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A Hidden History of Evil: Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
City Journal ^ | Claire Berlinski

Posted on 09/18/2011 11:27:13 AM PDT by the invisib1e hand

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.

Then there’s Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who once spent 12 years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas—political psychiatric hospitals—after being convicted of copying anti-Soviet literature. He, too, possesses a massive collection of stolen and smuggled papers from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which, as he writes, “contain the beginnings and the ends of all the tragedies of our bloodstained century.” These documents are available online at bukovsky-archives.net, but most are not translated. They are unorganized; there are no summaries; there is no search or index function. “I offer them free of charge to the most influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to print them,” Bukovsky writes. “Editors shrug indifferently: So what? Who cares?”

Read the rest of this timely and fascinating piece.


TOPICS: History
KEYWORDS: claireberlinski; communism; eu; eussr; history; russia; sovietarchives; ussr
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To: the invisib1e hand

The Communist Book of the Dead was published, and there are publishers and Think Tanks aplenty. I find it hard to believe that we’re getting the whole story, here.


21 posted on 09/18/2011 12:30:42 PM PDT by Prospero (non est ad astra mollis e terris via)
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To: the invisib1e hand

Most american’s are indifferent to evil. The soviets were the focus of evil in the modern world.


22 posted on 09/18/2011 12:32:45 PM PDT by OldCorps
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To: the invisib1e hand

Oh yeah, publicizing those files would do ‘our’ media and academia so much good...

Hard to understand why those bright patriots would want the info suppressed...

I’m stumped!


23 posted on 09/18/2011 12:40:25 PM PDT by mrsmith
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To: the invisib1e hand

Don’t I know it.

Although, my personal ultimate synonym for “evil” is “Islam”.


24 posted on 09/18/2011 12:54:50 PM PDT by the OlLine Rebel (Common sense is an uncommon virtue./Technological progress cannot be legislated.)
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To: rellimpank

“....and that Hollywood which still (rightfully) paints Nazis as villians never has a badword even for the likes of Stalin or Lenin-—”

.
You must keep in mind that the West (and this includes the US) was cozily in bed with communism (Stalin) in order to defeat Hitler. Democracy and communism became reluctant partners in the fight against Naziism.

Read your history and you’ll learn that Churchill sold Eastern Europe out to Stalin in a private meeting not attended by Truman.


25 posted on 09/18/2011 1:03:57 PM PDT by 353FMG (Liberalism is Satan's handiwork.)
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To: Revolting cat!
Read about the reception of the Black Book of Communism.

Wow. The "critics" defend the indefensible and do everything possible to cover up evil's tracks. No wonder we are doomed to repeat history.

I have one sister who, together with her husband, went through Communist hell to adopt a child who was in a Ukranian orphanage. She experienced the labyrinth first hand, yet is so anti-capitalist and pro-union that I imagine she would agree with the comments of one of the more well-known (Marxist) critics of the book.

"Critics have argued that capitalist countries could be held responsible for a similar number of deaths. Noam Chomsky, for example, writes that Amartya Sen in the early 1980s estimated the excess of mortality in India over China due to the latter's "relatively equitable distribution of medical resources" at close to 4 million a year. Chomsky therefore argues that, "suppos[ing] we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers" to India, "the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of ... Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone."[17]"

26 posted on 09/18/2011 1:12:34 PM PDT by arasina (So there.)
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To: the invisib1e hand
Here's clue: If a depot wants to remain in power he must confine his murders to his own citizens. If he does so no other government in the world will complain too strenuously and certainly none will move against him just for the reason of killing his own.
27 posted on 09/18/2011 1:26:20 PM PDT by count-your-change (You don't have be brilliant, not being stupid is enough.)
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To: Revolting cat!

thx for pointing it out.


28 posted on 09/18/2011 1:40:53 PM PDT by the invisib1e hand (...then they came for the guitars, and we kicked their sorry faggot asses into the dust)
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To: the invisib1e hand

Thank you for posting this fascinating article. This snippet is interesting for those who haven’t read the article in its entirety:

“And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?

“Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.

“Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.”


29 posted on 09/18/2011 1:47:03 PM PDT by Auntie Mame (Fear not tomorrow. God is already there.)
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To: All
I probably should have posted these excerpts:
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.

According to Zagladin’s reports, for example, Kenneth Coates, who from 1989 to 1998 was a British member of the European Parliament, approached Zagladin on January 9, 1990, to discuss what amounted to a gradual merger of the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet.

Or consider a report on Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, who led Spain’s integration into the European Community as its foreign minister. ...Eighteen months later, Ordóñez told Gorbachev: “I feel intellectual disgust when I have to read, for example, passages in the documents of ‘G7’ where the problems of democracy, freedom of human personality and ideology of market economy are set on the same level. As a socialist, I cannot accept such an equation.”

Perhaps most shockingly, the Eastern European press has reported that Stroilov’s documents suggest that François Mitterrand was maneuvering with Gorbachev to ensure that Germany would unite as a neutral, socialist entity under a Franco-Soviet condominium.

...the former leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock,approached Gorbachev—unauthorized, while Kinnock was leader of the opposition—through a secret envoy to discuss the possibility of halting the United Kingdom’s Trident nuclear-missile program. In 2004, and his wife, Glenys, is now Britain’s minister for Europe. Gerard Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, has noted the significance of the episode. “If the report given to Mr. Gorbachev is true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain’s enemies in order to seek approval regarding his party’s defense policy and, had he been elected, Britain’s defense policy,” Batten said to the European Parliament in 2009. “If this report is true, then Lord Kinnock would be guilty of treason.”

Similarly, Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic states and then of Ukraine.


30 posted on 09/18/2011 1:50:55 PM PDT by the invisib1e hand (...then they came for the guitars, and we kicked their sorry faggot asses into the dust)
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To: Auntie Mame

ahh, you beat me to it! Glad you found it useful. What struck me was the reference to the Soviet influence in uniting Europe.


31 posted on 09/18/2011 1:52:17 PM PDT by the invisib1e hand (...then they came for the guitars, and we kicked their sorry faggot asses into the dust)
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To: the invisib1e hand

The largest collection of Soviet archives is located at the Hoover Institute.

They have a more extensive archive than all of Russia on writers and other historical documents.


32 posted on 09/18/2011 3:07:12 PM PDT by Vendome (Don't take life so seriously, you won't live through it anyway)
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To: pallis
wwmd = "What Would Mugabe Do?"


33 posted on 09/18/2011 3:09:42 PM PDT by FreeAtlanta (Fight for Liberty)
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To: Vendome
marvelous.

But just as nobody bothered to the documents cited in the piece (or even the piece itself, for that matter) does anyone read them?

34 posted on 09/18/2011 3:25:10 PM PDT by the invisib1e hand (...then they came for the guitars, and we kicked their sorry faggot asses into the dust)
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To: the invisib1e hand

I’m reading the Gulag Archipeligo; A tough slog for the unmotivated reader. But I’m waiting for a long pause in Nazi or Nazi hunting movies; so focus can be put on the brutal, sadistic terrorism the Soviets visited on their own citizens. Spielberg,Hanks,Howard,Reiner— where are you?


35 posted on 09/18/2011 3:35:48 PM PDT by joelt
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To: the invisib1e hand

LOL

Actually, a friend of mine, who is Fellow at Hoover told me about this.

The Russians are coming to Stanford and reacquainting themselves with the writings and history of their peoples, that was purged during the Soviet Empire.

I am told they are often shocked to be researching one subject and then accidentally stumbling upon another.

Surprise, curiosity and pride don’t begin to describe what happens.


36 posted on 09/18/2011 3:39:52 PM PDT by Vendome (Don't take life so seriously, you won't live through it anyway)
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To: joelt
Recall the account of Solzhenitsyn’s reception at Harvard.
37 posted on 09/18/2011 3:43:08 PM PDT by the invisib1e hand (...then they came for the guitars, and we kicked their sorry faggot asses into the dust)
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To: arasina
Read about the reception of the Black Book of Communism. Wow. The "critics" defend the indefensible and do everything possible to cover up evil's tracks.

I think your "Wow" is a bit misplaced. I read this Wiki summary and would hardly describe it as trying "to cover up evil's tracks."

ML/NJ

38 posted on 09/18/2011 3:44:33 PM PDT by ml/nj
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To: the invisib1e hand

ping


39 posted on 09/18/2011 5:58:18 PM PDT by rogue yam
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To: rogue yam
ping

The yam has pung.

40 posted on 09/18/2011 6:01:44 PM PDT by the invisib1e hand (...then they came for the guitars, and we kicked their sorry faggot asses into the dust)
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