But Then Something Did Have to Be Done

But Then Something Did Have to Be Done

A Meditation On the Dynamics of Evil

“Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but then something did have to be done.” Thus spake Frau Annamarie von Goedel, my family’s landlady in Berlin, Germany during the 1957-58 academic year. To this day her statement makes my blood run cold. I know now what I should have said to her then, but I was eleven years old at the time and said nothing in response. I don’t recall either of my parents saying anything either. She was our landlady, and there probably wasn’t much point in saying anything to her. Here’s what I would say today: No, Annamarie, it isn’t “too bad” what happened to the Jews. It is one of the most monstrous acts of evil in human history. And no, it didn’t happen to the Jews. You Germans in your Nazi insanity did it to them. There was nothing passive about it. It was an affirmative act of previously unimaginable evil carried out by ordinary German people against their fellow human beings. And no, Annamarie, nothing had to be done. That Germany’s Jews were evil people responsible for all of Germany’s manifest problems after World War I was the great Nazi lie, or one of them. That people the Nazis identified as other were less human than the magnificent Germans and that therefore the Germans had to right or even the duty to kill all of them was another. Your nation, Annamarie, bought those lies and murdered millions upon millions of innocent people as a result. You dehumanized them, then slaughtered them as one might slaughter rats infesting one’s basement. No, Annamarie, nothing had to be done, but even if there had been a germ of truth in those Nazi lies, which there wasn’t, it would never have justified your “final solution” to the nonexistent Jewish issue. No, Annamarie, you didn’t just justify Germany’s slaughter of millions of people. Instead you laid bare significant aspect of the dynamics of evil.

I don’t blame Annamarie for what she said. I don’t blame her personally for the Holocaust, but she was part of the nation that did it. Her late husband had been a member of the Nazi party, something most Germans never were. Annamarie had his Nazi party uniform hanging in a big armoire that stood in the large entry way of the apartment we shared with her. I don’t think she understood how evil the things were that that uniform represented. One day I was playing with some windup toy cars in that large space. Annamarie came in. She said to me that she knew something that would be fun. She went to that armoire, opened it, and took the armband off that Nazi party uniform. She brought it over to me and tried to put it on my arm. I’m sure you’ve seen those things in the movies. It’s a red strip of cloth with a black swastika in a white circle. They’ve been on characters in lots of movies, but this one wasn’t a bit of Hollywood costuming. It was the real thing. It had belonged to a real human being who really had been a member of the Nazi party. I was a small, mousy eleven year old kid, but I knew what that thing represented. I’d learned about the Holocaust at the Berlin American Army School where my brother and I attended sixth grade that year. I’d seen those horrible, gut-wrenching pictures of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I knew what the Nazis had done. I refused to let her put that hateful thing on my arm. I’m sure she didn’t understand, but my refusal to let her do it that day so long ago remains one of the things in my life of which I am proudest.

These experiences of mine so many decades ago reveal a good deal about the dynamics of evil. Great evil is always based on a big lie. The people who carry out the evil don’t think they are doing anything evil because they have taken the big lie as true. Great evil dehumanizes its victims. It is that dehumanization that makes the great evil possible. Truly  great evil requires organization and the participation of many people. No single person could have done what the Nazis or the Soviet Communists did to millions upon millions of innocent people. Let’s take a closer look at each of these elements of great evil.

The Big Lie. The German Empire suffered a crushing and humiliating defeat in World War I. The western allies quite wrongly blamed Germany for the war when in truth all of Europe’s great powers including but not limited to Germany were responsible. Yes the Germans had done horrible things in the war like introduce the use of poison gas, but the allies had used it too. In the Treaty of Versailles they imposed crippling conditions on Germany. Germany’s government collapsed. The economy was in ruins. The German Communists presented what many Germans considered to be a serious threat to the country. Inflation got so bad that German money literally was not worth the paper it was printed on. People used it for firewood. All through the 1920s Germany was in terrible shape. The world-wide depression that began in 1929 only made matters worse.

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian who considered himself to be a German. He had been a corporal in the German army during World War I. He was among other things a failed artist, and he was a horrible anti-Semite. He hated Jewish people. He despised them. Anti-Semitism had a long and inglorious history in Europe including but not limited to Germany before Hitler came along. For centuries European Christians had blamed the Jews for the execution of Jesus of Nazareth centuries earlier, never mind that the Romans killed him not the Jews; and even if first century Jews had killed him the Jews of Europe certainly had not. European Christians had oppressed and inflicted violence on Europe’s Jews for a very long time before Hitler appeared on the public stage in the early 1920s.

Hitler planted his great lie about the Jews in the fertile soil of German anti-Semitism. He said getting rid of the Jews would solve most of Germany’s problems. Anti-Semitism was always a lie, yet because the Jews were recognizable as other than European Christians they had long been a scapegoat for whatever problems Europe was having at any particular time. They were a scapegoat, but they never were the cause of those problems. Even if they had been of course they were still fellow human beings no one had the right to despise and mistreat the way so many Europeans had. The soil of German anti-Semitism was fertile ground for the growth of Hitler’s extraordinarily vehement hatred of the Jews and the lies he told about them.

To the lie of European anti-Semitism Hitler added a new and particularly pernicious lie. He made what he called “race,” by which he meant something quite different from what we Americans mean by the term, the defining characteristic of all human beings. He identified so-called Aryan Germans as the master race of human beings. Hitler propounded the lie that the Germans were superior physically, intellectually, morally, and in every other way to everyone else. They therefore had the right simply to exterminate races Hitler considered to be inferior to the Germans. Of course to him all other races were inferior to the Germans, but he particularly despised and wanted to eliminate two so-called races in particular, the Jews and the Slavs, particularly the Poles and the Ukrainians.[1] To Hitler these people were “Untermenschen,” sub-humans. Between 1933 when he came to power and 1945 when the Soviets and the western allies (but particularly the Soviets) crushed Nazi Germany and ended World War II in Europe he would murder millions upon millions of these innocent people.

Of course Hitler’s contention that the Germans were superior to the Jews and the Slavs and that those people were sub-human was an enormous lie. For centuries most European Jews had been tradespeople, shopkeepers, and peasants. A few Jews became very wealthy working in fields like banking but most didn’t. Most lived ordinary lives that differed from the lives of Christian Europeans only in that many Jews spoke a dialect of German called Yiddish and worshiped God in the ancient, sacred Jewish way rather than in the Christian way. That they were evil people and a threat to European civilization was a gross lie.

It hardly needs to be said that Hitler’s hatred of the Slavs was also grounded in a lie. The Slavic peoples of central and eastern Europe, like all other Europeans, for the most part led peaceful, ordinary lives. Beyond that their cultures had produced giants of European culture in all fields of human activity. Yet even if they hadn’t the Germans certainly had no right to kill them and take their land for occupation by German people. Hitler saw the vast expanses of the Slavic lands only as “Lebensraum,” living space, for the Germans. The Germans, he said, needed that space, the Slavs were subhuman, so we’ll just kill them all and take their land for ourselves. In stirring up the hatred of the German people for the Jews, the Slavs and others Hitler became the master of the big lie.

Hitler’s evil wasn’t the only modern evil grounded in a big lie. Stalin’s evil, which truly rivaled Hitler’s in its scope and ferocity, was grounded in the lie that the Soviet Union was riddled with “enemies of the people,” that is, with supposed counterrevolutionaries and saboteurs hellbent on destroying the Soviet state. Certainly there were Soviet people who despised Soviet Communism, probably a great many of them. Surely however there were nowhere nearly as many of them as Stalin murdered as enemies of the people. Those that did exist were mostly never in positions to do much damage. Stalin used the lie that they were everywhere and were a real threat to whip up support for his regime. He used terror justified by the supposed presence of huge numbers of enemies of the people to keep the Soviet population cowed, submissive, and passive. By promulgating the big lie he even got many of them to love him and think of him as their great benefactor as he murdered and imprisoned millions of them who had done nothing wrong. Like Hitler Stalin used a big lie to create an absolutist regime responsible for the deaths of millions upon millions of people.

Yet let not us Americans think that evil grounded in a big lie is only a European phenomenon. We white Americans have our own great lies and our own great evil to answer for. The history of the United States includes two features that are truly evil. They were both grounded in essentially the same lie but differed in their particulars. One of them is our history of enslaving people of African heritage followed by a long period of legal and de facto racial discrimination that continues to this day. The other is our genocide against the American Indians.

Too few white Americans, I fear, understand just how evil the institution of race-based slavery was in our country. From the very beginning of European occupation of what became the United States Americans of European descent bought human beings of African descent who had been kidnapped back in Africa, often by other Africans. White slave traders shipped these men, women, and children to the Americas, including the British colonies that would become the United States, in horrific conditions on slave ships. Many of the Africans did not survive that Atlantic crossing. Here slave traders treated these human beings like livestock and sold them. Most but not all of the buyers were southern plantation owners. These Africans, beloved children of God every one, lived miserable lives of hard labor with no legal rights at all. Slave owners raped the women. They sold children away from their parents in one of the worst practices of a demonic and sinful system of exploitation and oppression.

Slavery ended in this country only in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. The Confederacy fought that war mostly to preserve slavery. After the northern states abandoned Reconstruction in the 1870s as part of a cynical political deal the southern states enacted a system of legal apartheid that lasted until the 1960s. Known as Jim Crow, this system made second class citizens of all Black Americans in the south. Blacks were denied the right to vote though they were nominally citizens of the United States. They were relegated to substandard segregated schools. They were denied virtually all economic opportunity. Jim Crow segregation was an abomination only a little bit less horrific than slavery had been.

We northerners have nothing to boast about in this regard. Segregation was not written into the law in the north as it was in the south, but it functioned in much the same way. Cities became racially segregated. Banks engaged in what was called red lining, a practice of denying mortgage loans to people in the Black part of town. National and local governments discriminated against Black Americans in the provision of services. Whites fled the cities to avoid living with Blacks. The neighborhood schools in the Black parts of town were substandard compared to the schools in the white parts of town. To a considerable extent they still are. Throughout our country today systemic racism preserves the privileges of white people and makes spending time in prison a more or less expected part of the lives of young Black men. American’s history of racism against Black people is one of the two major blots on our country’s history.

The other is the way Americans of European descent treated American Indians. The native peoples of North America had lived here for millennia by the time the first Europeans arrived. The Spanish occupied Florida and the American southwest already in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century the English arrived and established colonies that would become the first thirteen states of the United States of America. European Americans systematically deprived Native Americans of nearly all of the land they had once occupied. Diseases they brought with them to which the native people had no immunity killed a high percentage of the Indian population. The government of the United States signed treaty after treaty with Indian nations and violated every one of them. White Christian missionaries deprived Indian children of their languages and their cultures. The wars the United States waged against Indian nations combined with the forced relocation of some of them to places far away and very different from their ancestral lands amounted to a genocide of the American India people. Hitler took note. He thought the fact that we Americans had committed genocide against the Indians meant that we couldn’t object to his genocide against the Jews. Thank God there still are Indian people in this country. Some of them are rediscovering their ancient languages and cultures including their rich spiritual traditions. We tried to eliminate the Indians altogether. Thank God we didn’t quite succeed.

How could we do it? How could we white Americans do what we did to our fellow human beings of African or Native descent? We could do it for the same reason Hitler could commit genocide against the Jews and his attempted genocide of the Slavs. In both Hitler’s case and in ours the perpetrators of great evil used the big lie to enable us to treat other human beings as less than human. In our case one lie was that Black people aren’t really people. They’re more like apes, we said. If you doubt that go look up some of the racial stereotyping that was going on in our country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is truly appalling. We didn’t have to give Black people any civil rights, we said, because they’re just animals. Animals don’t have civil rights. We don’t have to educate Black children, we said. You don’t educate the young of apes, do you? White American culture created and for centuries lived under the lie that human beings of African descent aren’t really human beings. It was, and is, a lie that dehumanizes millions of people. We’ve come a long way in the last fifty years. We still have a long way to go.

We white Americans did much the same thing to American Indians as we did to African Americans except that we went even farther in our evil acts against the Indians than we did against the Blacks. We never tried to kill all the Blacks because so much of the nation’s economy depended on their labor and they didn’t have any land we wanted to steal. The Indians for the most part didn’t work for us, not the way the Blacks did, and they had a whole continent we wanted to steal. So we called them savages. We killed as many of them as we could and confined the rest of them to reservations on land we didn’t want. Why not? We said they’re primitive savages not civilized people like us. Never mind that they had ancient cultures and rich spiritual traditions that had served them well for millennia. They weren’t white. They weren’t Christian. So take their land and kill them with a free conscience. We committed genocide, and we grounded that genocide in the rich soil of the big lie that we weren’t doing anything wrong because the Indians weren’t really people.

Those big American lies reveal a central characteristic of the dynamics of evil. When one sort of people wants to commit atrocities against some other people without feeling guilty about it they dehumanize those whom they intend to harm. We white Americans did it with both the Blacks and the Indians. The Nazis did it with the Jews. If you don’t know the Broadway musical Cabaret and the movie that was made from it go find it. Watch it over and over again. I’ll refer to it again for another point below. Here I want to draw your attention to one particular musical number in the show. One of the main characters in the play is the master of ceremonies of a Berlin nightclub in 1931. Joel Grey played this role brilliantly both on stage and in the movie. In this particular scene he is on stage with a person dressed in a gorilla suit. They dance together as the master of ceremonies sings a song the point of which is that “if you could see her through my eyes” you’d understand why I love her. He sings her virtues: “She doesn’t smoke or drink gin like I do.” The last lines of the song are: “I understand your objection. I grant you the problem’s not small. But if you could see her through my eyes—she wouldn’t look Jewish at all!” Everyone in the audience, including several Nazis, erupts in laughter.

I understand that some Jewish people object to anyone staging Cabaret because they experience that gorilla dance scene  as saying that Jews really are like gorillas. It certainly is not for me to tell them they’re wrong, but that’s not how I experience the scene. I’m sure it’s not what the creators of the show intended to convey. To me and I think for most people the point is not that Jews are like gorillas. The point is that evil people with evil intent like the Nazis invariably dehumanize people they intend to harm. Almost all humans are loath to do harm to other humans. We are much more willing to harm and even kill animals that aren’t human. So Hitler portrayed Jews as gorillas. White Americans portrayed Black Americans as apes. White Americans portrayed Indian Americans as subhuman uncultured savages who we have a divine duty either to “civilize” or destroy.

Here’s another example that doesn’t do me or my countrymen proud. Americans of my age lived through the atrocity of the Vietnam War. We were fighting people who didn’t look like most of us. We were trying to kill as many of them as we could. We said we were defending “freedom and democracy” in South Vietnam, never mind that democracy there was a joke and the successive governments we were defending were as corrupt as governments come. We don’t like killing other human beings, but we were killing lots of Vietnamese human beings. So we didn’t call them or think of them as human beings. We didn’t even call them Vietnamese. We called them “gooks.” We dehumanized them by giving them a stupid, racist name rather than think of them as actual people.

I fell into that trap myself. I never served in the US military, but for the 1968-1969 academic year I participated in a year abroad program of my university at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. I lived in a foreign students dormitory. For a time that year I had two Vietnamese roommates. I never got to know them. We had a bit of a language barrier. German was our only common language, and I couldn’t understand their German very well. Perhaps they couldn’t understand mine either. I never even learned their names When I referred to them with my American colleagues I call them gook 1 and gook 2. That’s what we Americans did with Vietnamese people in those years, even those of us like me who had become strongly opposed to what our country was doing in Vietnam.

Another universal big lie of great evil lie is that it never presents itself as evil. It always masquerades as something good. Soviet Communism, for example, was an evil system, not as evil after Stalin as it had been under Stalin but still evil   It still oppressed the Soviet people and denied them basic human rights like freedom of speech and freedom of religion. I lived in Russia during the 1975-1976 academic year doing dissertation research. I saw how the Soviet regime portrayed itself as a beacon of peace, freedom, and progress in the world. There were banners and signs everywhere with slogans like “Glory to the CPSU,” (the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), and “Forward to the victory of Communism,” communism being the supposedly blessed future toward which the Party was supposedly working. Public art depicted heroic men and women, always beautiful and always smiling or looking intent and committed to what they were doing, working for the good of the people and of the Party. The Soviet press reported all the time that wonderful things were happening for the people under the leadership of the Communist Party and rarely if ever reported on any of the harsh realities of Soviet life. None of it was true. It served to present the evil of Soviet Communism as a great good. Not all but a great many Soviet people bought the lie.

Here’s another example from the Soviet Union of an evil act presented as good. In August, 1968, I was in Moscow on a Russian language study tour from Indiana University. One morning my group of students was on a bus going somewhere or other. Suddenly one of our number who was sitting in the back of the bus reading a Moscow morning paper shouted “Holy shit! They invaded Czechoslovakia!” Indeed they had, but that wasn’t quite what the Soviet press said that morning. It said that at the request of the people of Czechoslovakia the Red Army together with military forces from the fraternal socialist members of the Warsaw Pact had entered Czechoslovakia to put down a counterrevolution instigated and financed by the American CIA. That wasn’t true of course. What the Soviets had done was invade a foreign country to put and end to what the Czechs and Slovaks were calling “the Prague Spring.” The Czechoslovak communist party led by Alexander Dubček and the government led by Ludvik Svoboda had been instituting a program of reform to loosen the control of the party by introducing civil liberties and allowing more private initiative in the economy. (The president’s name Svoboda by the way means freedom in both Czech and Russian.) The Soviet Communists led by Party boss Leonid Brezhnev couldn’t stand it. They were afraid the contagion of freedom might seep over into the USSR. So they sent in the Red Army to put a stop to it. They did a very evil thing, but they presented to their people as a very good thing. That’s how evil works. It convinces people that what is truly evil is actually very good.[2]

Another scene from Cabaret illustrates this characteristic of evil as well. The scene is set in an outdoor beer garden on a beautiful sunny day. Many German people of different ages are sitting in the sunshine enjoying some good German beer. In the movie the camera cuts to the face of a handsome Nordic looking young man with a beautiful, trained high tenor voice. He’s singing a song that sounds like a German folk song. He is wearing some sort of Nazi uniform with a big swastika on one arm. As he sings, most of the people in the beer garden join in the song. They look intent, committed, fearless, defiant. Some of them are young adults, both men and women, of the same generation as the man who is singing. One older man sits at his table looking on with a face reflecting despair over what he is seeing. The last verse of the song is: “Now Fatherland, Fatherland, show us a sign. Your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs to me.” As he nears the end his song he raises his right arm in the Nazi salute. One of the main characters in the story says to another character: “Do you still think you can control them?” The obvious answer is no, the decent people can’t control them because they present their evil in such an appealing way that huge numbers of ordinary people accept it. The tomorrow that the Nazis envisioned belonging to them was a future hell on earth, but there was nothing obviously hellish about this young Nazi, his song, or the people who responded to it so positively. That’s how evil works. It disguises its evil as good.

We must not think that the use of the big lie is a phenomenon only of the past or of foreign lands today. There are big lies being touted as truth in the US today. So far they have not led to genocide or mass murder by the state. The history of big lies tells us, however, that wherever a person with power keeps asserting a big lie the risk of massive evil is present and real.

One very good example of the big lie in the US today is Donald Trump’s repeated contention that immigrants, both undocumented and documented, are a threat to our national security. During his 2016 election campaign he called them all rapists and murderers. He has attempted to bar all or nearly all Muslims from entering the country claiming that they represent a threat of terrorism. What Trump says about immigrants isn’t true. All the statistics relating to the behavior of immigrants show that they aren’t true. That matters not at all to Trump and his supporters. Promoters of evil use lies not the truth to rile up the people and get their support.

Trump and his minions haven’t committed mass murder against immigrants, but they have done acts of considerable evil against them. They have separated children from their parents, kept them in deplorable conditions, and deported them back to countries wracked with violence like El Salvador. The threat of worse atrocities will be with us as long as the leader of our nation keeps propounding the big lie.

We noted above that the US has a long and sordid history of racism. Overt acts of racial discrimination are now illegal in this country, but the racism that spawned those acts is still with us. The specter of white supremacy keeps raising its ugly, sinful head among us. Trump calls white supremacists good people. White supremacy is a lie. That white supremacists are good people is a lie. The presence in this country of white supremacists creates an ever-present risk of violence. The president approving of white supremacists makes that risk worse. We must do everything we can to debunk the big lie of white supremacy.

Organizations of Evil. One lone person can of course perpetrate great evil. Think of the Newtown school shooter for example. A lone gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed twenty-six people including twenty young children. Recent American history is filled with other examples of men acting alone to kill an appalling number of people (and of course even one person being killed that way would be appalling). Yet to conduct truly massive evil of that sort a maniacal leader needs help. He (they’re pretty much all male) needs an organization of people who are willing to carry out his diabolical orders. There’s a reason why Annamarie had that Nazi party uniform in her armoire. Hitler had a whole political party carrying out his every insane whim. As far as we know Hitler didn’t kill a single Jew himself. Neither did most Nazi party members, but Hitler had help from another institution that killed millions of them. It was the dreaded SS, the Schutzstaffel, which means protection squadron. Hitler had founded it as a small personal protection force. It grew to be so big and powerful that scholars call it a state within a state. It carried out the worst of Hitler’s atrocities. One of its divisions ran the concentration camps and committed the mass murder that took place in them. Another of its units, the Einsatzgruppen (the insertion groups) operated as mobile killing squads in Poland and the Soviet Union murdering tens of thousands of people, mostly Jews and Communist Party officials. Hitler had a lot of help in carrying out his murderous schemes of genocide and terror.

Stalin didn’t act alone either. His mass atrocities are perhaps less well known in the west than are Hitler’s, but they’re every bit as horrendous. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was ruled and controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It had begun as the Bolshevik (majority) faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The Bolsheviks as they were originally known used terror as a tool of control from the very beginning of their reign. Under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin they created the Extraordinary Committee, known as the Cheka from its name in Russian. It set about killing anyone suspected of opposing Soviet rule. It evolved through various stages eventually becoming the KGB, the Committee on State Security. Under Stalin it was known as the NKVD,  The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.

The CPSU under Stalin, through the NKVD and otherwise, committed mass murder on a scale at least as large as Hitler’s. It intentionally starved millions of peasants to death to force into the collectivized agriculture most of them despised. It arrested thousands upon thousands of people on false charges of having committed anti-Communist acts. Cars called Black Mariahs came in the night, people were arrested, hauled away, probably tortured (many of them at the NKVD’s headquarters in central Moscow called the Lubyanka with a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, out front), and never seen or heard from again. One book I’ve read told of a man whose eight hour work shift consisted of shooting person after person in the back of the head. Denouncing a coworker as an enemy of the people became a good way to advance in whatever organization you worked for. The NKVD operated the “Gulag Archipelago,” the vase network of forced labor camps from which most inmates never returned. Stalin did none of these things himself. He had a vast network of willing helpers.

People in the SS and the NKVD did things that normally no people would be willing to do. Why? The answer lies partly in the fact that people in many places, including Germany and Russia, have been conditioned to obey orders from any state authority After the collapse of Nazi Germany people accused of war crimes often said “I was just doing my job.” There’s more to it than that, however. People in groups commit acts they would never commit on their own because they have bought the big lie and the dehumanization of their victims that come from above, from the state or from some ruling party. The SS wasn’t doing anything wrong, they thought. They were eliminating a subhuman group that was a threat to the superior Germans. The NKVD  operatives weren’t doing anything wrong, they thought. They were eliminating enemies of the people who threatened to stop the progress of the USSR toward the ideal society of first socialism then communism. People rarely do things they believe to be evil. Instead they let themselves be convinced that the big lie is actually true.

These I think are the dynamics of evil. People let themselves be convinced that something has to be done to eliminate an evil. They let themselves be convinced that what they are doing is not evil. Maybe what they do is in some way unfortunate, “but then something did have to be done.”

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[1] He hated and tried to exterminate other people too—Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally disabled, and any opponent of his regime. He threw them into his hellish concentration camps, where a great many of them died.

[2] I’ll just put this in a footnote, but the Soviet leadership did more to pass the invasion off as good than put a false spin on it in the press. They hauled Dubček and Svoboda off to Moscow essentially as prisoners, but they presented the Czech leaders being there as an ordinary state visit. They put crossed Soviet and Czechoslovak flags on the bridges across the Moscow River at either end of the Kremlin. They disguised what they were doing so that the Soviet people would never know the truth about it.