Posted on 11/25/2016 1:34:25 AM PST by Tarasaramozart
MOSCOW — A Russian human rights group has published a database containing personal information about nearly 40,000 members of the notorious security force that carried out Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s purges, shedding light on an ugly stretch of history the Kremlin would prefer to remain hidden.
The archive, culled from the records of Stalin’s security forces (the NKVD) and posted on the website of Memorial, the human rights group, for the first time names those who carried out some 700,000 executions from 1935 to 1939 during “The Great Terror.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has in recent years revised Stalin’s legacy, emphasizing the dictator’s role in defeating Nazi Germany in World War II and turning the Soviet Union into a world power.
The details of the purges, in which Communist Party leaders and rank-and-file citizens were summarily tried and convicted, usually on trumped-up charges, have been erased from school textbooks and public discourse.
“Until now, if anyone mentions the victims, it’s as though they were killed by a natural disaster like an earthquake or a tidal wave,” Yan Rachinsky of Memorial told The Washington Post on Thursday. “They were victims of crimes and those crimes were committed by people.”
The Kremlin had a much less enthusiastic response.
“I will leave this issue without comment. The issue is very sensitive,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
Millions of people were imprisoned or killed during the three decades of Stalin’s rule, but the totalitarian Soviet state kept the purges a secret even after his death in 1953. As the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians, many of whom were related to victims, took interest in the purges, and Memorial and other rights groups actively sought to identify victims.
But the full archives of the KGB and its predecessors were never made public, and the country never experienced a full repentance. Under Putin, a former KGB officer, Stalin has been all but rehabilitated as a great leader who merely made some mistakes, and Memorial has been designated a “foreign agent” according to a law intended to marginalize nongovernment organizations.
“Russia never had a proper de-Stalinization and there is little awareness of The Great Terror in contemporary Russian society,” said Tanya Lokshina, Russia program director for Human Rights Watch. “Memorial has been doing tremendously important work in identifying and commemorating thousands of victims and now naming their butchers. The latter is an inalienable part of doing justice to the victims’ memory and of helping Russians come to terms with their history.”
Until now, Russians who wanted to reconstruct the history of the victims faced an uphill battle to get their hands on records, and difficulty in establishing the names on the documents to which they were given access.
Memorial’s publication of the archive came just days after Denis Karagodin, a 34-year-old resident of the Siberian city of Tomsk, announced that he had tracked down the names of the men who helped kill his great-grandfather — a peasant who was executed in 1938 on charges of spying for Japan. It took five years, Karagodin told Radio Liberty, and required him to persuade security-services archivists to show him documents that helped him reconstruct the chain of events, from the officials that gave the orders to the gunmen who carried out the sentence.
“The historians and specialists I was able to reach couldn’t believe that I’d managed to get this document,” he told Radio Liberty. “Some were simply in shock that such documents still exist and that you can actually get them. It’s possible that I might be the first person in Russia’s history to be given such documents.”
The archive, he said, “is a key that can and must be used to open the hidden secret of [NKVD agents]. It’s too bad that I didn’t have this database. It would’ve helped.”
Karagodin said the granddaughter of one of the men who executed his great-grandfather, wrote him a letter, asking forgiveness, after reading his blog. Rachinsky of Memorial said the archive, beyond helping people discover the fate of their relatives, sends a message to Russia’s leaders.
“Our government doesn’t like to acknowledge that the Soviet Union was a criminal state,” he said. “The criminals’ names are known; let the ones who carry out orders now know that their names, too, will be known.”
For Russia, its complicated.
You have a country with a dark past and also a country with great achievements.
Its not easy to come to terms with the criminal nature of the Soviet state.
Especially when the people running present-day Russia are former members of the Communist elite.
“...it just got easier to find the perpetrators of Stalin’s purges”
To what end? They’re all almost certainly dead by now.
For historians and history buffs. For truth-seekers. For the children of the victims curious to know the perpetrators.
A great thing that these names are now online.
It’s too bad they didn’t do this right after the Fall. It might have been possible to try, and execute, some old Communist Death Camp Guards. /sarc
"Is not the prevailing political 'liberalism'...that potpourri of indiscriminate do-goodism trending into statism and Marxism and blending so indistinguishably with treason, that is the deepest enemy of the traditional America and the West?" The Liberal, "has looked upon the face of evil and found it half good." (Forrest Davis in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George Nash, p. 95)
William Rusher, publisher of the National Review in 1957 observed that the Liberal Establishment,
"...shares Communism's materialist principles." (ibid, p. 137)
In agreement, Frank Meyer commented:
"...Liberalism is in agreement with Communism (it sees) the necessity and desirability of socialism...it regards all inherited value — theological, philosophical, political — as without intrinsic value or authority....therefore (there are no) irreconcilable differences...between it and Communism (thus) Liberals are unfit for the leadership of a free society, and intrinsically incapable of offering serious opposition to the Communist offensive." (ibid. p. 137)
This was the main reason Obama failed in his fundamental transformation of the United States through the implementation of socialism - he didn’t kill his enemies. The leftists/progressives are cut from the same cloth as Stalin, but attempted to use a more of a compassionate transformation, which was their undoing. I fear they won’t make the same mistake twice...
If we can go after Nazis until they are all dead, then we can go after Communists until they are all dead. And there were plenty of Commie atrocities still going on after 1945, so more of the perps might still be around.
“This was the main reason Obama failed in his fundamental transformation of the United States through the implementation of socialism - he didn’t kill his enemies.”
You need to consolidate power before you can really start the ‘purges’ and ‘re-education efforts’. The Dems never quite got there under Obama, as his opponents were still armed. Under Hillary I was convinced they would fully consolidate power...it was close!
You wrote: “Under Hillary I was convinced they would fully consolidate power...it was close!”
There is no reason to stop buying guns and ammo. But there are a great number of reasons to “go for it” exposing, trying and convicting these criminals here in the US. There is no other way to end this carp. If not, they will keep trying to kill freedom and those who will defend it.
Stalin was pretty bad but the KKK was worse. The KKK lynched tens of millions of innocent black men on their way to Sunday school.
Agreed. If you recall, they got pretty close in the Senate - one vote was the barrier to enacting gun control on the Nation.
A Clinton regime would have put the last piece of the puzzle in place - a leftist SCOTUS pick, which would have been a game changer for Second Amendment. Sotomayor, Kaygan and Ginzberg times two...
Without the right to bear arms, there would have been a shooting Civil War II. Texas and other red states would have attempted to secede, which would escalate assuming Clinton would call in the UN to seize weapons from American citizens.
Outlawing personal ownership of guns is a dramatic step in imposing tyranny on the masses - which is what all "good" dictators do.
A MSM all-out propaganda blitz would have preceded gun confiscation, and I am sure there would be a lot of neighbors turning in neighbors. What we found out in the last 8 years is that the the public here is not much different than those in Nazi Germany - willing to do just about anything the government tells them to do, and believing the lies.
You wrote: “The KKK lynched tens of millions of innocent black men on their way to Sunday school.”
You’re crazy.
Do you really think I’m serious? Tens of millions? I was mocking Black Lives Matter and the racist fearmongers on the left.
For Russia, its complicated.
You have a country with a dark past and also a country with great achievements.
Its not easy to come to terms with the criminal nature of the Soviet state.
Especially when the people running present-day Russia are former members of the Communist elite.
Good on them for publishing this. And have fun living the rest of your life in safe-houses.
That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I’m not a supporter of the KKK at all, but “tens of millions”? You shouldn’t post until you sober up.
It was a joke. I was making fun of the grandiose claims of the Black Lives Matter and Jesse Jackson crowd.
D’oh!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.