People did fight back, but rarely, unevenly, and almost always at horrific cost.
Early on (Tambov, Kronstadt), resistance was crushed so brutally that the lesson was burned into the population: resist and you, your family, and often your village disappear.
By the time of the Great Terror, arrests were atomized, one person, at night, in silence, so fear stayed individualized and resistance couldn’t scale.
There were acts of defiance, families resisting arrest, villages attacking secret police squads, prisoners sabotaging, and later full camp uprisings at Norilsk, Vorkuta and Kengir.
But most of these came only after people truly had nothing left to lose, often after Stalin’s death, and they were still crushed.
Terror works by fragmentation, misinformation, and incremental fear.
People didn’t yet understand the system was murderous by design, and by the time they did, it was too late.
Tyranny survives not because everyone believes the lie, but because too many face it alone, too late.
People that have nothing to lose fight back, but freedom is stolen by increments, increased taxation, gun control, curfews...
Hero of the Soviet Union...
- Pavel Morozov was a 13-year-old Soviet boy from Siberia.
- In the early 1930s, he was promoted by Soviet propaganda as having denounced his own father to authorities for allegedly helping kulaks (peasants resisting collectivization).
- Pavlik testified against his father (or was said to have done so; details are disputed).
- In 1932, Pavlik and his younger brother were murdered, reportedly by relatives.
- The Soviet state declared Pavlik a martyr and hero.
"It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision.
Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable.
A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear." AYN RAND |
