Sergey Besedin: “Ivan Safronov can repeat the fate of Mikhail Koltsov”

Timely analogies of what is happening now in Russia with what was happening in Stalin's time were made in his blog by writer Sergei Besedin:

“The detained journalist Safronov is loyal or not to the power - it does not matter anymore.

How loyal to it was Mikhail Koltsov, the editor-in-chief of Ogonyok, and later of the Crocodile. How many feuilleton - hundreds! - he devoted to the witty, vivid, cynical, talented, if this word is applicable to the terry propaganda, exposing the enemies of the people - from the case of the Industrial Party to the Bukharin process. How enthusiastically glorified the SLON (Solovetsky camp for special purposes) and its role in forging people and raising a person of a new formation. How masterfully he carried out the special orders of the leader, becoming his consiliori in the republican Spain!

No, it didn’t help. Having overstayed during, it would seem, the most terrible period - Ezhov's time, Koltsov was arrested under Beria at the very end of 1938 right in the editorial office of the newspaper Pravda.

In a hurry to save his life, Koltsov testified to seventy of his colleagues in the literary workshop - Erenburg, Fadeev, Fink, Vsevolod Vishnevsky, Alexei Tolstoy, Agniya Barto... All these people, handsome and not very, were enlisted by him in bulk as the “agents of the French intelligence”. Some later were also arrested. The arrested Yezhov called Koltsov himself “a British spy,” instantly writing that he was spying with his wife, Eugenia Khayutina.

I wonder what evidence in the end will give Ivan Safronov? How many colleagues will be the agents according to him? It seems that this know-how - to reveal entire networks of conspirators through one spy - the FSB has not yet used to its fullest.

Let's go back to Koltsov. Torture and interrogation continued for more than a year, as a result, Koltsov was shot within the “list of 346”, which included Yezhov himself.

It seems that the current FSB itself can no longer come up with anything. Only copy-paste from the famous processes of the past. Yes, and why to invent? Modern security officers feel comfortable and pleasant in those, old ones, overcoats and leather jackets from the thirties and forties. Russian society is rapidly plunging not even into Brezhnev’s - into Stalin’s archaic, during the story “The Fate of a Drummer” and the novel “The Secret of Two Oceans”, the films “Member of the Government” and “Error of the Engineer Cochin”, where endless spies are looking for a map of the Soviet side’s fortifications or a scheme of the mining operations; into the abyss of absurdity, where they dig tunnels from Bombay to London and pour iron nails into the butter. It is possible that a powerful call will soon be heard for juvenile pavliks morozovs to help their native intelligence services - to heed an unusual accent, to look at the brown buttons with the foreign inscriptions, to sniff at an alien perfume and immediately dial the hotline number...

We’re not waiting, but are preparing to?”