[Milsurplus] "7000 Days In Hell"

[Hubert Miller]

"The man on the bunk next to me was the engineer Semsky, of Tver ( Kalinen today), 
a city 70 km. northwest of Moscow. Semsky had been arrested on the first day of the
war for praising German technology in a conversation with a colleague. He was given
10 years for 'defeatism'. In the two weeks I spent with Semsky, I got to like him a lot.
Two months later, he was sentenced to death and shot."

"......In 1947, American food transports stopped coming in. Our bread rations were 
severely cut, and so were the portions of warm food. Very little food had been brought
in from the Russian interior, for there had been a catastrophically poor harvest...Stalin
had spread the rumor that that the collective farms would be eliminated after the war.
It was a deliberate deception...the peasants reacted as they had in 1933 - 1934 - they
virtually went on strike..." 

>From "Seven Thousand Days In Siberia", Karlo Stajner. I have read a great number of
"war books". This is the scariest, most horrific, most depressing of all !  The above are
just two of the very mildest paragraphs. The man was a committed Communist ! 
Arrested and punished as so many were, because of the paranoid suspicion that 
radiated  from the Fearless Leader on down. 
-Hue Miller