The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

by Michael Malice

It is unknown whether Kosior’s refusal to break earned him the grudging respect of his captors or simply angered them even more. It remains unclear whether they had their eventual ace in the hole the entire time and were toying with him, or if their idea only came when nothing else seemed to work—or perhaps there was a line even the NKVD wanted to avoid crossing if there remained any possibility of avoiding it. What we do know is that the interrogators brought in Kosior’s sixteen-year-old daughter Tamara, and raped her in front of him.[ccxl] That did it. That finally broke Stanislav Kosior. Kosior duly signed the confession that he, an ethnic Pole, had been a Polish spy. His execution was not immediate; he managed to outlive Tamara, who committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Whether Tamara’s death should technically be counted as one of the NKVD’s victims is an academic question. It is unlikely it was she who the New York Times had in mind when they published a 2017 opinion piece explaining “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.”[ccxli] But history has at least recorded her name, unlike those of so many thousands of others whose very existence has been entirely wiped away.