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THE OUROBOROS

You might have heard of the ancient symbol depicting a serpent eating its own tail. It’s called the ouroboros. It is held to symbolize eternity, the cyclic renewal of life. The rapid change of the state elite leads to the demise of the people.

«Between 1933 and 1935 most of the czarist engineers were rounded up. There were large-scaletransfers of people to different provinces, so they could not communicate with each other. Many innocents were executed immediately; others were banished to Siberia.»

«By the spring of 1936, almost all the young people who had received secondary or higher technical education between 1927 and 1932 had been rounded up. Thus, the regime first created a whole class

of specialists, and then, seeing in it a threat to its power, destroyed it. Before getting rid of the qualified technical elite, the party and the government prepared successors to take that elite’s place.

If they hadn’t, industrial development would have faced a dead end.»

«On graduating from the academy after two years of studies, the wunderkinds (as the old workers at our factory called them) were appointed to managerial positions as soon as the specialists who had

occupied them disappeared. This clearly planned and thought-out policy was carried out openly and rigorously for several years. That solved the problem – creating a class of «devotees to the party, truly

Soviet specialists’ (in the parlance of the slogans of that time). But the young managers lacked both experience operating machinery and theoretical knowledge, which two years at the academy could not provide. These wunderkinds had an adverse effect on factory workers secretly despising them.»

«As soon as new – truly socialist, from the party’s standpoint – workers came into the industry and thousands of others filled the rooms of industrial academies, a large-scale purge of experienced specialists began. First of all, it hit those who had been sent by the government to study abroad to replace the old engineers, who had been educated before the Revolution, and foreign specialists.

Now they were considered hopelessly tainted, especially condemned by the bourgeois influence of their association with foreign specialists. The foundation upon which the technical development of

the country developed began to disappear rapidly.»

These are excerpts from a book by a Jamaican-American toolmaker about his life in Stalin’s USSR.

Someone neither white nor red took stock of the situation as an impartial observer uninterested in politics and drew his conclusions about the regime.

As we know, such purges happened not only among engineers but also in all sectors of the government machine. Purges reached the highest establishment of the ruling party and the military, bringing the most tragic results of all. I have long included in those tragic results the number of people the USSR lost to the German attack. But who needed to purge the country of its «enemies»?

Even Stalin – the USSR leader – did not want to live in fear when Wehrmacht troops were near Moscow. He wasn’t that stupid to eliminate his military leaders so as to bring his own collapse closer.

A reason will be given here that was big enough to pull the rug out from under the omnipotent dictator, whom some ordinary people still hold in esteem to this day.

But what he did or had planned to do to leave people with no memory of the past – a crowd of devoted fanatics – is an indicator of common self-reflection. We must understand why today the state’s body, while it seems to be where it’s supposed to be, has a hydra of ever-hungry heads that fail to understand the state. Where do those heads come from?