished by the involuntary settlement in unpopulated areas, or stripped of citizen's rights. Being a friend of an enemy of the people automatically placed the person under suspicion.

A significant fraction of the enemies of the people were given this label not because of their hostile actions against the workers' and peasants' state, but simply because of their social origin or profession before the revolution: those who used hired labor, high-ranking clergy, former policemen, merchants, etc. Some of them were commonly known as lishentsy (лишенцы, derived from Russian word лишение, deprivation), because by the Soviet Constitution they were deprived of the right of voting. This automatically translated into a deprivation of various social benefits; some of them, e.g., rationing, were at times critical for survival.

Since 1927, Article 20 of the Common Part of the penal code that listed possible "measures of social defence" had the following item 20a: "declaration to be an enemy of the workers with deprivation of the union republic citizenship and hence of the USSR citizenship, with obligatory expulsion from its territory". Nevertheless, most "enemies of the people" suffered labor camps, rather than expulsion.

In his 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality, Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev called for an end to the use of the term, stating "the formula 'enemy of the people' was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals" who disagreed with Stalin. For decades afterwards, "It was so omnipresent, freighted and devastating in its use under Stalin that nobody [in Russia] wanted to touch it. ... except in reference to history and in jokes", according to an author of a biography of Khrushchev, William Taubman.