Honorable Death Over Collaboration

In 1937 my great grandfather Abdullah Turkհvatullin was found with a bullet in his head right at his work place, the local NKVD headquarters in Sterlitamak, Bashkortostan. He was a devout communist lifted from poverty by the revolution. But when it came to executing arrests of the innocent, he chose honorable death over collaboration with the bloody regime.

A screenshot of a Twitter thread describes a great-grandfather allegedly found dead at an NKVD headquarters, then reframes his death as a principled refusal to collaborate with the Soviet regime. The joke is the absurdly heroic reinterpretation of an obviously suspicious historical anecdote, echoing ironic stories about ancestors who supposedly opposed a “bloody regime.” It is sent as a sarcastic reaction to propaganda, historical revisionism, or self-congratulatory political storytelling.

• @sbunem / 32263 2022-11-01