Quote of the Day, I Would Have Done The Exact Same Damn Thing edition.

From the UK Telegraph article on Lavrenty Beria:

Unlike Stalin, who was buried in Lenin’s Mausoleum and later moved to a grave by the Kremlin walls, his body was burnt and his ashes dispersed by a huge fan.

Personally, if I was running that particular garbage disposal detail I would have also brought in a priest to clean up the lingering foul spiritual residue, and Marxism be damned*. Heck, for all I know, they did.  Certainly the Russians went back to Orthodox Christianity with remarkable speed…

Via

The original story is a couple of years old, though.

Moe Lane

*Huh.  Funny thing about that…

8 thoughts on “Quote of the Day, I Would Have Done The Exact Same Damn Thing edition.”

  1. And yet, we have a lot of people in this country that insist that none of that is “real” communism and if we just give it a chance, it will work.

    1. One reason we can’t get through to those people is that we fail to acknowledge that that is NOT what they mean by “real communism”. They know what they mean, and they know for damn sure that wasn’t it.
      “Real communism” is a human impossibility, and any attempt at it is bound to devolve into the horrors we’ve seen before. The problems are inherent ones like “workers control the means of production” can only mean “representatives of workers control the means of production” which then means “politicians control the means of production” which means “sociopaths control the means of production”.

  2. And yet it’s hard to decide if Beria was the sickest of the lot who ran the security services. After all, they had Yezhov and Yagoda, too. Beria was brought in to clean up their messes. *yikes*

    Coincidentally, I’m reading Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag,” her history of the KGB-run penal/slave-labor colony system. Great book, and an interesting side affect has been a renewed annoyance with those Western dupes who defended Bolshevism.

  3. I still want to find a good accounting of what exactly went down after Stalin died. Beria was all set to seize control, and then… The illiterate peasant Khrushchev, hero of the people, somehow cast him down and took his place.
    In that story, you’d expect at least a mention of a magical sword and wise mentor. It’s not just fantasy, it’s bad fantasy.

    1. Loathe as I am to praise a Commie, it must be said that Khrushchev had an essentially Russian peasant attitude towards this sort of thing: shoot the (greater) monster in the face, and see what happens then.

      1. Oh, I freely admit he was the lesser of evils. And in this instance, I applaud his instincts.
        .
        I just can’t help to note that we’re not getting the story of what actually happened. Print the legend, and all that. Thatwe likely never will, annoys the heck outofme me.

  4. ” . . . his ashes dispersed by a huge fan.”

    Part of the old Russian legend has this fantastically fat Kulak in an XXXXXXXL-size T-shirt that says “Vote Beria” on the front and “We Love Lav!” on the back wandering the countryside, reaching into his bag and tossing ashes Johnny Appleseed-like wherever he went.

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