Posted on 11/23/2017 6:20:03 PM PST by GoldenState_Rose
On Sunday, a high school student from the Siberian city of Novy Urengoy made a conciliatory speech to Germany's parliament...
"I was extremely upset,"Nikolay Desyatnichenko said, "because I saw the graves of people who died innocently, and many of whom wanted to live peacefully and didn't want to fight." He ended his short speech by saying he hoped "the world would never see war again."
Not long after a Bavaria-based Russian posted the speech on Facebook with his outraged comments, thousands of posts ripped apart the high schooler, his school and his family.
Thousands of people recalled the atrocities their grandfathers had suffered at the hands of the Nazi invaders. Because Desyatnichenko is a Ukrainian name, the family was discussed as a traitorous cell. Bloggers filed complaints to the Prosecutor General's Office, accusing the boy of "exonerating Nazism," a crime in Russia. The story got big enough for Vladimir Yabarov, a legislator in the upper house of parliament, to ask the local government to review the curriculum at Desyatnichenko's school.
The backlash was fierce, but also unsurprising. The cult of Russia's World War II victory has been whipped up to a hysterical pitch by Putin, especially during his current presidential term. Russia's role in defeating Nazism has been easiest for Putin to lean on: It's sufficiently recent and interwoven with the family histories of most Russians.
It's also uncontroversial because of the nature of the enemy. Suggesting that German invaders deserved better than dying from harsh deprivation sounds absurd to Russians who know that Josef Stalin subjected many Soviets to the same treatment. Suggesting that German soldiers may not have wanted to fight is akin to blasphemy.
(Excerpt) Read more at themoscowtimes.com ...
>I am of the belief that America has confronted and overcome slavery, and we have enshrined the legacy of the civil rights movement with things like Reagan’s enactment of Martin Luther King Day as a holiday.
And today it’s perfectly fine to be racists against whites in America. If you’re going to try and puff us up as a nation, might want to try a subject that hasn’t turned into such a disaster.
>In today’s Russia, if you even want to so far as make or show a film condemning or even exploring anything not so appetizing from the Soviet past, you will be banned, rejected, and not get funding from the Culture of Ministry.
In America, the discoverer of the shape and operation DNA a Dr. James Watson has been banned and publicly shunned noting that the Average African IQ is 70 and attributing that as the reason that African nations are not well functioning. Before you go around pointing out specs in other nations eyes, you might want to check the log in the American eye first.
Both Russia and the US have things that cannot be publicly said without destroying one’s ability to earn a living.
>JohnBoy, look through Trump’s twitter page. He will rail against (Soros-funded) fake news media all the time but if there is a good article. He will still link to the source (CNN, WaPo, whatever.) A good article is a good article.
No, it’s just as much propganda as RT TV is. Find a better source.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Funny, that’s a term leftist use endlessly on Reddit to avoid discussing issues.
Let me check your join date: Join date: Oct 17, 2016
And I’ve now got you pegged as a reddit lib. Why are you here?
I’ve been through 3 different usernames on this board. Have been on it since high school.
What’s the earlier board names?
Never mentioned in any Russian history is just how happy Old Joe was to go strolling down the garden path with Old Adolph, invading Poland, three weeks after Nazi Germany did most of the heavy lifting, carving up the Baltic States, invading Finland and Old Joe sitting fat and sassy in the Kremlin while the Luftwaffe was pounding London into dust every night during the winter of 1940/41. Tough sh!t for the Russkies.
‘’’’I am of the belief that America has confronted and overcome slavery, and we have enshrined the legacy of the civil rights movement with things like Reagan’s enactment of Martin Luther King Day as a holiday.’’’’
October 30 is a National Day of rememberance of victims of Communist repression in Russia.
Solzhenitsyn is studied at schools in Russia for three decades and counting. No Lenin and Stalin books are part of curriculum anymore.
Old idiots holding Stalin’s portraits aren’t representative.
Stalin has died 65 years ago. That is more than the average life expectancy for a post-Soveit Russian meaning he is about as contemporary for 99% Russians as Lincoln to the Americans.
What reconciliation do you want? Who has to reconcile with whom over what?
‘’’’In today’s Russia, if you even want to so far as make or show a film condemning or even exploring anything not so appetizing from the Soviet past, you will be banned, rejected, and not get funding from the Culture of Ministry.’’’’
Go fund self-loafing movie yourself. Why do you believe one have to use public funds to produce some garbage ‘art’ showing people how bad they are? Maybe you know there would be empty theaters and you don’t want to lose your own money?
What exactly is banned? Self-loathing movies were hits in FSU since about 1985 and well into late 1990s. This garbage is on DVD for a ruble per dozen. The public has somehow grown tired of it and wants something optimistic ever since.
You could sell underage Interdevochka prostituting herself to foreigners at Moscow hotels as a movie hero in 1989 but nobody wants any of it anymore.
In 2000 movie heroes were Danila Bagrov returning to Caucasus to save fellow POWs from Muslims and other stuff like this resembling older US flicks.
Is the first a fine art to you and the latter is racist and a ‘patriotic syphilis’ as you put it?
I suspect many bankrupt fine artist who immigrated to US are among people pushing the ‘patriotic syphilis’ meme against Russia.
Who killed more Russians? Hitler or Stalin?
The question is not as obvious as you would think.
Oliver Cromwell killed at least no less people than Hitler did on British Isles.
Yes, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after the USSR fell. He praised the direction Putin was taking the country in (especially with regard to helping revive the prominence of the Orthodox Church) - and Putin encouraged the reading of “Gulag Archipelago” and other works in schools...
Solzhenitsyn has since passed away, Putin has since left and re-taken the presidency. And the tone has shifted in Russian society with regard to *dredging up* the kinds of things Solzhenitsyn wrote about.
According to the Vladimir Putin of latter years, Stalin has been “excessively demonized.”
Dear NorseViking, the USSR did not collapse very long ago, and people and their families still haven’t healed from the trauma perpetrated upon themselves by the State, and to each other — by each other. Much of the (free) world may find it difficult to understand the nature of the system and how deep it cut into the lives and hearts of people. *Soul crushing* is the best way to describe it.
The “horror” of the system wasn’t always as blatant as prison camps, the looting of cathedrals, punitive psychiatry, and midnight KGB raids into your homes — but some of the subtle, daily oppressions that defined people’s lives and withered away at their souls. It left very, VERY big scars. Then came the collapse of the system, which added more trauma and dropped the male life expectancy age alone, by about two decades.
And the longer you live in Russia, you realize it’s these very scars that keep it from moving forward...a country of otherwise enormous economic and consequential potential — still relies on oil and the Cold War veneer of military power to stay afloat.
And now, the Putin system leaves a whole new set of scars as the regime has revived just enough of the spirit of the former system to render millions of people into feeling powerless to change or challenge anything.
There are a lot of mixed feelings about October 30 and the “commemorations” of Stalin’s horrors. One historian Irina Pavlova argues:
“Today,mass repressions of the Stalinist type aren’t needed and therefore excesses of those kinds can and must be recognized and condemned...Today Russian society even without mass repressions is loyal to the supreme power”
In terms of Putin’s attendance at the opening of the new Wall of Grief which just opened in Moscow:
“The Kremlin leader’s action is not a sign of the recognition of the crimes of Stalin’s time but rather of “the excesses” in repressions under the Soviet dictator.”
Anyways:
I think children like the one who gave the speech to Germany are signs that the coming generation is eager to heal past wounds and reconcile with all the lingering tensions of the past on their own terms.
With regard to “self-loathing.” Have you ever heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer? He was the Germany pastor/theologian who was part of the plot to kill Hitler. He was executed just days before Hitler himself committed suicide. Today, he is a hero in Germany. You can buy stamps with his face on them...why? Because for all the Nazis there were, there was a class of RESISTERS and MARTYRS who held true to their faith, who saved Jews, who stayed true to their faith, to righteousness and goodness.
As historian A. Applebaum points out, One of the great tragedies of not closing off the records and stories of the Gulag and other horrors is that it robs young people of Russia of a whole NEW class of HEROES to look up to. Rather than looking up to Lenin, Stalin, and the tsars — the upcoming generations should learn the names of those who suffered under them, stood up to them, and remained true to God in the midst of hell on earth.
Another typo correction:
“one of the tragedies of *closing* off the records to Gulag and other horrors is that it robs young people in Russia of a whole class of heroes to honor and look up to: resisters to the system, martyrs, etc...”
‘’’’With regard to “self-loathing.” Have you ever heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer? He was the Germany pastor/theologian who was part of the plot to kill Hitler. He was executed just days before Hitler himself committed suicide. Today, he is a hero in Germany. You can buy stamps with his face on them...why? Because for all the Nazis there were, there was a class of RESISTERS and MARTYRS who held true to their faith, who saved Jews, who stayed true to their faith, to righteousness and goodness.’’’’
Do better research and you’d find anti-Communist heroes like that in Russia too.
And since we were talking about Solzhenitsyn he makes a perfect ‘resister’ and there are post stamps bearing his image too. Many other anti-Communist heroes as well but you are lazy to research sticking to left-wing anti-Russian propaganda instead. By the way when you are into popular culture there are plenty of anti-Soviet movies produced in Russia nowadays, some are paid by government grants.
I’m sorry, Rose, but you are a globalist shill. And ultra-liberal to boot. I wonder why are you posting here.
At the moment, especially following Crimea annexation -> Stalin, Dzherzinsky and Lenin have more panache in mainstream culture than their resisters. That’s my point, and the main point of the article. The counter-productive direction of “patriotism” as has been defined by Putin these past few years.
Okay, good riddance dear Norse Viking.
“Russia’s reverence for Stalin grows as memory of atrocities fades”
On the corner of a busy intersection in Moscow, Georgy Frangulyan is creating an evocative memorial to the millions of Russians executed, starved or banished by Joseph Stalin.
With painstaking care, he’s carved hundreds of human forms into what amounts to a wall of suffering. Visitors are invited to stand within the curve of the wall and surround themselves with the weight of Stalin’s crimes against the Russian people.
“They are tears,” Frangulyan said of the shape of the heads and bodies on the wall. “They are victims — forms which convey a tragedy.”
Frangulyan is hoping his efforts will help reverse an ominous trend.
Reverence for Stalin — one of the most despised and notorious figures of the 20th century — is on the rise in Russia.
In fact, the totalitarian wartime leader has never been more popular.
“I think it’s a real catastrophe,” said Fangulyan.
“It is a tragedy of the nation. I think its necessary to have such a monument as a guarantee this will never happen again.”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/stalin-popularity-rising-in-russia-1.4255882
Can’t be! An activism like that warrants immediate response from Putin’s KGB to arrest and execute this scoundrel! /s
Putin primarily assassinates, rather than executing.
And it is mostly done to those who oppose Putin, personally.
His policies are not helping the Russian economy and could easily be targeted for quick takedown, if need be.
Internationally, Putin continues allying with the worst of the worst in the international perspective - Iran, NKorea, Syria...Russia has been turned into a cheap tin pot nation under his leadership.
The Russian people deserve better.
Yet to see the evidence of assassinations which are about as firm as for an election meddling accusations.
As for Putin’s policies there is generally some truth in that you are saying.
He did some things wrong but on the other hand you don’t know dynamics behind this politic. Politic is an art of possible in the first place. It is not doing that you wish all the time.
The same is true about foreign alliances. I don’t see why Syria and Iran are worse than some other nations US are dealing with on a daily basis. US is dealing with Iran too.
My point is not that Putin is saint and Russia is a promised land. The point is perception of both in the West is completely distorted.
Small correction. The USSR invaded Finland, the Baltic states, Poland and Romania when the USSR and the Nazis were still allied. They even held a joint victory parade in Poland together with the Nazi forces.
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