Saturday Evening Cigar

We're still making our way through Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, a book about Stalin's purges. We smoked one of our last Rocky Patel Cuban Blends.

Stalin arranged the assassination of Sergei Kirov on December 1, 1934, and used the crisis environment afterward to justify and kickstart his Great Terror. Conveniently, he had his Charter of Terror written on the same day as the murder, and before his 400 mile trip from Moscow to Leningrad to mourn Kirov's death. Page 41, regarding his Charter of Terror:

...Stalin's new technique, by which the state of emergency was used to justify personal, and technically unconstitutional, action.

We sure are lucky this tactic of crisis-as-a-means isn't in use today to go after say... capitalists, doctors or bitter clingers. Eh?

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