The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

* Pavel Galitsky (b. 1911) remembers being questioned by his Party bosses at the Red Arsenal Factory in Leningrad during the purges of 1932. The son of a priest, Galitsky was the editor of the factory’s wall-newspaper. He had recently joined the Party, but his family background made him vulnerable. The head of the purge committee, who was the chairman of the regional Party committee and the factory’s director, put Galitsky on the spot by asking him to give a summary of ‘Lenin’s book The Anti-Dühring’ (there was no such work by Lenin, but there was a famous book by Friedrich Engels with that name that had outlined in encyclopedic detail the Marxist conception of philosophy, natural science and political economy). Galitsky had no idea about the book but, as he recalls, ‘I knew that anti meant against, so I said that Lenin wrote against this Dühring, and they said, “Correct! Well done, clever lad!”’ (MSP, f. 3, op. 53, d. 2, l. 6).