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0 pointsHDThoreaun1y ago0 comments

The cultural revolution began by lynching all the teachers and kicking the bureaucrats out of the cities. Stalin did much of the same. It was a horrible strategy which is why they came up with the new ones.

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int_19h1y ago· 2 in thread

I can think of many nasty things that Stalin did, but I don't recall anything even remotely similar to "lynching all the teachers and kicking the bureaucrats out of the cities". In fact, teacher was probably one of the most respected occupations throughout the Soviet period.

aguaviva1y ago

The Katyń forest massacres (to the extent that about a third of the victims were targeted for being members of the intelligentsia) come to mind as a reasonably similar instance of the kind of "lynching" you're referring to. Within the USSR itself we have the purges of leading intellectuals in Ukraine -- the number of victims is more difficult to quantify, but was likely far beyond the few hundred known by name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executed_Renaissance

The June 1941 (and later) deportations in the Baltics (involving inevitably a very high mortality rate) seem to have at least partially targeted the intelligentsia as such in those Republics (in addition to the other usual suspects).

int_19h1y ago

Right, but that's just the classic occupier tactic - target the (usually independent-minded) intelligentsia of conquered territories to suppress any budding national liberation movements. But OP was talking about Maoist purges of their own intelligentsia. Bolsheviks indiscriminately purged the nobility, which certainly did disproportionally affect intelligentsia, but they weren't ideologically anti-intellectual the way some Maoist strains or Khmer Rouge were.

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