A friend who worked at the State Department moved out of the area to take up an academic post teaching history at a state university. He and his wife came back a week ago for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA). They’re a swell, smart couple.
At their party in their hotel room at the site of the AHA meeting, my friend’s wife wore a black t-shirt that said on the front “arrest Bush.” My friend’s t-shirt said on the front “arrest Cheney first.” I think I get that. But on the back of their shirts was printed Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution. That section doesn’t say anything about arresting political leaders.
Stroking my small head trying to figure out this conundrum, I remembered Lev Razgon’s story. Razgon was a Communist Party member in the Soviet Union. After graduating from a provincial teachers’ training institute and a short career writing children’s stories, he was imprisoned in the Gulag for 17 years. Once by chance he shared a jeep ride in the Gulag with the deputy Chief Medical Officer. The officer reminisced about having personally dined with Soviet President Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin. The officer collapsed hysterically when Razgon inadvertently revealed that Kalinin’s wife was imprisoned nearby.
Razgon explained that this situation should not have been considered surprising: “If members of the Politburo were themselves liable to be arrested and shot without more ado, why should their wives enjoy special immunity?”[1] Stalin in fact arrested close relatives of many members of his inner circle.
President Kalinin’s wife, Yekaterina Ivanovna, was imprisoned in the Gulag from 1937 to 1945. She spent years working at hard labor. Because of poor health, her job was then switched to working in the washhouse, picking nits out prisoners’ underwear. She was released after World War II ended. Razgon explained:
Kalinin was already terminally ill when he was permitted to see his wife again. He died only a year later, in the summer of 1946. … We reacted with very mixed feelings to the rhetoric gushing from the radio and the press about how deeply the deceased had been loved by the Party, the Soviet people and Comrade Stalin himself. Even more bizarre was to read in the papers a telegram of condolence from the Queen of England to a woman who only a year earlier had been picking nits out of underwear in a prison camp. But most terrible of all was to see the newspaper and magazine photographs of Kalinin’s funeral, with Yekaterina Ivanovna following the coffin, and Stalin and his entire retinue walking beside her.[2]
The human way is a hilly, wet foot-path.
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Read more:
- coverture, domestic violence & criminalization of men
- criminalizing seduction: the crime of men seducing women
- studies of cuckolding in beyond Brezhnev-era Soviet intellectual life
Notes:
[1] Lev Razgon, “The President’s Wife,” in True Stories (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1997) p. 14.
[2] Id. p. 18.