Georgy Burkov: ‘Kill me, but Stalinism is a disease…’

In 1990, Russian actor Georgy Burkov (31 May 1933 – 19 July 1990) passed away. After his death, the actor’s widow, Tatyana Ukharova, gave permission to publish her husband’s diary entries, which he had kept from 1953 to 1990.

We are all concentration camp amateurs. Underdeveloped and talentless people continue to terrorise and rob a huge country. And they breed creatures similar to themselves. It’s a disaster. The bandits will continue to play with the people for a long time, tightening the screws and letting off steam…

I have no homeland, because a slave cannot have one. But if I do have one, it is inside me, and so it is for many. But we live on foreign territory; our homeland has been occupied by communists. These are not Tatars or Mongols, they are our own people, and perhaps that is the secret of their success. They forced us to be strangers. They assign us to one place, but not the one where you were born and raised. A small homeland is a bandit state, a deceptive, false phenomenon.

The communists never represented the interests of the working class. Never. They are mainly the dregs and failures of all strata of Russian society. They destroyed the foundation — the peasantry and the intelligentsia. Now they can be persuaded, begged to leave the historical stage, but they cannot be destroyed, they cannot be made to pay for what they have done. It is not true that these are different people.

They are the ideological children of those first ones, the Devils. They say that Stalin destroyed a potential fifth column on the eve of the war with Hitler. People talk about this with passion, and most surprisingly, conviction. They speak sincerely! The road back to restoring justice will not end with Stalin. Therefore, we will continue to be led through the minefield of Stalinism for a long time to come.

I perceive Stalinism (one-dimensionality) and the state education of fools as a mass disease, an epidemic. Stalinism is closer to the plague than to socialism. Or to AIDS. The social becomes physiological — this is one of Lysenko’s discoveries. But it is true. Evidence must be gathered bit by bit for an assumption to become a discovery. After all, the approaches to Stalinism are still guarded. Those who approach the danger zone are no longer shot on the spot. They are recorded. Why? Just in case. And for now, within the limits of democratisation, they are simply interested in why you need it.

What are the current leaders hoping for? That they will manage to lead the party out of its deepest crisis, break into the operational space and do something meaningful and visible. While the focus is on international affairs, it is more convenient now. We helped the fascists devastate Europe and the Chinese devastate Asia. We did not think about people, we did not believe in people. Our ideal is a herd. And to top it all off, we built the worst possible form of human coexistence.

Kill me, but Stalinism is a disease. A mass mental illness. Like kleptomania. Some kind of terrible combination of poverty, lack of culture, religiosity (with the substitution of ‘God’), herd mentality, brought to the point of hysteria… How many people, the most intelligent people, were trampled into the mud or physically destroyed! To please and delight the masses. And, of course, to strengthen their own party power.

I must say that I can guess the state of the entire population of our country. It can be expressed in two words! Expectation of change, but what kind of change?! Change is necessary. The country is morally paralysed. The country has long been in a state of grand war. Stalinists dream of iron discipline, of order. On the other hand, there is the pressure of dreamers of freedom, people who no longer believe in communist demagogy. Both sides talk about change within the framework of existing relations. But everyone understands perfectly well that any changes in one direction or another will not be limited to small doses. It will be either Stalinism, repression, concentration camp communism, or capitalism.

They stand against each other, not shooting yet (I am not counting isolated cases on both sides), but the state of war is obvious. The state is trying to take everything under its control, pass everything through itself and return to the people, its wards, what appears to be the same in form but is completely opposite in content. It is frightening to think what will happen. There are scoundrels at the very top. I thought I had guessed the decline of individuality in leadership. The Bolsheviks have long since ceased to believe in the correctness of what they are doing and how they are doing it. The fury with which those who doubt are persecuted, isolated, expelled and killed only confirms this assumption. There is a struggle for a good life at the expense of others. That’s all.

Today, we are once again entering this cave of horrors. I do not think that this time everything will be dispelled and resolved once and for all. An attempt to close the topic and put an end to it was already made at the 70th anniversary celebration. I am convinced that at the party conference in mid-1988, the topic will be closed or the focus will be shifted in another direction.

The Bolsheviks need an atomic bomb to stay in power, that is, against their own people. A little time will pass, and they will begin to blackmail the whole world so that the whole world will beg us, the people, not to make a revolution and to tolerate these ghouls and keep them in power.

The ease with which we enter foreign countries (or bring weapons there) — Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, China, Vietnam and many others — shows that the West has armed itself for a reason. We are professional aggressors. And we have not yet abandoned the idea of world domination, modestly calling this idea a ‘world revolution.’

Now we will move forward in this area in small steps. It will be a long time before we erect a monument in Kolyma, and it will be a long time before democracy emerges. Perhaps only now, at the age of 55, am I beginning to become an artist. Because only now have I begun to understand how fragile and short-lived human beings are…