Os amados que dormem na eternidade

The longest chapter of the book is illustrated with photographs

    Casa clandestina de Ida e de Leida

Lista de envio para Ravensbrück. Leida Holm é a primeira

Gulag Vorkuta

Prisioneiros constroem camino-de-ferro

Campo de concentração de Ravensbrück

Barracão e crematório do campo de concentração de Ravensbrück

Residentes de Leninegrado recolhem agua de un cano destruído na Avenida Nevsky durante o cerco nazi a cidade. URSS,1941

In thirty pages, the author takes us little by little from the random years of Russian domination and the attempt to implement communism in Estonia until the arrival of the Nazis in the Baltic country and the siege of Leningrad, giving greater prominence to an era gray, distrustful and bloody of the Stalinist purges.

Mr Milhazes describes the liquidation of the properties of the kulaks and their division into three categories. How the kulaks and their families were sent to the most distant and inhospitable regions, dispossessed of all their goods. In eight years, about half a million kulaks were deported.

Surprising the treatment that the Estonian authorities give to Erich and his nine comrades after the 1924 attempt. These communists were advised to go to the USSR and not return to the country. Thus, in April 1925, Erich entered the Soviet Union.

They are turbulent years where they shot anyone for not doing their job according to the communist dictatorship. Nikolai Pellinen, who ran the Technical School of Agriculture was denounced as being a «burócrata sem alma»  —we can only imagine what soul they refer to— he was shot for alleged anti-Soviet propaganda. This case splashed Erich Sõerd for not having been more forceful with Pellinem. In December 1937 he was expelled from the PCR (b) «por descuido e cegueira política» among other charges.

(As I write this, the television gives the news that in the neighbouring country, Neus Catalá has just died at the age of 103. She survived, precisely in the Ravensbrück extermination camp; she didn´t say concentration camp)

I had not heard of the Stakhanovist movement either. It seems that Alexei Stakhanov defended the increase in worker productivity (always productivity!) based on the workers' own willpower. Of course, this doesn´t work on a large scale; only among the most responsible or among the most drinkers.

More fusillades. Aleksandr Kossarev, Soviet politician who led the Komsomol between 1929 and 1938. In August 1937 was accused of «having manifested an unacceptable political neglect and not having seen the special methods of sabotage work of the enemies of the people». Detained in 1938, he was shot the following year as «enemy of the people».

Judgment carried out in August 1936, in which sixteen Soviet leaders were tried for having created a clandestine organization to kill Sergey Kirov and Stalin. Zinoviev and Kamenev were the leaders. Almost a year after remaining in the hands of the secret police they 'confessed' and were sentenced to be shot by a Military Court. Supposedly, Trotsky was involved in this clandestine organization.

Let us aside, for a moment this official massacre and understood as action to ‘eradicate the weed that contaminated the sacred mission to save the world from the oppression of the bourgeois’.

It calls the attention to Mr Milhazes (to us also) a supposed relationship of Oskar Sõerd with an Italian communist and it isn´t considered correct. The Stalinist authorities did not applaud contacts between Soviet citizens and foreigners, and this distrust remained until the end of the USSR. (Touristy well-known is the Viru Hotel, in Tallinn that conserves as a museum the rooms and objects that the police kept in the building to control the guests). The Stalinist authorities did not applaud contacts between Soviet citizens and foreigners, and this distrust remained until the end of the USSR. (Touristy well-known is the hotel Viru, in Tallinn that preserves as a museum the rooms and objects that the police kept in the building to control the guests. Be careful if you stay on the 23rd floor and what you are talking while having lunch in its restaurant!) As in any dictatorial regime, the obsession with espionage rested in the bowels of Soviet society. Our writer comments on the case of many Spaniards who sought refuge in the Soviet Union after the Civil War of '36 and many of them passed through Soviet concentration camps.

Now it's the turn of the Nazis. The Germans approach Leningrad. Blockade or siege?

«A fome entrou em Leninegrado de forma imperceptível, a palabra ‘bloqueio’ surgiu muito mais tarde, inicialmente utilizava-se a expressão militar comum ‘cerco’, era mais leve, porque se podía sair dele.»

There is a shameful - for human feeling - order of the Chief of Staff of the German Navy on September 41. In point 4 he orders to bomb with artillery of all calibres and from the air, permanently, the city of Leningrad and that if the besieged surrender, surrender is not accepted because they (the Nazis) are not going to solve the problems related to the survival of the communists.

The chapter ends by relating the different ways of putting up with the German blockade according to -allow me the expression- the social class that you were. Leader: meat, fish caviar, bread and wine from Porto! Ordinary citizen: die by starvation.

There is a text by the Soviet poet Olga Berggoltz, which I leave to your free choice in case you want to read it. It appears on page 121. There is also a poem of this woman that (freely) you should read.

From my Borstal.

LDR

Os Blumthal: Uma História Real de Vidas Sacrificadas às piores Utopias e Tiranias do Século XX. 2018, José Milhazes e Oficina do Livro. Afragide. Portugal