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On the 50th Anniversary of the death
the greatest mass murderer of the twentieth century
March 5, 2003
In 1957, four years after Josef Stalin’s death, Anna Akhmatova,
the great Russian poet, was attempting to visit her son, who had been
jailed by the secret police. She writes that
 [i]n
the fearful years of the … terror I spent seventeen months in prison
queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Besides
me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course,
never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common
to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there):
“Can you describe this?” And I said: “Yes I can.”
And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once
been her face.
From Requiem (1957)
In those years only the dead smiled,
Glad to be at rest:
And Leningrad city swayed like
A needless appendix to its prisons.
It was then that the railway-yards
Were asylums of the mad:
Short were the locomotives’
Farewell songs.
Stars of death stood
Above us, and innocent Russia
Writhed under bloodstained boots, and
Under the tires of Black Marias
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