Smiling on Stalin

UPI ^ | March 03, 2005 | Paul Goble

[Tailgunner Joe]

President Vladimir Putin is using the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe not to help Russians confront the Stalinist past but rather to engage in mythmaking that will only add to their difficulties in dealing with that past and building a democratic future, according to a French specialist on how societies cope with traumatic pasts.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and some of his henchmen, arguing that the crimes of that era were the responsibility of only a few but not of the Communist Party or Soviet people as a whole.

His successor, Leonid Brezhnev, sought to damp down even that narrow criticism, clearly viewing it as a threat to the legitimacy of his rule and the Soviet state more generally. Instead, he chose to play up Stalin's positive role in World War II, largely remaining silent about the dictator's criminal activities.

Putin has sought to promote only positive images of that period and has angrily dismissed any suggestions such as those by Latvian President Vaira Vika-Freiberga that 1945 may have brought liberation from one kind of totalitarianism but led to the imposition of another kind on half of Europe.

[anonymoussierra]

Ping

[Billthedrill]

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

The 20 million dead, that is. Anyone who thinks good ol' Uncle Joe was a fuzzy bunny ought to check this brilliant book out.

[GSlob]

Why does the statement of the obvious fact by the Latvian President gets written up as "suggestion"? Are they equally unsure of 2x2=4?

[ozzymandus]

One of the main reasons the USSR lost somewhere between 20 and 30 million people in WW2 (they never bothered to count them) was Stalin's total incompetence as a military leader. The only thing that saved the Rodina was Hitler's even greater incompetence.