Gross & Horrible; Bastards Great & Small

When I was a teacher, I used to pose conundrums raised by history's successful bastards to my year twelve senior students, in relation to what kind of political exemplars they were going to respect, or reject and morally judge:

I raised it then and raise it again here because I think the global convulsions that marked the first half of the twentieth century were really only a 'training run' for what the twenty-first century is about to dump on us. If one wants to know what happens to decision making institutions and decision makers when they have to 'ride the tiger', this earlier period is rich in examples of 'tigers' and those who would chance their lives to ride them; at the micro as well as macro level. See them and see the future.


Joseph Stalin mobilized millions of slave and near slave laborers to accelerate building the industrial bases he established east of the Urals and to the north in the 1930s. He starved the peasantry to feed this new industrial workforce (and kept much of it short rationed as well) to accumulate the maximum possible new capital to employ it.

He did this as part of securing the Soviet Union as a lone Socialist Republic facing the probability that it was going to be the only one of its kind for the time being, and therefore the sole object of possible attack by numerous enemies, who regarded its very existence as a provocation.

If the regime had eschewed these drastic methods to fast track in depth industrial defense, very likely it would not have had sufficient reserve industrial capacity left to be able to stay in WW2 for long, once the traditional western industrial areas had been overrun, as they were in the summer and autumn of 1941.

It does not require special insight to imagine what would have happened to the overall tide of war, if a reasonably large proportion of the 4.5 million Axis troops used for operation Barbarossa had been made available in other theaters of the World War, by the middle of 1942.

Having regard to this, how would you assess the character of Joseph Stalin; evil monster to be opposed at all costs, or tough visionary, to be supported at all costs?

You have the luxury of hindsight and your life isn’t on the line if you get it 'wrong'. People at the time had to make such decisions without knowing how it was all going to turn out! There wasn’t any middle ground. All the options were necessarily extreme, for that was the template of the time. The Soviet security forces and the Germans made sure of that. History is not an academic exercise for those who have to make it.

These considerations exist at every level of society from the political leadership to the ordinary person. History isn’t just about the important people, but the vast mass of humanity, like you and me, who have to cope with what the important people do and the forces that move them. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, all the lives of those who lived and worked there were on the line, whatever their name or status was.

By the end of the war, between twenty and twenty-seven million Soviet citizens were gone, out of the population of one hundred and eighty-one million, that lived there on June 22nd 1941, when the German armies crossed the Western Soviet frontier.

Come with me to a very dark time......................(The stories portrayed here are apocryphal and the characters entirely fictitious, but every effort has been made to maintain an overall authentic representation of the sorts of things that did happen during the period.)


The Soviet armies in the West have completely collapsed, leaving millions of troops cut off, stranded, without supplies and forced to surrender en mass. You have been caught up in the German Kiev encirclement net and you are sitting in the autumn rain with what’s left of your regiment and division, on the side of a little knoll, with a dirt road going past it through a now destroyed collective farm complex, towards a dead flat Eastern Ukraine horizon that is shrouded in smoke and still reverberating to the crump and thud of distant gunfire.


“Where did that big Ukrainian go? I only saw him a minute ago talking in German to a German officer and now he’s gone! I didn’t know he could speak German! That bastard was always a traitor waiting his chance. We should’ve shot him before they overran and cut us off completely!”

“You remember Ivan used to stir him up by asking him about why he didn’t have a family in front of the Commissar? Didn’t he squirm. Doesn’t do to say does it....what happened where he comes from....What did they call it? The Holodomor?....back in ’32 when the security troops took the grain away and left them nothing. I heard about it while unbuttoning for a piss in an alley behind Red Square. Never saw the face of the man who tol’ me.”

“Pity Ivan couldn’t‘ve unbuttoned his mouth because The Commissar would have had him in a punishment battalion faster than you could say Vladimir Lenin; mine clearing see, with machine gunners behind them just in case they forget which way’s forward.”

“Shuddup Vlad! What are those fucking SS trucks stopping here for? Oh Shit! Vladamir!

“Don’t panic Vassili.....It’s OK.. They’re probably just stopping to have a crap and a smoke. Don’t worry about ‘em.”

About an hour later, Vlad and Vass could hear the unmistakable tearing sound of the latest German MG34s, firing at over a thousand rounds a minute, just behind the knoll. There was a forty-five second burst of sustained fire, and then a six to eight second break as barrels were changed; another forty-five seconds and a break with hot barrels going back in; another twenty-seven seconds of sustained fire; a six second break........fifteen seconds of sustained fire............

“They’re goin’ to have to have a smoke soon. If they have only one spare barrel apiece, they must be red hot by now. Sorry Vas, it looks like they are goin’ to shoot the lot of us.”

“Not all of us, ‘Comrade’.”

Comrade Private Vassili Richardson got up and started to look over the crowd of men around them.

“I don’t give a fuck about the Soviet bloody Union. Where’s that bloody Ukrainian and the German officer? I hope the Germans string up all those fat Moscow party pricks and their security police lackeys off the lamp posts outside the apartments of all those people who disappeared in the middle of the night and never came back, dangling them like the bunches of bananas that we used to see hanging in ‘Party Member only’ shops!”

Comrade Commissar Nagle hadn’t been separated from the rest of the troops for the usual ‘special treatment’ that was normally meted out to Communist Party people by the Germans; the torture and beatings; the interrogations and humiliations, the digging of their own graves and finally being spreadeagled between posts so that troops could practice shooting their arms and legs off.

He was wearing the uniform of an ordinary, now dead corporal, and a bloodied bandage round his head which made it difficult for anyone to recognize him. During the confusion of the surrender and being herded into the wire enclosure, he had managed to blend into another regiment where he wasn’t known. It bought him a little time, but his disguise would not survive a real identity check.

The front was moving so fast the Germans just didn’t have time for the usually more thorough political ‘weeding’ process or even the digging of graves, let alone having a ‘little bit of fun’ at the expense of communist apparatchiks; nor had they provided the resources to deal with the avalanche of prisoners either. It was easier to just kill everybody and worry about the clean up later.

The Commissar ‘corporal’ who was sitting alone, not three meters from Vassili and Vlad, had heard Comrade Private Vas Richardson’s intended treachery, anonymously got up, as if to move from one spot of mud to another, but as he passed Vassili, he suddenly rounded and confronted him head on, grabbed him by the throat, spat in his face and started to throttle him.

“You miserable little lumpen-proletarian wretch! Look at them! They are killing Soviet citizens indiscriminately and when they get to your home town, what makes you think they are going to spare your family, your friends and your village. Who do you think is going to inherit the land that belongs to your collective? German farmers, that’s who! And what do you think will remain for anyone who has the misfortune to survive this invasion, because I’ll tell you: sub-human serfdom; being treated like cattle on your own land until further fucking notice. And you want to help this plague spread itself around the world so that it chokes and destroys working people everywhere. What are you thinking of? Have you absolutely no shame or pride, class consciousness, or a single patriotic bone in your body?”

He looked down the hill towards a little knot of field gray German and Soviet army brown uniformed men. The Ukrainian was with them, taking a proffered German cigarette. Comrade Commissar Nagle forced the Comrade Private’s head around to follow his view.

“He is going to become a butcher’s apprentice and do the German’s dirty work for them and he’ll end up being worse than those SS men round the hill. He’ll be up to his eyeballs in Russian blood, in no time at all. Do you really want to do that as the price of your life? Is that all it’s worth? WELL IS IT?”

The nearest German guard had heard the commotion and had moved towards the makeshift single strand of coiled barbed wire that fenced off the prisoners and aimed his machine pistol at the ‘corporal’. He relaxed his grip, looked Vas Richardson in the face and said in a lower voice that the guard couldn’t hear,

“Have you not the courage to stand with your fellows to the last, honorably, or will you disgrace yourself and your memory forever by collaborating with your enemies? Choose so that every man around you can see the character that you really are. What is it to be? Tell me. Tell them”.

Comrade Private Vas Richardson stared into the face of his assailant and just knew this had to be one of those party pricks he had so often hated and despised. He could denounce him now to the guard, but he felt ashamed. He’d seen what had happened to the Commissars who’d been caught the day before; a three to four round burst into the groin and lower abdomen, then left to scream and groan for hours, just outside the wire. This man was taking a terrible risk with what little was left of his life.

What could he have been thinking of? He looked around at the sea of bedraggled, exhausted, wet, dirty, lousy, cold, hungry, thirsty, sick, wounded and dying men sitting and lying around him in pools of mud, blood, urine and feces,...... hoarsely coughed,...... cleared his throat,....(The Commissar was only shirt fronting him now.)..... took a deep breath and spoke in a whisper.

“Death.”

“Louder Comrade! Shout it so that fuck down the hill can hear it!”

“DEAAAAATH!”

There were shouts in German and gesticulations from the guards to get up and move..... “Rous! Rous!” ....The remains of the regiment wearily got to its feet, or were carried, and filed slowly out of the wire enclosure on its last march to a flat area about two hundred meters away.

They started to sing ‘The Red Flag’, not necessarily because they believed in Socialism, nor just to get up the noses of the Germans, but because this was a damned good song to sing for men who were about to die.

The people's flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyr'd dead
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its ev'ry fold.
Then raise the scarlet standard high,
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.

It did get up the noses of the Germans. Shots rang out and men fell, but the singing continued even louder, over and over, all the way to the killing ground, until it was drowned by the machine guns.


Compared to the fate of the Russian prisoners who were not immediately shot, the summarily executed got off lightly. Of the five point seven million prisoners taken by the Germans during operation Barbarossa, three point three million died in captivity, in conditions that were even worse than the notorious concentration camps.

Even more terribly, after the war, many of the survivors (nine hundred and thirty thousand who were still in German POW camps when they surrendered and around half a million who escaped or were liberated during the Soviet counter offensives back into Germany) were sent to Soviet punishment camps on the totally unjust accusation that they surrendered too easily, or that they had ‘collaborated’(not quite so unjust, for around a million had become auxiliaries in the German army and the SS) to save themselves from death by starvation, exposure, constant beatings, slave labor conditions and disease.


‘The Ukrainian’ soon led the life prophesied by the Commissar ‘corporal’; a life terribly familiar to the NKVD security troops who administered Stalin’s Great Terror, only a few years before.

His German mother (There was a large and long standing German population in Czarist Russian and the Soviet Union) had quietly taught her blond haired son her language as he grew up, which meant that after his defection, he was quickly absorbed into the SS as a close ‘Aryan Volksdeutsche’ (foreign born ethnic German). In the earlier phases of the war, he was involved in behind the lines anti-partisan operations and reprisals, and of course, Jewish round ups and mass shootings’.

Watching his family and community die of starvation until he could stay no more without dying himself, gave him a clinical and detached view of death and killing. He saw and did a great deal of both, in circumstances that to an ordinary observer, would have seemed like obscene apocalyptic grotesqueries from Dante’s ‘Inferno’.

The Ukrainian was neither enlivened nor destroyed by what he was doing. He felt nothing. He could have been employed in an abattoir, or as an overworked game keeper doing culling work. The odd thing was that in his travels he acquired a dog who used to go everywhere with him. He loved it and when it died he got really upset. His comrades understood how he felt and tried to cheer him up. It had been the platoon mascot. They had all had a soft spot for little 'Storm Trooper' Fonzi. His ‘funeral’ was a moving moment for them all.

Later in the war, when things started to go against The Axis powers, he was transferred to the front. The death and killing did not abate, but its burden was now more evenly spread. His almost preternatural instincts for danger and dealing with it, that got him out of his homeland region during the famine, earned him the nickname ‘Lucky Dumchuk’ from his doomed SS storm trooper comrades, who, as the war progressed, fell like autumn leaves.

This instinct was not just a matter of learned experience, but very consistently focused observation and timing. He never noticed whether landscapes were beautiful or ugly. They were very detailed assemblages of risks and opportunities, which he constantly monitored, filtered and manipulated at the exact point of necessity, right down to what the ants and the birds were 'saying' and relating that to distance and time of potential impacts. They presented him with patterns and dissonances that had some of the characteristics of odor; like a gambler’s ‘smell’ for the fall of the cards.

He made his luck and it rewarded him with fewer and lighter wounds than most, but there were times when only blind chance, iron discipline, high levels of military skill and the grim determination of his regiment saved those who survived, of which he was one.

Eventually there were just not enough new recruits coming through the system to keep Lucky's regiment intact and so its remnants were used to bolster other equally depleted units elsewhere in the division. He eventually got a ‘cushy’ job as a staff car driver because of his ability to keep his senior ranking passengers alive if they had to travel by day. By then the Luftwaffe had lost control of the skies, so day time travel was extremely dangerous. He would plan a journey like a rally driver would do, except he would be optimizing for cover availability instead of just speed.

He had some near scrapes, but he never lost a car or a passenger.

At the end of the war, Lucky Demanunchuk escaped with what was left of his SS division in a fighting retreat out of the Soviet Eastern Sector and into the American one. (They were at risk of being shot out of hand by the Soviet front line forces if found to be SS, particularly ones from units known to have committed ‘heinous war crimes’).

He infiltrated the American zone using the identity of a displaced Ukrainian slave worker, called Anatole Pavlichenko, deliberately starving himself while in hiding so he would be thin enough to pass himself off. It didn’t take long, because nobody in Germany round that time had had much meat on their bones. He bluffed his way into a refugee camp and in 1948, migrated to Australia to work on the Snowy River hydro electric scheme.

All the survival skills that he had acquired made him into a shrewd, ruthless and eventually wealthy businessman, as well as a good catch for an Aussie girl by whom he had five children. They all did well in what came to be known in the post war period, as the Lucky Country (and his little joke).

They never found out the truth about what their enigmatic father had done during the war. His wife had asked about the scars he had. “They were industrial accidents and allied bombing in Germany when the SS forced us to work through a raid. The factory was hit. The boss was decent and pressured the guards to let his doctor attend to the wounded among us, on the understanding we had to work the next day, or be shot. He managed to push that out to three days because the SS were finding it difficult to get new labor and they had quotas to fill. Half of us made it. The others were so bad that to kill them was a mercy. We always went to the shelters after that.”

She was also curious about the rather unusually positioned Ukrainian Orthodox Cross that was diagonally angled from the lateral aspect of his left upper arm and curving around it, with dense roots growing out of its base, spreading into the armpit and seemingly disappearing into it. “My Orthodoxy is the root of my soul! One of my fellow laborers was a tattooist. He improvised new work tools and we all got one. He said that if he did not live to see the end of the war, at least he left his friends with something to remember him by. He was a very religious man. He didn’t make it. I always light a candle for him in the Church.”

‘Lucky’ Pavlichenko died peacefully with his family around him, after a too-much-of-the-good-life heart attack in 1980. He got an obituary in the Melbourne ‘Age’ newspaper the following week, saying what a successful ‘New Australian’ citizen he had been. His funeral attracted many mourners to the Orthodox Church that his money had helped to build, but it was not a deeply emotional occasion, with tears and displays of grief. Powerful he was, respected he might have been, but loved he was not; not really even by his family.

He could be affectionate, giving, generous and cheerfully pleasant, but there was something about him that was so profoundly inaccessible, no one ever got close to him.

His wife, who had been on anti-depressants and suffering an eating disorder for years, felt freed at last from a man who had left her emotionally dangling and baffled. His children were only interested in where the money and power were going in relation to his companies and other assets. His mistress was disappointed and inconvenienced that she had to find a real job. His business competitors and suppliers breathed a quiet sigh of relief at the passing of real bastard. His over one thousand employees held their collective breath, because although he had been a bastard, he was their bastard and a reliable one.

It was the fellow post-war refugee Jewish undertaker who laid him out who guessed what the tattoo and the scars meant and spat the word “SS!” into the face of the corpse, as if it were cobra venom. He recognized the cross design as a camouflage for the original blood group tattoo on the inner upper arm, used by the SS to facilitate rapid blood transfusions for its wounded personnel. This giveaway organizational signature was now hopelessly tangled in roots.

He said nothing to the family. What was the point? How could he ‘prove’ it anyway?

Lucky understood concealment. Others had tried tattoo removal or even double scarring to mimic bullet entry and exit wounds, to no avail. The beautiful and religiously uplifting work of art on his arm saved him from the hanging or long jail sentences many of his surviving former comrades suffered for their crimes, which were horrific, even by SS standards.


Freed! The Soviet people cried when Joseph Stalin died, in '53. He was their bastard; a despot who had lasted since time before remembering; now left them, naked, trembling. Twas but a quarter century, yet seemed an age, suddenly, released them from its cage. They had survived so much together, suffered him in all extremes of politics and weather, that his decease deprived them of a father; towering, dreadful, fallen, now a vulture's feast. When the shadow of his presence lifted, it was not relief or rage, but children's grief that mourned his passing.


Young Richardson and his family didn’t like communists and I was one at the time, so the history re-enactment had a certain frisson. His parents complained to the Principal that I had broken the top button of their son’s shirt doing the shirt fronting strangling bit, calling him a miserable little lumpen proletarian, making him use ‘filthy language’ and forcing him to sing ‘Red Flag’.

The Principal told me that in future, perhaps I ought to tone it down a bit. I was lucky. I could get away with it. It was one of those lumpen proletarian schools full of second generation welfare recipient’s kids who were lucky if a hiding and broken top button were all they got from their step fathers.


Was Vassili Richardson ‘right’ to go to his death along with his comrades as a loyal soldier of a regime he despised, or was he just morally bullied into not collaborating? Was Commissar Nagle really in any sort of moral position to preach righteous indignation after what the regime he represented had done to its own people? Given the Soviet regime had murdered his entire family, was Lucky Demananchuk/Pavlichenko an evil character for collaborating with its enemies, even though what he did was as evil as it gets? What does Lucky’s capacity to build a new life, wealth and family in a new country as a respectable pillar of society tell us about the nature of his behavior during the German invasion?

Should regime based ‘political’ crime be seen in the same way as common criminality? Is criminalizing regime based repression, torture and killing necessarily appropriate? Would a South African styled Truth and Reconciliation Commission be a legitimate alternative to a war crimes tribunal? And if not, how far and how rigorously should the weight of responsibility be allocated between the leaders/policy makers and the foot soldiers who carried it out? One merely signs a piece of paper and the others find themselves up to their necks in other peoples' blood. How appropriate was it to have Soviet Judges who were deeply implicated in regime ‘crime’ in their own country, sitting on the war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg?


Against improbable odds, and in the face of terrible choices that required doing unimaginably dreadful things, at hideous cost in life and property, Lucky Pavlichenko and Stalin each in his own way won their battle to not just save themselves, but their enterprises. Stalin saved his regime, his country and very possibly the world. Lucky was able to build a new commercial regime in a new country. On the one side was the certainty of defeat and death. On the other, riding the tiger. And to be able to ride it required not only a mind that was not constrained by ordinary morality, but any sense of human feeling. Decision making in such an arena is a very dark business indeed.

In this game, even Machiavelli would have been right out of his depth.


If faced with protracted global famine that means equitable rationing will cause slow starvation amongst the whole global population, would it be a ‘crime’ to cut part of that population off from the food supply to save the rest? Would it be ‘criminal’ on the part of security forces to do what was necessary to enforce this policy?

This is coming. Get used to it. Anyone who thinks we can sustain a global population that is projected to climb to nine billion people by 2040, using an agricultural system on permanent steroids, even as ground water runs out, and the glaciers that feed the major river/food bowls melt and the dry land grain food bowls become drought marginalized, as a result of global warming, is deluding themselves.

This is coming. Get used to it. A recent MIT study ( “Probabilistic Forecast for 21st Century Climate Based on Uncertainties in Emissions (without Policy) and Climate Parameters,” Jan 2009, as reported on url: http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/23/mit-doubles-global-warming-projections/) concluded that atmospheric carbon rates in 2050 will still have risen to 600 (up from the current 387) parts per million, implying a rise in global temperatures of 4 degrees C. By between 2090-2100 it will have risen to 866 ppm and 5.1 degrees C. Two degrees is considered to be the tipping point after which environmental stabilizer systems start to crash and burn, without possibility of remedy and rising sea levels start to claim our lower lying global cities.

And the question is, with what sort of crimes and penalties are we going to charge the people who have been responsible for not just allowing this to happen, but actively continuing to do things that they knew would lead to the deaths of not just the millions who died at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, but billions of people and fellow species that are already experiencing the biggest life forms crash since the end of the dinosaurs?

We have heard of genocide. What about ecocide? And punishments? What about flaying so that before they die, those responsible get some inkling of the pain and suffering they have caused? Crucifixion? Impalement? Or are the survivors of this coming holocaust going to be a bit more forgiving and and make do with a Truth and Reconciliation let off?

More immediately, how are we going to deal with ecocidal policy makers and their henchmen, now? Are we going to let their lobbyists and propagandists destroy the future? What sort of measures become legitimate when this much is at stake?

I am not sure I want to think about the possible answers to this question, but answered they are going to have to be.