Burning Girls and Other Stories by Veronica Schanoes

Author:Veronica Schanoes [Schanoes, Veronica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250781512
Google: kpTlDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

3. THE END, JUSTIFYING THE MEANS

I was raised by Marxists, and in the 1980s, that was not so common, not even in New York City. I remember when I proudly told my classmates that my parents were communists (they were never CP, of course; they were 1960s New Left and knew better than that) in fifth or sixth grade—whenever it was that we studied the virtues of capitalism and the unworkable evil of communism. They all seemed shocked and asked what it was like at my house. “You’ve been to my house,” I said. “It’s just like yours!”

I wasn’t sure what kind of answer they were looking for—a big portrait of Papa Karl on the wall, maybe? A dinnertime request to pass the potatoes met with the stern reminder that these potatoes were dug by the workers?

(To be honest, I’m told that my parents did have a big poster of Marx up when I was a baby, but I have no memory of it. Apparently I liked it a lot as a newborn, which my father made much of, but my mother figured it was because it was a stark black-and-white image of a human face.)

My mother repudiated communism when the Soviet government turned the Red Army on the Russian people in August 1991. It’s an odd marker, because, as I said, neither of my parents had ever been CP or supported the Soviet Union, but there it is. Life doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to happen. That is why art is superior to life. It is why fairy tales can contain as much truth as facts.

When doing the research for this story, I approached my mother with my—as Goldman put it—disillusionment with the revolution. I had always been taught that it had a glorious beginning and that Stalin had betrayed revolutionary principles in order to seize and keep power. But Lenin and his comrades formed a government rotten from the get-go, and Goldman was writing about it from the left in the 1920s, so why were my parents still buying this crap in the 1960s, I asked my mother.

“We all should have known after Kronstadt,” she said.

The Kronstadt Rebellion was a rising of sailors, soldiers, and ordinary people on Kotlin Island, in the Gulf of Finland, in March 1921. It made fifteen demands of the Bolshevik government. They included demands for free, fair elections conducted by secret ballot; freedom of speech and the press; freedom of assembly and to form trade unions; the right for peasants to own cattle; the right for workers to engage in handicraft production; the liberation of all political prisoners belonging to socialist, workers’, or peasants’ organizations.

It was brutally suppressed, with thousands killed, executed, and/or imprisoned.

The Kronstadt Rebellion took place in 1921, thirty years before my mother was born. The Red Army had been turned on the Russian people at the very beginning.

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