Lenin’s Sex Worker Massacre
Today I learned that among Lenin’s many crimes, he specifically ordered that hundreds of sex workers be shot. Worker’s revolution? Sure, but only for the correct sort of workers:
“It is obvious that a whiteguard insurrection is being prepared in Nizhni. You must strain every effort, appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like.”
Due to an ambiguity about whether a specific Russian word means “making drunk” or “being drunk”, this more sensible-sounding translation is also offered:
You must … organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes, drunk soldiers, former officers and the like.
There’s some historical ambiguity about how many of the sex workers were actually shot (as opposed to being terrorized or deported) but any public discussion of the question so rapidly fills up with tankies dreaming up creative justifications to excuse/absolve Lenin of his crimes, that it’s not an easily-researchable question for non-historians.
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I swear it’s like Lenin and Stalin had a dart board and just picked random groups to completely destroy. Either that or their cronies just saw them get angry and threw the name of a disposable group in front of them to slake their thirst.
In the context of the orders, did “deported” mean sent to a prison or camp in Siberia or some remote place like that?
Vance I believe, but do not know, that in the context of Russia in the 20th century deportation was almost always internal — from the cities to some remote and squalid frontier from which return would always be very difficult/forbidden. Under the Czars, this was often a forced march in a wagon caravan across most of the breadth of Siberia, there to serve (or not, depending on the particular case) a term in a work camp (which might or might not have conditions so awful it was also a death camp). In Soviet Russia, it was usually a train ride to the end of the line, perhaps in Siberia or somewhere terrible in Central Asia. Again, there might be additional penal servitude at the destination but often there was not, or it was brief — the main punishment being the exile.