The Ships That Helped Silence the Early USSR’s Intellectuals | Atlas Obscura
▻http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/philosophers-ships-soviet-intellectual-ussr-russia
The USSR was first established in December of 1922, but months earlier, the new nation’s future leaders ordered the deportation of a large number of Russian intellectuals.
The idea to exile the ideological opponents of the new Soviet state had come from Vladimir Lenin himself. In May of 1922, Lenin sent a letter to the head of the GPU, the state security organization in charge of, among other things, dealing with dissidents and enemies of the Soviet state. The letter ordered the director, Felix Dzerzhinsky, to organize teams to research the backgrounds and political leanings of academics and writers. Dzerzhinsky, a loyal Bolshevik, set to work and established a pair of committees, one to create a list of troublesome professors, and another to focus on students.
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On September 28, 1922, loaded with its cargo of exiled thinkers and their families, the ship Oberbürgermeister Haken disembarked for Germany. And in November of that year, a second German vessel, the Preussen, carried yet more deported thinkers to Germany as well. All told, some 220 prominent intellectuals were forcibly removed from Russia before the official establishment of the Soviet Union.
via Maritime Monday, l’excellente revue de presse hebdomadaire de gCaptain, ▻http://gcaptain.com/maritime-monday-feb-20-2017
