Читать книгу Nature's Evil - Alexander Etkind - Страница 38

1 * Hostage-taking (amanat) was widely used in the Russian colonisation of Siberia and Alaska but was unknown in the British, French and Spanish colonisation of America. The word amanat, like yasak (tribute) and kapkan (trap), is of Turkish origin: the theory and practice of violence permeated the Russian Empire, moving from west to east.

2 * In the first decade of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks still depended on the fur trade. One of its top managers was Artur Stashevsky, a Soviet agent in Berlin who was later responsible for organising state-owned pawnshops (Torgsin) all over the Soviet Union. Members of the Eitingon family controlled Soviet fur exports to the USA. One cousin, Matvey, held the monopoly on Russian fur in New York. Another, Leonid, was a general in the NKVD (Soviet secret police) and organised the assassination of Trotsky. A third cousin, Max, was a leading psychoanalyst in Berlin (Etkind, Eros of the Impossible; Wilmers, The Eitingons).