Victor Zalsavsky was born on September 26, 1937 in what was Leningrad, Russia at the time, but is now St. Petersburg. His occupation was a Professor of Political Sociology Theorist. He taught political sociology at various institutions throughout his long academic career such as LUISS (Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli), Leningrad State University, Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, Canada, University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford. He had become a naturalized citizen of Canada, and had a passion for analyzing the Soviet Union. He had written three books, Class Cleansing being the most illustrious, receiving the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought from the Heinrich Boell Foundation.
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It discusses the events leading up to the terrible shooting, and the responses to it from governments all over the world. It discusses that when Poland was first taken under Nazi control when the war began in September 1, 1939. On September 5, Georgi Dimitrov the General Secretary of the Comintern quickly realized he needed the Russian’s help, and requested for Stalin, and by mid-September the Soviets had approximately a million soldiers and many tank units on the Polish border. Poland began to divide itself and about 250,000 soldiers and officers became prisoners of this undeclared war. The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (or the NKVD, the police of the Soviet Union) were the ones to decide what would happen with the many Polish prisoners and their families. The German and Soviet allies then exchanged them and took part in managing the transportation, supervision, interrogation, and labor assignments of the prisoners. There are countless cover-ups, and denies of the Russian and German command, and this is why the paperwork on this massacre did not come to the surface until recently, although pieces are still missing. Through detective work, the first paper uncovered the plans were to shoot these polish shoulders and deport their families …show more content…
One of the ways to show this is by exposing the connection of what was happening with the Katyn and the Nazi in Germany. Although the Nazi’s were killing people in gas chambers, and what happened at Katyn was with weapons, either way it is still a mass murder. “Class cleansing is a strategy of calculated and systematic annihilation of an entire social class by totalitarian regimes whose foundational ideology is Marxism-Leninism” (43). He shows that the Nazi policy of annihilating Jews is the same as the deportation and killing of around one-and-a-half million Armenians by the Turks in 1915, and continuing the connect the ties to the killing of the Polish soldiers at Katyn. Zaslavsky shows that history repeats itself through destruction. They are all desperately important and cannot continue to be shoved under the rug. “Internal NKVD and NKGB documents intended for their own personnel established the basic directives for the class cleansing policy” (50). They knew what they were doing, as they were able to keep their gold
It discusses the events leading up to the terrible shooting, and the responses to it from governments all over the world. It discusses that when Poland was first taken under Nazi control when the war began in September 1, 1939. On September 5, Georgi Dimitrov the General Secretary of the Comintern quickly realized he needed the Russian’s help, and requested for Stalin, and by mid-September the Soviets had approximately a million soldiers and many tank units on the Polish border. Poland began to divide itself and about 250,000 soldiers and officers became prisoners of this undeclared war. The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (or the NKVD, the police of the Soviet Union) were the ones to decide what would happen with the many Polish prisoners and their families. The German and Soviet allies then exchanged them and took part in managing the transportation, supervision, interrogation, and labor assignments of the prisoners. There are countless cover-ups, and denies of the Russian and German command, and this is why the paperwork on this massacre did not come to the surface until recently, although pieces are still missing. Through detective work, the first paper uncovered the plans were to shoot these polish shoulders and deport their families …show more content…
One of the ways to show this is by exposing the connection of what was happening with the Katyn and the Nazi in Germany. Although the Nazi’s were killing people in gas chambers, and what happened at Katyn was with weapons, either way it is still a mass murder. “Class cleansing is a strategy of calculated and systematic annihilation of an entire social class by totalitarian regimes whose foundational ideology is Marxism-Leninism” (43). He shows that the Nazi policy of annihilating Jews is the same as the deportation and killing of around one-and-a-half million Armenians by the Turks in 1915, and continuing the connect the ties to the killing of the Polish soldiers at Katyn. Zaslavsky shows that history repeats itself through destruction. They are all desperately important and cannot continue to be shoved under the rug. “Internal NKVD and NKGB documents intended for their own personnel established the basic directives for the class cleansing policy” (50). They knew what they were doing, as they were able to keep their gold