it makes sense if you read solzhenitsyn on the thieves. the soviet...

it makes sense if you read solzhenitsyn on the thieves. the soviet state coddled and nurtured a permanent hereditary caste of rapists, murderers and robbers. they flourished in cities, where they kept the populace in constant low-level fear

of course the thieves had to kick …

some of their spoils up to the security organs who tolerated them, but that wasn’t the main reason they were tolerated. the organs could easily steal (and kill and rape) on their own

they valued the thieves’ role in terrifying and demoralizing people. there was an explicitly …

formulated ideology around this approach. the thieves were “friendly class elements.” anyone afraid of having private property despoiled by the friendly class element was by definition a bourgeois, if not a counterrevolutionary imperialist fascist etc etc

none of this means …

the thieves had complete impunity though. the gulag had millions of them. it couldn’t have functioned without them

the thieves played the same role in the prisons and labor camps as they did outside, terrifying and demoralizing the bourgeois, but with much more viciousness

when you arrive in a prisoner transport, a couple of thieves methodically go through your belongings, take what they want, and maybe stab you

the guards get a cut of the stolen goods and, it goes without saying, do nothing to stop the thieves. because they’re stealing from …

middle class people with retrograde ideas of individual dignity and decency. these are “political offenders” (someone who an acquaintance, under extrme torture, accused of making some stray antiregime comment, and confessed it extreme torture, accusing others in the process)

if the political is caught with a knife in camp, he will be accused of a terrorist plot, a great conspiracy in league with the americans or chinese or french or whoever the enemy of the month is. he’s charged with ten more years. or shot

if the thief is caught, nothing happens

the thieves literally attend sessions to raise their “class consciousness” in camp, where they’re taught that it’s not their fault they’re violent lowlifes, that capitalist imperialist society made them this way (a bourgeois would be jailed for 10 years for suggesting russia …

still a bourgois imperialist society after the revolution)

the thieves could easily be redeemed. the politicals were rotten to the core. part of the redemption was stealing from, beating, raping politicals

oh. the thieves didn’t work in the labor camps. they gambled and …

drank and smoked weed and raped politicals (who could be as young as 12 btw)

the politicals were worked to death

any of this sound familiar? i’ll spell it out. the indigent illiterate hostile foreigners are this regime’s thieves. none of this is an accident

i'm working on a short story vaguely related to this sort of thing. it's a rough draft but maybe you'll will enjoy it zelinarxy.com/horse-farm