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yoificfinder · 2 years

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hi love, hope you're well! i was wondering if you have any recs for slow burn or hurt/comfort type of fics? appreciate your work and hope you stay safe <3 -n

Hello dear n! I was steadily working on this whenever I have free time but this still took a long time. Thank you for patiently waiting.

A lot of fics I recommended under personal favorites actually fit your request. But here are some more fics (limited at 1 fic per author but check out their other works too!) tagged slow burn and/or hurt/comfort I rec:

All Our Yesterdays by @kitsunebi-uk [E, 1M]

York, England, 2120: Yuuri Katsuki is a dime-a-dozen techie, spending his days doing routine repairs at the university. He hangs out with his friend Phichit, goes for a drink, watches holograms. It’s an existence – but is it a life?

Crowood Castle, Yorkshire, 1392: As the son of a baron, Sir Victor Nikiforov makes judgements where lives hang in the balance. As a knight, he must sometimes end them. It’s what he was born to do – but what of the heavy burden on his soul? Death is all too commonplace, while life and love remain elusive.

When a brilliant scientist goes rogue, journeying to the Middle Ages with the world’s first time machine, Yuuri is stunned to be called on as the last hope of preventing her from changing history. After an abrupt departure, he lands at Crowood Castle disguised as an enemy of the Nikiforovs, Sir Justin le Savage – and will need to act the part if he is to survive. It’s a tall order for someone who can barely tell the back end of a horse from the front. But if Ailis, in her own disguise, discovers who he is, his mission will end in a blaze of laser-gun fire. He must not give his real identity away, even to the beguiling knight he’s falling in love with…

Beside the Dancing Sea by lily_winterwood / @omgkatsudonplease [E, ?] *Being edited and reuploaded

He’s finally here in this lovely and quiet little beach cottage, and the rest of the year seems to stretch out infinitely before him. Time will pass, though, and it will pass faster than he realises, but in the meantime he will stop worrying about writer’s block and deadlines and not even having the foggiest clue what his next novel’s going to be about, and live.

New York Times-bestselling author Viktor Nikiforov arrives in the sleepy seaside town of Torvill Cove to cure his writer's block. After encountering local wallflower Yuuri Katsuki at a party, he discovers that this mysterious dark-haired man has a couple secrets up his sleeve.

And Viktor will be damned if he doesn't find out just what those secrets are.

Dot, Dash, Star* by saltwreath [T, 29K]

People with soulmates were blessed with lights like stars. Viktor Nikiforov was born without one, Katsuki Yuuri would have two, and Yuri Plisetsky pretended he had none.

They find each other anyway.

it's the side effects that save us by renaissance [T 71K]

After a sudden personal tragedy and a narrow defeat at the Grand Prix Final, Viktor is ready to throw it all away—until he sees a video of the skater who beat him performing the free skate he couldn't.

Or; plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

Love in Exile by @martymusesloveinexile [E, 99K]

Once a well know ballet dancer in St. Petersburg, Victor Nikiforov finds himself exiled to Sakhalin Island as a political convict in 1881. As a man sentenced to katorga he will never return to European Russia or his life on the stage. Known as the "Edge of the World," his life on Sakhalin could not be further from the life he once knew. Strange circumstances lead his path to cross that of a young Japanese man, one of the very few still living on the island. Katsuki Yuuri leads a life of exile of a different kind, one that is largely self-imposed. Drawn to each other, despite their differences, something slowly begins to grow between them. When a narrowly avoided tragedy leaves them stranded together for a long, cold Sakhalin winter, they are challenged to face what their relationship really means, and what future it could possibly have.

My Name On Your Lips by feelslikefire [E, 108K]

Yuuri Katsuki has been betrothed to the High King's son, Victor, since he was just a child; furthermore, as an omega, he's forbidden from practicing magic in combat. For years, he's been able to put off the former because the Prince was traveling abroad, and gotten around the latter by practicing with his mentor in secret.

Now Victor Nikiforov has finally returned home, and Yuuri is being summoned to the capital for their wedding. He needs a plan to put off marriage long enough to find a way to break the betrothal, while keeping his practicing from being discovered.

If only the Prince didn't have other ideas.

The Noblest Form of Affection by @lucycamui [E, 38K]

The duty of a valet appears deceptively simple on the surface: his sole job is to wait upon his master. Yuuri prides himself on his skills as a valet, but will the challenges and heartaches that come hand in hand with serving the lovely and eccentric Mister Nikiforov prove to be too great a hurdle?

Nuclear Hearts Club by butterbeerbitch / @the-tortellini-man [T, 84K]

He remembers his sister made being seventeen look like life was happening harder than it ever did. All those big, brutal feelings.

And he’s here now, and it's untangling in a pace too fast for him to hold onto anything. Something's starting and something's ending, and it makes sense until it doesn't, and he's stuck somewhere in the middle thinking it won't ever stop feeling like this.

All this changing in a town where nothing ever does.

Being seventeen in the middle of nowhere isn't supposed to be a walk in the park. Add being crazy in love with your brother's best friend to the equation, and it’s safe to say you’re cosmically fucked for life.

Good thing Yuuri Katsuki's not used to having nice things.

Rivals series by Reiya / @kazliin [E, 452K]

An altered universe where a single event changes the course of both Yuuri and Viktor's lives, a rivalry is formed that spans across many years and both of them tell a very different side to the story

same song, different dance by @crossroadswrite [T, 88K] *WIP

The line is silent for a moment, as Yuuri stands there, fingers getting progressively colder as he hears Minako breathe in his ear, not really willing to hang up first.

“The Grand Prix is just around the corner,” Minako says, her tone almost wistful.

He breathes out slowly to steady himself. “It is.”

“… Are you going to watch it?”

Yuuri shouldn’t. He knows it’ll feel awful to watch everyone he knows trying their best at something he loves when he can’t anymore. But it’s Phichit’s first year in the Grand Prix, and Victor’s competing, so…

“Of course,” he says, and is proud of how steady his voice comes out. He doesn’t know if it’s a lie or not.

(Or: in which Yuuri's Stammi Vicino skate never gets posted and he retires, Victor keeps himself skating for better or for worse, Yuri struggles with his debut, and missed opportunities have a way of righting themselves.)

Tadaima by @stammiviktor [T, 12K]

After decades of wandering, Viktor finds a home in the Katsuki family.

#yoi #yuri on ice #yoi fanfic #victuuri #slow burn #yoi fic rec

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hacked-wtsdz · 2 years

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Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death, brought outside for execution by shooting with a sack on his head, stood on the scaffold with other prisoners awaiting death, and ONLY THEN got the pardon and got sent to Siberia to work on the katorga. He literally stood in darkness and thought that he was living his last moments, only to be pardoned and sent to live and work in inhuman conditions for years. That’s why it low-key troubles me when people ‘feel’ Dostoyevsky lmao

#fyodor dostoevsky #dostoyevsky #russian literature #russian classics #world literature #Russia #crime and punishment

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osomanga · 4 years

Photo

Wilk’s father(mainly appearance) is based on exiled Polish anthropologist Bronisław Piłsudski.

The clothes especially are based on Bronisław Piłsudski’s portrait by Adomas Varnas(1912)

Wilk himself would be older than the real Pilsudski who would be the same age as Kiroranke(b. 1866).

Pilsudski was a law student and member of the extremist group Narodnaya Volya who participated in the “Second First of March” where they attempted to assassinate Tsar Alexander III(son of the Tsar Wilk assassinated) but failed. Pilsudski was the only one of the group not executed but was instead sent to Katorga(hard labour) in the Sakhalin penal colony in 1887.

There, Pilsudski studied and interacted with the Karfuto Ainu, Nivkh, Orok and later even went to Hokkaido and worked with the Hokkaido Ainu. In 1902, he married a Karafuto Ainu woman, Chuhsamma[チュフサンマ], with whom he had two children- a son and daughter. This is once again similar to Kiroranke who has two infant sons and he seems to have married more recently some time before the war(1904-1905) maybe 1902.

Having to leave behind his family including his infant children he took an opportunity to flee illegally to his native Poland around the time after the Russo-Japanese War and he died in Europe without ever seeing them again.

#golden kamuy #gk anime #wilk #wilk's father

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kaichan24 · 4 years

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Favorite historical AUs

Blackbird. The year is 1942, and Europe is at war. Captain Victor Nikiforov, an intelligence operative for the NKVD, has been trapped in Berlin by the German invasion of the USSR. Posing as a Nazi industrialist, his days are spent charming information out of Axis diplomats to try and keep the Red Army fighting another day.

Yuuri Katsuki, a foreign-educated bureaucrat in the Japanese Embassy, has secrets of his own concealed beneath his unremarkable demeanour. When he uncovers Victor’s real identity, it will alter the course of both of their lives forever.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/9651944/chapters/21806939

Love in Exile. Once a well know ballet dancer in St. Petersburg, Victor Nikiforov finds himself exiled to Sakhalin Island as a political convict in 1881. As a man sentenced to katorga he will never return to European Russia or his life on the stage. Known as the "Edge of the World," his life on Sakhalin could not be further from the life he once knew. Strange circumstances lead his path to cross that of a young Japanese man, one of the very few still living on the island. Katsuki Yuuri leads a life of exile of a different kind, one that is largely self-imposed. Drawn to each other, despite their differences, something slowly begins to grow between them. When a narrowly avoided tragedy leaves them stranded together for a long, cold Sakhalin winter, they are challenged to face what their relationship really means, and what future it could possibly have.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/9327392/chapters/21135641

the fall of this empire will be loud. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapses. In 1989, the Berlin wall falls. In 1987, Viktor Nikiforov, iconic figure skater and darling of the USSR, defects to the United States. In 1986, Yuuri Katsuki falls in love.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/10450485/chapters/23069037

The Stars, the Moon, and a Soul to Guide Us. When Yuuri was born, the priestess was struck with a vision, a picture they could not explain. As he comes of age, they realise what he is - the carrier of a gift, admired by some, but feared and mistrusted by most.

But when his future is decided for him and his life put in the hands of a stranger through marriage, Yuuri knows that he has no choice. That whatever the gods have planned for him must come true.

As it was foretold.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21300893/chapters/50723870?view_adult=true

moods, states of grace, & elegies. Victor Nikiforov has traveled far and wide in the company of trader Christophe Giacometti on the silk roads to arrive at Hasetsu, capital of the Great Nihon Empire. He expects to stay a winter, until the seasons change again, and fairer weather and the changing of seasons can return him to his wanderlust.He does not expect to fall in love with the Crown Prince.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/14632119/chapters/33817776#workskin

Zanka. Aoyagi's lips parted in a sigh, and for a brief second, Viktor saw a wistful expression beneath the fine-edged veneer – fleeting and transient as a cherry blossom in bloom. There was so much unspoken that Viktor wanted, now more than ever, to take the man with him. Bring him home and far away from this glittering world of luxury and waste.

Victuuri historical AU in 1800s, Edo, Japan. Yuuri is Aoyagi, a high-ranking male courtesan, and Viktor falls hopelessly in love.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/11542329/chapters/25917123

The Lily of Kasagiya. Yuuri, following his love of beautiful things, would have gone to any lengths to become the finest geisha in the world. Then he met Victor Nikiforov.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/11467587

croisés, écartés, entrelacés. St. Petersburg, the early 1900s. Yuuri has left everything behind to follow his dream and Victor is the city’s darling. Both danseurs at Mariinsky theatre, their paths continually intertwine as they are fated to meet again and again. However, as love blooms, looming shadows of war lie in wait.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12534796/chapters/28544700

Interpersonal Diplomacy. For the sake of ending a centennial war and protecting the lives of his family and people, Prince Imperial Yuuri of Shanjia makes an unexpected sacrifice, placing his life in the hands of King Viktor of Nova. For the survival of their nations' fledgling peace, Yuuri must live on Novan soil alone, surrounded by people his nation just recently considered enemies, and tied to their monarch by the bonds of diplomacy.

However, Yuuri will also find allies, individuals willing to welcome the peace-loving regardless of past history. If Yuuri is to carve a home in this foreign nation, he must earn the trust of the war-weary Novan people.

And in time, Yuuri may find himself drawing closer to the sympathetic but enigmatic King Viktor.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/16072742/chapters/37529747

in my head, in my heart, in my soul. Drawn into a conflict outside of his responsibility, Victor Nikiforov, the greatest general of the age, appears to have met his match in the shy Prince of Japan who surrenders on the fields of Goryeo.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/15994100

for your sake I hope heaven and hell. Mr. Nikiforov, Duke of Cumberland, first meets Mr. Katsuki, assistant steward to the Giacometti Estate, in Kent.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/23587234

Chorus in Aurorae. When Minako, the sightseer of the Elk clan, tells Yuuri of her vision, he doesn't know what to make of it. But he knows it must be important.

Once she returns from her travels, he learns that another seer from another great clan has shared her vision, and that this can only mean one thing: their clans are to be united, and Yuuri is to be part of it.

He is to bond with a hunter of the Bear clan.

While frustrated that he is being thrust onto a path so very different from the life he had envisioned for himself, Yuuri is made to accept that this union is the will of the spirits. He will go through with it for the sake of the people he loves, even if it means giving up every last part of himself.

To make matters worse, his mate-to-be is the most renowned hunter the winter lands have ever seen, and someone Yuuri has admired for a long time.However, from the moment they meet, Yuuri slowly realises that there is much more to Victor than he has imagined, and that perhaps the will of the spirits is more closely aligned with his own than he previously thought...

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13707318/chapters/31487046

Victor the Great. At the age of nine Victor became the Tsar of all the Russias with Lilia as regent. One day he will be the sole ruler of Russia, the man who makes all the decisions and gets to do what he wants, with one exception: he has to marry a woman from a Russian aristocratic family. Except that he falls in love with a boy who is a foreign commoner. Will he risk the throne to be able to marry the one he loves?

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12740541/chapters/29055912

Pulses that beat double. Katsuki Yuuri traveled all the way from Japan to study medicine in London, but finds himself very short on funds. He's long had a fascination with the scandalous Baron Viktor Nikiforov, so he's shocked when the baron takes an interest in him. So shocked he runs away as quickly as possible. But Viktor Nikiforov is a persistent man when he sees something he wants.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12210117/chapters/27730044

Gore and Glory. It is the year 1903. In an attempt of de-escalating matters with Imperial Russia, translator Yuuri Katsuki accompanies his father to St. Petersburg in a diplomatic mission. However, he certainly did not expect to meet a man as stunning and peculiar as tsarevich Yuri Georgieviech's bodyguard, Polkovnik Viktor Ivanovich Nikiforov - and even less he expected to fall in love when war is threatening the country.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/10485105/chapters/23131323

#Yuri on ice #YOI #yuuri katsuki #yuri katsuki #Viktor Nikiforov #victor nikiforov #viktor x yuuri #yuuri x victor #yoi fanfic #yoi fic #yoi aus #viktuuri #victuuri

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tanadrin · 5 years

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I’m reading One Long Night, because the interview with Andrea Pitzer on Chris Hayes’ podcast was so interesting; and the book does not disappoint, though the subject matter is in equal measures depressing and infuriating. I want to talk about it at length when I’m through with it, but I was particularly struck today by her discussion of the Soviet gulags and how concentration camps arose in Germany, and how they marked a transition away from how concentration camps had been used before then.

The background is this: the concentration camp as we know it is only a little more than a century old. The individual kinds of violence that all inform the modern concentration camp have plenty of predecessors, some as old as time: internal deportations, native reservations, forced expulsions, detention without trial. But prior to the modern era, the characteristic feature of a concentration camp--the long-term detention of large numbers of civilians not convicted of any crime--would have been prohibitively expensive in manpower and effort. Two major technological innovations altered that calculus, Pitzer argues: the automatic gun and barbed wire. Those two devices permit a small number of guards to contain a much larger number of people; all that was needed was the will to do so.

The concentration camp as we know it was invented during Cuba’s struggle for independence; the advantages enjoyed by the rebels meant that Spain struggled to clear them out of the countryside, and the general in charge of Cuba, Arsenio Martinez Campos, noted that the only way to win the war would be to relocate basically the entire rural population of the island to Spanish-held towns to cut off the rebels’ base of support and prevent them from hiding among the rest of the population. And this he refused to do, considering it unthinkable under the rules of warfare. So Spain replaced him, and his successor, Valeriano Weyler, was all too happy to attempt what Campos would not. The resulting atrocities--including starvation and the spread of disease--were one of the things that spurred the American public to support war with Spain shortly thereafter, and while the Maine provided the immediate casus belli, Spanish conduct in Cuba was, in the public’s eyes, just as important a reason for going to war.

What is so bitterly comedic about that justification, though, is that after the war, when the U.S. found itself in possession of former Spanish colonies like Cuba and the Philippines, it found itself struggling against the very same rebels that Spain had failed to suppress; in the Philippines, the military immediately adopted tactics almost identical to the ones the Spanish had used in Cuba; and when during the Boer War in South Africa, the British likewise rounded up both Boer and black civilians in the Boer republics, it could cite the U.S.’s use of concentration camps as a justification for its own. And so on--each subsequent generation of internment drew on the precedent its predecessors had established, and if you wanted to object to (say) the policy of Germany interning all the British in the country at the start of World War I, you had to contend with the fact that they were doing nothing the British hadn’t done a few years before. (Indeed, it was the British internment of enemy aliens specifically that set off reciprocal treatment all over Europe; Pitzer relates the account of one Israel Cohen, a British man, being arrested in Germany and interned at Ruhleben, who, when the police came for him, was told ‘You have only your own Government to thank for this.’)

In fact, World War I is very important--internment of enemy civilians established not only a general precedent in favor of concentration camps in the eyes of the public, but it created the expectation that if you went into a concentration camp, you would come out again. The conditions in these camps were not good by any stretch of the imagination, but they were not as awful as the camps of Cuba, the Philippines, or South Africa, where famine and disease killed thousands. Concentration camps became decoupled from actual battlefield strategy, arising not “out of the local chaos of warfare, but instead represent[ing] a deliberate choice to inject the framework of war into society itself.’ (p. 103)

To this grim precedent, the Soviets added another innovation: the gulag was the first time concentration camps were used in peacetime particularly, and they were integrated into the Soviet state apparatus as a normal part of its justice system. And more than just the semi-punitive labor that, say, German POWs had been forced to perform during the war (and after--Germany had to release the POWs it held when WWI ended, but thousands of Germans continued to be detained long after the war), the Soviets hoped to make gulags profitable to their economy on net. Whatever their original justification, it quickly becomes clear as the labor camp is institutionalized in Soviet society that much of the behavior of the Soviet state around forced labor is shaped by the age-old impulse of conquerers to use conquered peoples to enrich themselves. After Poland was divided with Germany, thousands of Poles were shipped to the gulags and forced to work. And not only was the USSR thus inheriting the system of forced labor that Tsarist Russia had used, it was making it significantly crueler.

The premise of using labor to reeducate problematic citizens to be part of a bright Soviet future gave way to the idea that detainees themselves represented raw materials to be consumed in building that future.

In reality, Frenkel [an administrator at the Solovki camp] did not invent the tiered ration system from scratch. Likewise, the shift from idealized rehabilitation to a more permanent system maximizing forced labor may have been inevitable. Stalin appeared impressed with the possibilities of detainee labor and believed in the profitability of the Solovki endeavor (despite the fact, as Anne Applebaum has noted, that Solovki required a subsidy of 1.6 million rubles--perhaps due to graft). (p. 132)

Under the tsars in previous centuries, Polish insurgents resisting Russian rule or political prisoners convicted for offenses against the tsar were shipped off to remote Siberian katorga, working in mining or logging. Their penal labor had often been brutal, but it had come after conviction in an actual trial. Compared to penal labor under the tsars, Gulag workdays were longer and the rations shorter. A daily quota for earth mined by a single Decembrist prisoner at Nerchinsk under Tsar Nicholas I was 118 pounds; in the Soviet era, the same lone prisoner might be expected to excavate 28,800 pounds. And while tsarist courts had long sentenced political prisoners to labor camps, the Gulag was orders of magnitude larger from its very beginning. The Soviet Union had grafted the worst of Russian penal history onto the extrajudicial detention of internment, creating a vast malignant enterprise. And it would continue to grow. (p.133-34)

The scale of the gulags declines after Stalin’s death, but it never quite disappears.

Neither self-sustaining nor productive in the long run, the system required tremendous resources, and the economic burden of the camps had weighed heavily on the Soviet Union in wartime.

Still, as historian Steven Barnes has pointed out, ‘The Soviet leadership never entertained the notion of dismantling the system.’ The USSR had always had a camp system; its tendrils had grown into agriculture and industry, as well as becoming a key facet of government interactions with citizens. The Gulag was intrinsic to the state itself. (p.155)

And then there’s this passage, about the camp at Solovki, which was almost painful to read:

Prisoners heard from the radio station that [Maxim] Gorky was coming. Detainees could hardly wait for him to tell the world what was happening on Solovki: ‘Gorki will spot everything, find out everything. ... About the logging and the torture on the tree stumps, the sekirka [punishment cells], the hunger, the disease... the sentences without conviction.... The whole lot!’

Before Gorky’s visit, contingents of prisoners were hidden in the forest to lessen evidence of overcrowding. Sick patients were given new gowns to wear ... . Gorky visited the sick bay, a labor camp, and stopped in at the children’s colony that had been formed since Likhachev first encountered the urchins hiding under his bunk.

Gorky asked to speak to one boy privately and stayed with him a long time. Standing outside with the rest of the crowd, Likhachev counted forty minutes on the watch his father had given him. He recounts that Gorky emerged weeping and climbed the stairway to the punishment cell at Sekirka.

Yet when Gorky’s anxiously awaited piece on the trip came out, the section about Solovki was relegated to Part Five of the report, with the devastating conclusion that ‘camps such as “Solovki” were absolutely necessary. ... Only by this road would the state achieve in the fastest possible time one of its aims: to get rid of prisons.’

The German system, of course, did not start out as a program of genocide. It did not even necessarily start out as a program of forced labor (i.e., slavery) like in Russia. Its immediate predecessors, in fact, might be said to be the concentration camps established before the Nazis even came to power to keep Roma away from cities like Frankfurt (cf. p. 183); the Roma were subject to registry before any racial laws about Jews were passed, before the Nazis ever took power, and they were swept up along with the homeless during the Olympics to keep them out of sight of the international press (p. 187). But as the classes of political prisoners and other undesirables swelled, so did the concentration camp system.

Once war broke out, of course, the temptation to use prisoners for war industry was not resisted.

By late 1941, the camps had grown dense and squalid from the flood of detainees arriving from abroad, yet the war placed still more demands on the camps. ... a complex network of labor projects emerged, spread across thousands of sites. Every camp and subcamp used prisoner labor in some fashion. Prisoners working for the I.G. Farben rubber plant lived in a dedicated compound at Auschwitz. Fur linings in the coats of the SS came from hutches of rabbits under the administration of prisoners at Dachau. At Neuengamme, detainees were set to work clearing rubble from the bombed roads and buildings outside Hamburg. ... Both Nazis and Soviets went to war on the backs of their concentration camp prisoners. Forced-labor Gulag efficiency expert Naftaly Frenkel had suggested the system be optimized to get the most out of prisoners in their first three months, after which they were disposable. He would have been ideally placed to appreciate that before the end of the war, average life expectancy at Neuengamme concentration camp had dropped to twelve weeks. (p. 200-201)

What is perhaps the most bitter flourish on the German concentration camp system is that there was a very real possibility it could have been entirely avoided. Pitzer argues that even after the death of Hindenberg and Hitler’s adoption of the title Fuehrer, there was a very real possibility that the Nazi regime might have proceeded along (still cruel, still inhumane, still racist) legalistic lines, keeping continuity with German law, rather than relying on extrajudicial terror. Himmler’s desire to strengthen his position within the government and the purge of Rohm and the SA led to him expanding the concentration camp system further; and this was what ensured that, when the systematic, wholesale extermination of the Jews was decided upon, there was a preexisting infrastructure in place to facilitate it. (see p. 178-179) In the early years, local prosecutors actively sought to arrest and try sadistic guards, and the notion that the concentration camps were sites of abuse or torture was hotly contested.

In his first months as commandant at Dachau, Theodor Eicke flew into a rage, haranguing prisoners about the vicious rumors in the community about conditions there. Reminding them that detainees had already been killed for spreading word about the camp--including Dr. Katz, who had helped so many prisoners--Eicke threatened that more could be executed at any point. He seemed especially offended by any suggested comparison to Soviet tactics. ‘There are no atrocities and there is no Cheka cellar in Dachau!’ he insisted. ‘Anybody whipped deserves to be whipped.’

Even the Nazis, one supposes, would balk at being compared to the Nazis.

Special mention goes to two people in this section of the book: Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German communist who fled to Russia and, who along with her husband, was arrested and thrown into the gulag. She survived; her husband did not--but survived only to be handed over to the Nazis after the invasion of Poland, as part of a prisoner exchange, whereupon she was shipped to a Nazi concentration camp. She survived the war, at least, and seven years total of internment; she lived until 1989.

Hans Beimler was a Communist elected three times to the Reichstag, the last in May of 1933. He was arrested in April and imprisoned in Dachau, where he was repeatedly beaten and humiliated and encouraged to kill himself. Nighttime beatings and the murder of his cellmates (some of whom were friends of his) made him resolve to escape, since he figured it would be better to be shot trying to break out than to be murdered and have it staged to look like a suicide.

[A] friend who was a prisoner outside the bunker managed to slip him a tool to unscrew the grate over his window and tin snips to help manage the barbed wire. Later reports claimed he strangled a storm trooper and took his clothing, but Beimler simply crawled out of his high window, taking a board with him. He navigated three layers of barbed wire--the middle one electrified--using the wood for insulation, and climbed onto the six-foot wall surrounding the camp’s exterior. Waiting there a moment to make sure he had not been seen, he jumped down the other side and made his way to Munich.

The next morning, Steinbrenner arrived to find an empty cell. Frantic searches were made, prisoners were interrogated. For some time, guardhouse staff remained certain Beimler was hiding somewhere on the grounds. Dogs were used to search, and a hundred-mark reward was posted in the local paper Amper-Bote. But Beimler remained in hiding until he could safely get to Berlin and cross the border to the east.

Once out of the country, he mailed a postcard to Dachau telling the camp commanders to kiss his ass. Some three months after his escape, he was sitting in Moscow writing a searing indictment of Nazi atrocities. It was printed in three languages and circled the globe. (p. 173-174)

It’s important to observe that no system of mass detention ever sets out with the cruelty that (sooner or later) inevitably manifests in mind. From reconcentracion in Cuba to the Nazi crimes, there is never a single point of no return for the countries involved, nor a single moment of moral clarity where the architects of these policies are forced to confront what they are creating. It is always possible for those responsible to hide behind precedent, behind political rhetoric, behind expedient to justify to the rest of the world as to why their camps are not only right but necessary, to argue away any evidence for the gravity of these sins as ‘a few bad apples’ or ‘an unfortunate excess.’

And the corollary to this is that you will never get one moment you can point to and say to the people around you, “Look! There it is! That’s the moral event horizon, and they just crossed it. You can’t possibly support them now.” Because there will always be a way for people to rationalize their support of such policies. I suspect the only antidote, individual or collective, is an ironclad moral will that rejects the dehumanization of others outright--and to fight like hell to shut such evils down when they first begin to appear.

This all has obvious relevance to the present political moment--that’s why Pitzer was on Hayes’ podcast, that’s why I wanted to read this book to begin with. I don’t think that, outside genuine, self-described neo-Nazis, even in the darkest imagination of the most reflexively prejudiced Trump supporter, the desire for Soviet or Nazi-style gulags exists, I really don’t. But things can always get worse. The cruelties build on themselves incrementially--and the only way to prevent that, to actually make sure that kind of thing can’t happen here (or anything like it--there is, after all, plenty of evil that is not outright genocide) is to refuse to permit the creation of the institutions that are its necessary predecessors.

#andrea pitzer #one long night #cw for:#torture #nazis #concentration camps #gulags #the holocaust

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russiancrimes · 5 years

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Russian “Jack The Ripper”- Nikolay Radkevich

Prostitution is the “most ancient profession”, and it has striven in the Russian Empire for centuries. Peter the Great, founder of Saint Petersburg, attempted to abolish prostitution during his rein (1689-1725), with strict laws and punishments of sex workers, their souteneurs and owners of brothels. This trend was carried on by his successors, until Tsar Nikolaj I realised, that blindly banning prostitution would only make it more secretive and less monitored, which would facilitate certain risks, such as the spreading of STDs amongst the military. Prostitution was henceforth legalized with mandatory medical checks, and registration with an appropriate police unit.

Despite becoming a legal activity, women working in the industry still faced a certain stigma in the society and would often become victims of abuse.

This leads us to the anti-hero of our tale- Nikolay Radkevich, a 20-something youth, an expelled student of “Cadet Corps”, a military school for boys in Nizhniy Novgorod.

His infamous crimes took place in Saint Petersburg, where he went on a killing spree between June and September of 1909, killing 3 sex workers, injuring 1 other and attacking a servant girl, who was unfortunate to fit his target profile.

(Kalashnikovskii bank, where the 1st victim was discovered)

The first victim was discovered at the Kalashnikovskii bank of Neva river on July 1st 1909, and was identified by a special document that was carried by every registered sex worker- 20-year-old Anna Blumentrost had sustained more than 10 stab wounds to her arms, neck and face.

(”Yellow ticket” document, given to registered sex workers in Russian Empire)

The first round of questioning among the working ladies gave the investigating bureau some useful leads- before her disappearance, Anna had been seen with a tall man in a long black coat and a big hat. There were also 2 very important characteristics, which later played a key role in tracking the killer- the man had a “skipper’s beard”, and disproportionately long arms.

The killer did not wait too long to strike again- on 15th July the body of Ekaterina Gerus was discovered in the “Dunai (Danube) Hotel” on Ligovsky Avenue. This time, however, there were witnesses, who remembered seeing a man with “monkey arms” checking in on July 14th with Ekaterina and leaving in the morning after. The main cause of death was asphyxiation, followed by 20 stab wounds. The witnesses’ statements, method of killing and the victims’ profession lead the renowned investigator, Vladimir Filippov, to conclude that a serial killer had been at work.

The next attack occurred a mere 10 days later after the incident at “Dunai”, in the middle of day on a busy street. The victim of the attacker was a servant lady, Zinaida Levina, who sustained 2 stab wounds, but survived due to passerby’s, who rushed to her aid. The witnesses recalled seeing a tall man in a black coat and hat, running out of a side-alley and shouting “Death to beauties!”, before charging at Zinaida.

Initially, the victim’s profession confused the investigation- she didn’t fit the serial killer’s pattern. However, Filippov managed to draw another connection- all the ladies were young, pretty brunettes. “Death to beauties” was another sign that the motive of the killer was revenge against women.

Despite the dark circumstances of the attack, there was a lucky break-through for the investigation- the killer dropped the murder weapon- a specific knife. It was traced to a shop in the Aleksandrovsky market of Saint Petersburg, turned out to be a popular purchase among sailors employed on commercial ships.

(Aleksandrovskiy Market, Saint Petersburg, 1903)

The investigation sent inquests to the biggest ports of the Baltic sea, attempting to check a possibility that similar attacks had occurred elsewhere. Filippov’s hunch was spot on. Several cities responded with a confirmation- sex workers with dark hair had been murdered, cases unsolved.

(A commercial ship crew, Russian Empire)

Unsatisfied with the turn of events on 24th July, the elusive killer decided to strike again the very next day, this time choosing a brothel on Kolomenskaya street. The sex worker, who went by the name Clautilda, miraculously managed to fence off the attack. The attacker, however, evaded capture once again, jumping through an open window.

Despite a second escape, the police had been making progress by interviewing numerous workers of little bars, eateries and brothels, or “houses of tolerance”, as they were officially named in the Empire. They were able to narrow down the sightings and attacks to a particular area of the capital- Znamenskaya square, and even got a name – Vadim Krovianik.

(Znamenskaya Square in 1900s. Today it is the Vosstaniya Square)

It turned out to be a fake name, but the investigation was saved by the ship reports- a sailor by the name of Nikolay Radkevich fit the descriptions perfectly and was in the city on all the attack dates. The police rushed to his lodgings, where the menacing phrase “Death to beauties” was scribbled on a wall. He, however, was already gone, undoubtedly feeling the pursuit closing in.

Radkevich waited till September 19th to attack yet another prostitute, Maria Budochnikova, following his usual method- strangulation and a frenzy of stab wounds. The establishment’s staff, aware of the serial killer activities, became suspicious of the man and managed to capture him.

What motivated this young man to carry out the heinous crimes? There was a reason of course- as a 14-year-old student of the military school, he was infected with syphilis by an older woman, who seduced him, but later left him for another man. After his rage-fueled attempt to kill her failed, he was expelled from the school, leaving him with nothing but a manic idea- revenge against all “depraved” women.

Radkevich was placed into a psychiatric ward for a 3-year-long assessment, and in 1912, was determined to be sane and aware of his actions by court. The jury, shockingly, decided to sentence him to 8 years of “katorga” (penal works, not to be confused with “gulags”, a term used in Soviet Union) in Siberia, which was a much lenient punishment than Radkevich deserved. Fortunately, karma caught up with him in 1916- he was murdered by the inmates.

(The only surviving sketch of Nikolay Radkevich)

#serial killer #Russian Empire #Russian #Russia #Nikolay Radkevich #jack the ripper #murder #mystery #history #vintage news #true crime #tcc #crime #criminology #criminal minds #detective #true crime community #murder mystery

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