Sunday, October 2, 2016

Gold is most likely the best wealth protection ever, but…Don't forget what the bastards did about private ownership of gold in the US in 1933. What a lot of people don't realize is what Stalin did about private ownership of gold at about the same time.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn 
"From 1928 on, it was time to call to a reckoning those late stragglers after the bourgeoisie — the NEPmen. The usual practice was to impose on them ever-increasing and finally totally intolerable taxes. At a certain point they could no longer pay; they were immediately arrested for bankruptcy, and their property was confiscated. (Small tradesmen such as barbers, tailors, even those who repaired primus stoves, were only deprived of their licenses to ply their trade.)

There was an economic purpose to the development of the NEPmen wave. The state needed property and gold, and there was as yet no Kolyma. The famous gold fever began at the end of 1929, only the fever gripped not those looking for gold but those from whom it was being shaken loose. The particular feature of this new, "gold" wave was that the GPU was not actually accusing these rabbits of anything, and was perfectly willing not to send them off to Gulag country, but wished only to take away their gold by main force. So the prisons were packed, the interrogators were worn to a frazzle, but the transit prisons, prisoner transports, and camps received only relatively minor reinforcements.

Who was arrested in the "gold" wave? All those who, at one time or another, fifteen years before,
had had a private "business," had been involved in retail trade, had earned wages at a craft, and could have, according to the GPU's deductions, hoarded gold.

But it so happened that they often had no gold. They had put their money into real estate or
securities, which had melted away or been taken away in the Revolution, and nothing remained.
They had high hopes, of course, in arresting dental technicians, jewelers, and watch repairmen.
Through denunciations, one could learn about gold in the most unexpected places: a veteran lathe worker had somewhere gotten hold of, and held on to, sixty gold five-ruble pieces from Tsarist times. The famous Siberian partisan Muravyev had come to Odessa, bringing with him a small bag full of gold. The Petersburg Tatar draymen all had gold hidden away. Whether or not these things were so could be discovered only inside prison walls. Nothing — neither proletarian origin nor revolutionary services — served as a defense against a gold denunciation. All were arrested, all were crammed into GPU cells in numbers no one had considered possible up to then — but that was all to the good: they would cough it up all the sooner! It even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each other's presence — who cared about those niceties? Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators did not write up charge sheets because no one needed their papers. And whether or not a sentence would be pasted on was of very little interest. Only one thing was important: Give up your gold, viper! The state needs gold and you don't. The interrogators had neither voice nor strength left to threaten and torture; they had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water.

Whoever coughed up gold got water! One gold piece for a cup of fresh water!


People perish for cold metal.

This wave was distinguished from those that preceded and followed it because, even though fewer than half its victims held their fate in their own hands, some did. If you in fact had no gold, then your situation was hopeless. You would be beaten, burned, tortured, and steamed to the point of death or until they finally came to believe you. But if you had gold, you could determine the extent of your torture, the limits of your endurance, and your own fate. Psychologically, this situation was,incidentally, not easier but more difficult, because if you made an error you would always be ridden by a guilty conscience. Of course, anyone who had already mastered the rules of the institution would yield and give up his gold — that was easier. But it was a mistake to give it up too readily. 

They would refuse to believe you had coughed it all up, and they would continue to hold you. But
you'd be wrong, too, to wait too long before yielding: you'd end up kicking the bucket or they'd pastea term on you out of meanness. One of the Tatar dray men endured all the tortures: he had no gold!
They imprisoned his wife, too, and tortured her, but the Tatar stuck to his story: no gold! Then they arrested his daughter: the Tatar couldn't take it anymore. He coughed up 100,000 rubles. At this point they let his family go, but slapped a prison term on him. The crudest detective stories and operas about brigands were played out in real life on a vast national scale."

Full text can be read here:

This happened because Stalin's government was stone broke. Just like the USSA is now.
Desperation will drive helplessly bankrupt governments (as well as individuals) to drastically evil ends.

This also happened because private ownership of firearms in Russia was non-existent at that time. If private Russians had private firearms Stalin would not have been able to wipe out 20 million or more of his own people.

In the end, Stalin killed more of his own people than both world wars (estimates in excess of 20 million!). Whereby, the Nazis were accused of killing "only" 6 million.

Stalin and Hitler had asset seizure too...just ask the Jews.