Will They Come For You?

(Not an x-ray of Nicolas)

One time when my grandfather Michael and his brother were teenagers, they were at their father's school. Their dad, Nicolas Pavlovich Pokrovsky, was headmaster there. This was in Tula, during or shortly after the civil war known as The Russian Revolution.

Seeking to destroy any of the intelligentisia who did not support the new communist regime, assassins were on the hunt for dissenters like my great-grandfather. The boys overheard the assassins say that they "had killed the old man." They thought their dad was dead.

It turns out, they had killed the wrong man.

Some time later, my grandfather's family fled Russia to China. Even years later, the Russian communists were still sending out assassins, seeking to kill the intelligentsia — even those no longer residing within their borders. One day, Nicolas was walking down the street in Harbin (or perhaps Shanghai), when he was shot in the head by these assassins. Assuming their work to be done, the killers fled.

However, Nicolas was still alive!

He had a bullet lodged in his skull just behind his ear. The doctors said it would be too dangerous to remove it, so he spent the remainder of his days with a communist's bullet in his head. Nicolas died in Shanghai in 1946, shortly before his children and their children (my mom) fled the dangerous conflict of the Chinese Civil War. They escaped to the Philippines, stateless refugees living in a tent village with 3,000 other Russians. But that's a story for another time.

The moral of this true story? Totalitarians simply do not tolerate the existence of dissent. Any opposing thought must be wiped from existence. There is no fleeing; they will hunt you down and put a bullet in your head. The only remedy is to never let them take control to begin with.

Are we too late?