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Russia has yet to recover from the trauma of the Stalin era
The Guardian ^ | Mar 2018 | Sergey Parkhomenko

Posted on 04/11/2018 4:35:27 PM PDT by GoldenState_Rose

Earlier this year the Russian ministry of culture banned the satirical film The Death of Stalin, because it contained “information whose dissemination is prohibited by law”. On Russian social media, the withdrawal of the film’s licence was met with widespread laughter and scorn: what sort of secrets could this movie possibly have disclosed? Could it be that Stalin is indeed dead? – so went the irony.

Back in December, there had been an ominous precursor: Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s FSB intelligence services, told the Rossiyskaya Gazeta that Stalin-era repressions had been justified. He mentioned the need to counter Trotsky’s networks, and plots that had “ties with foreign secret services”. He also claimed that “mass-scale political repression” had ended by 1938 – a blatant rewriting of history.

Meanwhile, new monuments, banners and exhibits honouring Joseph Stalin are sprouting up around the country, while hundreds of Soviet-era representations of him have been left intact: busts and bas-reliefs of the man, statues big and small, standing or on horseback. Twice a year, on his birthday and on the anniversary of his death, admirers bring piles of red carnations to Stalin’s grave on Red Square.

But Stalinism today in Russia isn’t found in those monuments, flowers, or posters – nor is it in censorship or the double-speak of high-level officials. Instead it is hidden in the minds of many Russians, in how they perceive history, and how they relate to fundamental values.

For most Russians, those millions of victims are nothing but cold statistics. Few people care to pore over the difficult and unpleasant questions. That’s because an unprocessed, psychological trauma remains in our society.

Four years ago, I decided to do something about this. I went to the Moscow offices of the human rights organisation Memorial with an idea...

(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...


TOPICS: History
KEYWORDS: crimea; gulag; history; holocaust; memory; russia; stalin; syria
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To: Cronos
The Nazis were of course socialists first in the authoritarian (as if there's any other) sense. Their view of history was flawed like everything else, preferring to rewrite history rather than acknowledge it. As I understand, the Celts and Saxons came first, overwhelming the indigenous Europeans due to their advancements in iron working, agriculture, as well as physical size. Sort of like what happened in America but much earlier, since Europe wasn't separated by a couple thousand miles of ocean.

Much later came the Huns, Goths, Lombards, Vandals, Slavs, all wanting to get away from wherever they were, to somewhere better. Sort of like what's happening now in America. Not overwhelming them with technology, but with numbers.
41 posted on 04/12/2018 3:41:11 AM PDT by Telepathic Intruder
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To: MeganC

Makes about as much sense as Southern conservatives who claim to hate statism and repression but who still love their Jeff Davis statue, and make nonsensical ahistorical claims like The War Of Northern Aggression. The South started the Civil War because they were afraid that someday the North would repeal their oppressive, federalized laws like the Fugitive Slave Act, or contain slavery to within the Deep South. They get some agreement from communists out to deny that the USA could ever do anything just. Bit try telling that to all the moronic yokuls around here.

Hey folks, yes Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. But the dividing line between Washington and Jefferson or Jeff Davis should be that Washington and Jefferson made America and Jeff Davis was a bloodthirsty insurrectionist. Duh.


42 posted on 04/12/2018 4:17:31 AM PDT by dangus
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To: Telepathic Intruder
As I understand, the Celts and Saxons came first....Much later came the Huns, Goths, Lombards, Vandals, Slavs

That's incorrect

  1. Saxons (or rather the group before Saxons), Vandals, lombards and Goths were all Germanic people. They separated from each other only around 100 AD -- even as late as 500 AD their languages were mutually intelligible and they were essentially different clans or groupings of tribes/clans in the same nation

  2. Saxons appear only around 300 AD. Prior to this, you can find out about the different germanic tribes in the various tribal groups like the Allemannia, Suebian etc. groups -- the Saxons were a group of different Germanic tribes that used the Saxe (scyth like weapon)

  3. Huns were not Indo-European by language or by "race" - they were Xiongnu (at least when they started moving out of Mongolia around the time of Christ

Into Europe you have three main "migrations" of homo homo sapiens:

  1. "Ancient Europeans" or hunter-gatherers that were widely distributed but had largest numbers (in the thousands) in Spain and to some extent Greece (Pelasgians) - Italy was not heavily populated until after 1100 due to volcanic activity)
  2. Middle Eastern farmers who came around 3000 BC with the domestication of wheat/barley and sheep/pigs/goats
  3. Indo-europeans starting around 2000 BC

The different Indo-European people who migrated spoke proto-IE and were the same ethnicity/race/nation.

proto-Celts developed in the Panonian valley at the same time as Proto-Germans developed in the Denmark-Scandia region, proto-Balto-Slavs in the Pripet marshes, Illyrians in the Albanian mountains into north-eastern Italy, proto-Greeks in the Greek valleys and also Indo-Iranians in what is now Central Asia. This was about 2000

Around 2000 BC you have a group of Indian Indo-Europeans go through the southern coastline of Iran into Sumeria, setting up the short-lived Gutian empire before they move to the north-west and set up the Mittani and hittite confederations (both of these worship Vedic gods like Varuna,indra, Agnis)

At 900 BC you have

  1. Greeks (Ionians) in Greece and Western Anatolia
  2. remnants of the Hittites: Phyrgians, Lydians (like Croesus) etc. in what is now Turkey
  3. Illyrians in Yugoslavia-Albania-ne italy
  4. Italic tribes in Italy
  5. Celts in southern Germany and north-eastern france
  6. Germanics (ancestors of Saxons, Suebians, Nordics, Danes, Vikings, Vandals, Goths, Lombards, Burgundians) in Scandia
  7. Baltics in the foggy lands of the Baltics
  8. Slavs in the Pripet marshes
  9. Tocharians in Xingjian/East turkestan/uighuristan Tarim basin
  10. Iranians (ancestors of Medes, Persians etc.) in north-east Iran
  11. indic groups in northern India

all of these people even as late as 900 BC have langauges that are somewhat mutually intelligible (as you can see comparing Sanskrit, Avestani, Old Greek, Old Armenian, SAmnite) and have similar Vedic gods (two "families" of Gods, a god fo Thunder indra/Inder/perun/Thor and Dyaus Pitar (Sky father) / Jupiter / Zeus etc. They have similar culture

But things change by 300 BC - by this time the Greeks have merged with Iranians with Anatolians, with Illyrians and the Celts invaded Italy, spain (forming Celtiberians) and Anatolia. The language branches were solidifed by 500 BC but now get merged

The Germanics only start ("start") to differentiate around the time of Christ and this isn't solidified until 500 AD due to Christianization

Ditto for the Slavs who only really separated around 800 AD into southern Slavs and western-eastern Slavs, thanks to the Magyar creating a separating "band" between them. The East Slavs as we see haven't separated well now. And they themselves separated from teh West Slavs only around the 11th century

As to the "Age of migrations" - they were majority about different Indo-European groups.

But to really see this in the wider picture:


So, it's a wild ride and the fact is that people all over eurasia mixed -- we find continuous interaction between peoples from India to Ireland and including North Africa and the horn of Africa - they exchanged genes, religions, cultures, languages etc. which is why the Ethiopians and Somalis and Arabs and Jews and Berbers all speak branches fo the same lagnauge family and have genetic markers similar to each other.

43 posted on 04/12/2018 5:45:45 AM PDT by Cronos (Obama's dislike of Assad is not based on his brutality but that he isn't a jihadi Moslem)
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To: Cronos

True that Russians don’t see Stalin as a Communist. They don’t lump him in with Lenin, Brezhnev, etc. He is beyond ideology, they see him as a modern-day “Ivan the Terrible”, who also just happened to be Stalin’s role model. To him, the Bolsheviks were just a means to gain power.


44 posted on 04/12/2018 6:09:34 AM PDT by dfwgator
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To: DIRTYSECRET

Sorry, I don’t know anything about Phil Donohue....


45 posted on 04/12/2018 8:02:40 AM PDT by Jack Hammer
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To: butlerweave
Stalin Killed all the smart people

The fact that the Russians beat us into space, and that so may Russians are working in the West as talented scientists and engineers, seems to contradict your theory.


46 posted on 04/12/2018 8:57:55 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog
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To: Jack Hammer
Sorry, I don’t know anything about Phil Donohue....

Consider yourself fortunate.


47 posted on 04/12/2018 8:58:34 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog
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To: Cronos

Yep, I always said the only good thing Stalin did was to get rid of Trotsky, Trotsky would have been a much tougher adversary.


48 posted on 04/12/2018 9:31:59 AM PDT by dfwgator
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To: PIF

By Sept. 1939, conservatively, 3 million Ukrainians and 700,000 Kazakhs starved, more than a million Soviet civilians were executed outright or sent to die. You might double that if you weren’t conservative.

He had another 24 years to kill millions more. I am not convinced of 69 million, but it was a lot.

I’m just saying Uncle Joe was a peculiar ally for the Land of the Free, and that people don’t understand that the Communists were as evil and murderous as the Nazis is a continuing surprise to me. People collect Communist art, tres chic. People wear Che shirts. Communist apologist professors get tenure.


49 posted on 04/12/2018 10:08:02 AM PDT by heartwood (Someone has to play devil's advocate.)
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To: heartwood

The numbers I cited are what the historical researchers ie historians say they are. I did not make them up. See: Sokolov, Korol, Eckhardt, Kinder,
Urlanis. Also Britannica, Harper Collins, and Encarta.

Stalin murdered millions in Europe during the Trotski purges in the mid 30’s - they were mostly those that believed in the Communist cause aka the first to go.

And that people do not seem to realize that Mao murdered more than Stalin and Hitler combined.


50 posted on 04/12/2018 4:39:39 PM PDT by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now it is your turn ...)
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To: WMarshal
Yes, the Mongol conquests and the "Tatar yoke" that followed were responsible for much of what Russia became in later centuries.

But Peter, Catherine, the later tsars, Lenin, and Stalin were all in their own way trying to "modernize" the country.

There was some ambiguity with those later tsars. They didn't want freedom or democracy. But they didn't reject Western technology when they could get it. And they used Western bureaucratic methods to run their autocracy.

The early Communists also saw themselves as trying to bring Russia into the 20th century, though they also rejected western ideas of freedom and representative government.

51 posted on 04/12/2018 4:57:19 PM PDT by x
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To: dfwgator

Very true. Trotsky was brilliant and a fantastic general. If he had won, then we would have a different communist world in 1930.


52 posted on 04/12/2018 11:26:22 PM PDT by Cronos (Obama's dislike of Assad is not based on his brutality but that he isn't a jihadi Moslem)
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To: Telepathic Intruder; SunkenCiv

Sorry TI, I got carried away... :(


53 posted on 04/12/2018 11:37:19 PM PDT by Cronos (Obama's dislike of Assad is not based on his brutality but that he isn't a jihadi Moslem)
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To: x

I don’t know about the early Communists rejecting western ideas of freedom. They certainly embraced the strain of the western idea of freedom brought about by the French Revolution and Reign of Terror based on Lenin’s own remarks and their use of the French National Anthem for their acts.

BTW, I wonder what happened to Golden State Rose? From clicking the user’s page, Golden State Rose seems to be either banned or suspended.


54 posted on 05/17/2018 4:17:14 AM PDT by otness_e
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