Stalin and Khrushchev’s Great Purge

by William H. Benson

September 11, 2014

     Although President Obama has ordered airstrikes on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Pentagon is saying that “further strikes are needed in both Iraq and Syria to stop the militants from regrouping.” Then, from the Red Square in Moscow, Putin has “slowly ramped up his meddling in Ukraine, and with just enough uncertainty around each incremental escalation” so as to evade a larger war or a threat from the United States or western Europe. Then, today marks the thirteenth anniversary of 9-11, Al-Qaeda’s deadly attacks on New York City’s twin towers, and Washington D.C.’s Pentagon.

     One wonders where all this “war and rumors of war” will end. A columnist recently said though, “it could be worse.” Indeed, look back to the 1930’s, to the Soviet Union, and see a nation, where the citizens shrank in terror from a Great Purge: Siberian prison camps, executions, and mass graves.

     Although Hitler’s Holocaust in the early 1940’s receives the most attention today, Stalin’s Great Purge preceded the Nazi leader’s by five years.

     Beginning in 1934, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union’s dictator, turned on, in succession, his own Communist Party’s members; the Red Army’s generals and officers; the writers, thinkers, poets, and playwrights; and then the Russian peasants, the kulak’s who resisted Stalin’s idyllic plan for collective farms. Most of those arrested were shot, their bodies dumped into mass graves. Most were innocent.

     The numbers are difficult to comprehend. Soviet archives list a total of 681,692 people killed, but others put the estimate at one million or more. Then, there were those transported to the prison camps in Siberia, where they worked for years, many of whom died before their terms expired. In the 1930’s, the Soviet citizens—Russian, Ukrainian, and the other nationalities—suffered unspeakable atrocities.

     Why did Joseph Stalin turn on his own party, his army officers, the intelligentsia, and the peasants? One answer is that he feared the loss of his own power, that his paranoia drove him to eliminate all potential rivals. Another answer is that he subscribed to Karl Marx’s political philosophy.

     The British author Paul Johnson wrote in his book Intellectuals that “Marx’s vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat had taken concrete and terrifying shape and that Stalin—the ruler who achieved the absolute power for which Marx had yearned—was just beginning his catastrophic assault upon the Russian peasantry.”

     Another answer is that Stalin was contemptuous of the Russian people. In 1937-1938 he signed 357 lists that authorized the executions of tens of thousands of people, and he said, “Who’s going to remember all this riffraff 10 or 20 years? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars that Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one.”

     Nikita Khrushchev supported Stalin’s purges and even participated in them. For ten years Khrushchev, a Russian, was the Communist Party’s leader in the Ukraine, and from that post, he oversaw the arrest and execution of thousands of Ukrainian people, including the kulaks there, and so many members of Ukraine’s Communist Party that they could not meet because of a lack of a quorum.

     It is no small wonder that the Ukrainians fear the Russian leaders today. Nikita Krushchev’s name is not forgotten in the Ukraine.

     At the time of the Great Purge, Khrushchev said, “Everyone who rejoices in the successes achieved in our country, the victories of our party led by the great Stalin, will find only one word suitable for the mercenary and fascist dogs, and that word is execution.” Khrushchev was fortunate that Stalin never turned on him, because others acted and spoke in the same servile manner that Khrushchev did, and yet Stalin rounded on them. Submissiveness to the dictator proved no guarantee of his protection.

     Still, Khrushchev said, “When Stalin says dance, a wise man dances.”

     Stalin died of a stroke on March 5, 1953, and Khrushchev succeeded him as the Soviet Union’s leader, and then on February 25, 1956, to the Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress, Khrushchev delivered his Secret Speech. In it he outlined Stalin’s crimes: “It is here that Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality, and his abuse of power. . . . In practice, Stalin ignored the norms of party life and trampled on the Leninist principle of collective party leadership.”

     Because of his speech, Khrushchev made enemies in the Communist Party, and because of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, party officials ousted him in 1965. He died six years later on September 11, 1971.

     The machinations of ISIS and Vladimir Putin are worrisome, a harbinger of further atrocities and of world war, but they are small in comparison to Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. “It could be worse.”     

Robin Williams

by William H. Benson

August 28, 2014

     Robin Williams was born in 1951, and I in 1953. Due to his rapid-fire wit, his zany antics, and his overabundance of comedic talents, success came quick for him, more so than it did for others of our generation, who struggled for years to make a living.

     In 1978, when I was trying to teach English composition to seventh and eighth graders in Lodgepole, Nebraska, Robin Williams starred in his own television show, Mork and Mindy. Instead of learning to appreciate a poem’s text, my students would chant “na-noo, na-noo,” Mork’s nonsensical catchphrase. Each week on Thursday nights, Mork cast a spell on America’s junior high students.

      Mork and Mindy was a spin-off from Happy Days, and its premise was similar to the early ’60’s black and white sitcom, My Favorite Martian. Orson, the dictator on the planet Ork, had banished Mork to Earth because Orson did not permit humor on Ork.

     Then, at the end of each episode, for about three minutes, Mork, the alien, would report to Orson all he had learned that week. “Mork calling Orson. Mork calling Orson,” he would call out. “Come in Orson.” The audience would then hear Orson’s loud voice, “What is it, Mork!”

     Amongst a series of cutting comments about Orson’s rotund size, Mork would explain in very human terms his interactions with men and women, and these scenes were often unscripted. The show’s writers would leave space and then write, “Robin talks here.”

     The show’s plot was typical sit-com, but Robin’s conversation with Orson, more a monologue than a dialogue, was the clincher. It was then that Robin Williams displayed his versatile skill at stand-up comedy, at improvisation and mimic.

     His friend, Christopher Reeve, said that when the two of them met at the Julliard School in New York City, when both were young and unknown, Robin Williams “talked a mile a minute. He caromed off the walls of the classrooms and hallways. To say that he was ‘on’ would be an understatement.”

     John Houseman at the Julliard School suggested that Robin leave the school after two years and try to find work as a stand-up comedian, and so Robin moved back to California.

     At the comedy clubs in San Francisco, Robin honed his jaw-dropping talent. Other comedians would stand in the wings, gape in amazement as he performed, and realize that they could never transform an audience into a state of helpless laughter as Robin did.

     When the television producer, Garry Marshall, was interviewing actors to play Mork, he asked Robin to act like an alien, and so Robin walked over to a chair and sat on his head. Marshall gave him the job, saying that “Robin was the only alien he interviewed.”

     After four years on Mork and Mindy, Robin starred in a series of movies, and I judge Mrs. Doubtfire his best. In it, Robin played the part of a divorced man who was so saddened by his loss of contact with his three kids that he disguised himself as a kind grandmother, in order to win the job as their babysitter. Neither his ex-wife, played by Sally Field, or their three kids suspected the truth.

     In the animated film Aladdin, he was the genie’s voice, a role that the studio producer created for Robin. As the genie, he sang the show’s opening song, “A Friend Like Me.” “Life is your restaurant, and I’m your maitre d’! C’mon, whisper what it is you want. You ain’t never had a friend like me.”

     Like so many celebrities in Hollywood, Robin fell into a familiar rut: partying until late, drug use, considerable alcohol consumption, and then severe depression that led to suicidal thoughts. John Belushi’s drug overdose in March of 1982 shocked Robin, who had partied at John’s apartment that same night. In 1983, Robin Williams quit both alcohol and drugs and remained sober for two decades.

     In 2003, he was filming a movie in Alaska, felt lonely and afraid, and took his first drink in twenty years. In an interview with Diane Sawyer, he said, that “addiction is a sickness that knows no statue of limitation. It waits. It lays in wait for the time when you think, ‘It’s fine now. I’m OK.’ Then, the next thing you know, it’s not OK.” After a family intervention in 2006, he entered rehab.

     He claimed he never returned to the drugs though. “I knew,” he said, “that would kill me. I knew I couldn’t be a father and live that sort of life. Useless conversations until midnight, waking up at dawn feeling like a vampire on a day pass.” 

     Although he may have won the war with drugs and battled alcohol to a draw, he could not conquer his own inner thoughts that “the world would be a better place without him.” How wrong he was, and how wrong is anyone who believes that. Mara Buxbaum, his spokesperson, said that “He had been battling severe depression of late.” His gifted and volatile mind had turned on himself.

     Mork loved Mindy, Mrs. Doubtfire loved her, or his, kids, and the genie claimed that “You ain’t never had a friend like me.” How true. I consider Robin Williams my generation’s best jester.

The Japanese National Exams

by William H. Benson

August 14, 2014

     In an effort to raise students’ educational levels across the globe, the Program for International Student Assessment, encourages hundreds of thousands of 15-year-old students from sixty-five countries to take a two-hour test that covers just three subjects: math, science, and reading. In 2012, 510,000 students completed the test, and the PISA test scores reveal sobering news.

     The Shanghai Chinese students won first place in all three subjects, and Peru’s students took last place in all three. The Japanese students scored seventh in math, and fourth in both science and reading, and the South Koreans received fifth place in math and in reading, and seventh in science. The United States students were stuck in the middle of the pack: 36^th in math, 28^th in science, and 24^th in reading.

     As expected, the Asian students claimed the top scores, and so one wonders, “Why?” Part of the answer may lie in those countries’ national exams. For example, in Japan, high school students devote an enormous number of hours studying for Japan’s national exam given once a year on a Saturday and a Sunday in January. A student’s score determines where he or she will attend college.

     Those with the highest scores receive acceptance letters into the top public universities, such as the University of Tokyo, but those with the lower scores will either study for another year and take the exam a second time, or they will give up and attend a private university. Because those students who graduate from the select public universities receive the best job offers, the course of the students’ lives hinges upon that one test score.

     The entrance examination—or nyugaku sheken—is composed of twenty-nine tests. On Saturday students complete sixteen tests in civics, geography, history, Japanese literature, and foreign languages, and on Sunday they complete thirteen tests on math and science. A Japanese friend once explained that the three most important parts of the exam are Japanese, English, and mathematics.

     Although the students may learn the material, the pressure to compete well is overbearing, and the work is solitary and lonely. For a student to fail the exam is a crushing defeat that brings shame and  disgrace upon the family, and so parents push their students to study hour after hour.

     Instead of sports and practice and football and volleyball games, many Japanese high school students pore over their textbooks for hours every day. They attend school during the day, receive additional instruction during private evening classes, and then complete their homework after midnight. Five and a half hours of sleep a night is common.

     Critics ridicule the system, saying that the “entrance exams hang over Japanese students like a personal devil.” Another said it is a “poor system, a real plague.” “Those stupid exams are a colossal waste of time, dollars, energy, and in the end achieve basically nothing!” The exams “guarantee that a group of kids will get little chance to do well once out of school; pretty sad, really.”

     Critics point out that for some students, intellectual thinking does not begin to develop until their late teens or early twenties. An incredibly-difficult exam at seventeen would mar a students’ potential. 

     And once a student has won an envied position at a university, the teachers and professors at a Japanese university do not expect the same monumental hours of study, and so truancy at the university is common. Of utmost importance are the academic credentials and the university’s prestige.

     In contrast to the Japanese system, universities in the United States rely more upon a student’s high school Grade Point Average, rather than his or her score on a national exam, such as the ACT or SAT, to determine admission into a university. The same is true for the professional schools, such as for law or medicine or business or graduate school.

     Although the average high school student in the United States will not work as hard as their counterparts in Japan, or in Korea, or in China, once on the university’s campus, an American student feels the intense pressure to perform well on exams, and so he or she learns to study longer hours than their high school teachers expected in order to maintain a solid GPA.

     Which system works best? The Japanese or the American? If you want to ensure a top score on a PISA exam, you will want a Japanese-styled system, but if you want a system with second chances, other opportunities, escape routes, and alternatives, then you will want a system such as in the United States. Anybody, whatever their age, can go back to school in August, and dare to dream about a better life that they can make happen with a superior education, and no national exam will prevent it.

     I think it was Jesse Jackson who used to say, “If you are in school, stay there; if you are not in school, go back.”

Competition vs. Cooperation

by William H. Benson

July 31, 2014

     Two boys were playing badminton, and because Andy played better than Bob, Andy won all the games. Bob threw down his racket, sat on a tree stump, and said, “I won’t play anymore.” So Andy suggested a different game. “Bob, let’s see how long we can keep the bird going between us and count how many times it goes back and forth without falling. Do you think we could make a score of ten or twenty?” Bob thought it a grand idea, and so the two boys resumed playing a cooperative game.

      From his office window, the German psychologist, Max Wertheimer, watched as Andy and Bob worked out their discrepancy in playing skills, and from this example Max concluded in his book Productive Thinking that “Often one must first forget what he wants before he can become susceptible to what the situation itself requires. This transition is a great moment in genuine thought processes.”

     For an instant Andy forgot about winning the game in order to remain friendly with Bob, and if he had not done so, the two boys would have quarreled, shouted at each other, and thrown punches.

     Winning at all costs as well as avoiding a serious loss can disrupt relationships, escalate violence, and result in war. An idea can so grip a person or a nation that they will not surrender that idea, even though it yields counter-productive and detrimental results.

     For example, in the spring of 1865, the South refused to consider ending slavery, surrendering their government, and rejoining the union, and so General Robert E. Lee fought for months, long after he knew he could not defeat General Grant and win the war. As a result, thousands of Southern and Northern soldiers were killed or wounded in bloody battles during the Civil War’s final months.

     Then, the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on two Japaneses cities, annihilating one hundred and fifty thousand Japanese citizens, before the Japanese government surrendered their idea of a far-flung Japanese empire across the Pacific.

     James Harvey Robinson, an American historian, said it best. “We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them whenever anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship.”

     Human beings are loathe to give up an idea that they swallowed years before. Separation and divorce are painful events because no one wants to admit failure, but they are society’s way of protecting the vulnerable, the men and women and children who face deceit or violence at home.

Bankruptcy is equally devastating, but it too is society’s method for handling a financial quandary.

     Divorce, bankruptcy, or the loss of an empire, a government, a ballgame, an election, or a job are numbing and devastating experiences, and people will fight to the bitter end in order to avoid that feeling. They are the people who say, “I will never give up!”

      But what happens if someone surrenders his or her idea? The answer is, “Life goes on.” A loss is never final nor permanent. Because the universe is constantly expanding, according to Stephen Hawking, galaxies are moving away from each other, time and space march on, and so chances are excellent that other opportunities will appear. So why grip so tight to an idea that may have looked appropriate at the time when first encountered, but is no longer?

     Detroit declared bankruptcy on July 18, 2013, swamped by a debt of $18.5 billion, but today Motown is healing. Investors are buying buildings and homes, demolition crews and the wrecking ball are knocking down the 78,000 abandoned properties, small businesses are emerging, and in the parks and open areas, farmers are swathing hay and selling vegetables at a farmers’ market. Life goes on.

     This month, the Israeli army invaded Gaza again, this time to destroy the tunnel network that Hamas has dug into Israel. Lt. Colonel Peter Lerner of Israel’s army charged Hamas, “They shifted all of their assets, all of their infrastructure, all of their defensive capabilities, into these offensive capabilities in order to have some element of surprise.” And Hamas turned Gaza into a rocket factory.

     Israel and Hamas at war again. Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times last week, “This is a war in which both peoples have a considerable amount of right on their sides. Both sides have good people who want the best for their children, and also plenty of myopic zealots who preach hatred.”

     Kristoff suggests instead a cooperative game. “That’s why we need to de-escalate, starting with a cease-fire that includes an end to Hamas rocket attacks and a withdrawal from Gaza by Israel.” Hamas though appears determined to drive the Israelis out of Palestine, and Israel seems equally determined to never surrender its dream of a homeland for the Jewish people. “This is,” wrote Kristoff, “the aching story of two peoples—each with legitimate grievances—colliding with each other.”

     If peace will ever find a home in Palestine, it will happen when one side or the other will surrender its current dream and substitute another in its place. Andy suggested a solution, Bob agreed, and so too perhaps someone in Gaza or Israel can think of a cooperative, rather than a competitive, game.

Dinosaurs and Asteroids

by William H. Benson

July 17, 2014

     In March of 1992, three astronomers, Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy discovered their ninth comet, hence its name, “Shoemaker-Levy 9.” The team determined that S-L9 was orbiting Jupiter now rather than the sun. Because Jupiter is a heavy-weight planet, exerting an enormous gravitational pull, astronomers call it the solar system’s vacuum sweeper.

     In July of 1992, astronomers noticed that Jupiter’s force had broken S-L9 into 23 fragments that they labelled A through W and that each were strung out in single file, like pearls on a string. Most fragments, they estimated, were little more than two kilometers wide.

     Astronomers detected that the comet was losing its power, unable to overcome Jupiter’s massive pull, and they calculated the fragments would strike the massive planet the second week of July in 1994, twenty years ago. That week astronomers trained their telescopes, plus the Hubble space telescope, at Jupiter, in anticipation of the spectacular fireworks, and they were not disappointed.

     The first fragment struck on July 16, and the last on July 21. Brown smudges and stains dotted Jupiter’s surface, some thousands of kilometers wide, as big as Earth itself, or bigger.

     Astronomers estimated that fragment G was the heaviest and largest, three or four kilometers wide, and its impact created a brown smudge double the diameter of Earth’s. “Although only about the size of a small mountain, it created wounds in Jupiter’s surface the size of Earth,” one author wrote.

     As the weeks passed, the stains dissipated, but astronomers were convinced. A collision with a single comet would cause immense catastrophes upon Earth, where life exists.

     In 1980, Luis Alvarez, a physicist, and his son, Walter, a geologist, published a paper, and in it they proposed that an extra-terrestrial source, such as a comet or an asteroid, had slammed into the Earth millions of years ago, and that it had caused fires, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis.

     With debris and smoke littering the atmosphere for years, a continual winter settled upon planet Earth. Without adequate sunlight, photosynthesis was disrupted, and once the plants died out, so did the herbivores. Then, those atop the food chain, such as the carnivores like Tyrannosaurus Rex, were wiped out. A single comet pushed the dinosaurs into extinction in a few thousand years. 

     Walter and Luis had noticed a thin clay layer in sedimentary deposits all over the planet and that this layer is unusual because it contained soot, glass, quartz, and diamonds, minerals formed by high temperatures and pressure. They also noted that the clay layer is rich in iridium, a mineral not abundant on Earth, but one that is found in comets and asteroids.

     They also observed that the dinosaur fossils reside below the clay layer, but not above it.

     The Alvarez’s proposal encountered fierce opposition and debate, but two years after Luis Alvarez died of cancer in 1988, researchers pointed to the crater Chicxulub, 120 miles wide and under the water off the coast of Mexico. The comet that caused that crater, scientists believe, triggered the dinosaurs’ mass extinctions, and as much as 75% of the pre-existing plant and animal life.

     In his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson said that if a similar comet would strike the Earth, temperatures “would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the Sun’s surface. Everything in its path—people, houses, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame.”

     As if not bad enough, “the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles would be killed by the blast. Everything standing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead.”

     Afterwords, volcanoes would erupt, tsunamis would roil the oceans, and “a cloud of blackness”  would cover the planet, ushering in an apocalyptic nightmare.

     What life forms would survive another collision with a comet? Possibly those that survived before: carrion-eaters, sharks, crocodiles, bacteria, certain insects, some plants, a few small mammals. The primates, if not destroyed, would be changed forever,and this includes human beings, men and women.

     All of this is sobering. Human beings reside atop the food chain now, as T-Rex once did, and yet a single rock floating in outer space has the potential to destroy all that humanity has accumulated over several millennium: science, the historical record, the legal code, literary achievements, technology, buildings, military armaments, and systems of government.

     We would have little warning, just a few months or weeks if someone saw it approaching, or as little as a single second after it entered the Earth’s atmosphere and heated up. If we did see it weeks in advance, we could do nothing to prevent it from striking Earth, because we have no technology to redirect a comet’s trajectory, nor to launch a nuclear warhead to pulverize it.

     The odds are against an imminent collision though. Brian Witzke, a geologist in Iowa, said that a collision with a comet or an asteroid or a massive meteorite occurs only “about once every million years on average.”