WSJ: What Gulag? The Soviet Union achieved a great victory in defeating Nazi Germany, but...

...The re-Sovietization of Russia is possible because when the Soviet Union fell, the new Russian state did not break irrevocably with its communist heritage. To do this, it needed to define the communist regime as criminal and the Soviet period as illegitimate; open the archives, including the list of informers; and find all mass burial grounds and execution sites. None of this was done and the consequences are being felt today.

There is still no legal evaluation of the Soviet regime: It has never been declared criminal and no official has ever been tried for crimes committed under communism. The result is that former communist leaders in Russia are viewed as leaders first and criminals second (if at all), no matter how heinous their actions. Russians, thus, frequently lack the conviction, intrinsic to free men, that an individual answers for his actions no matter what the external conditions.

Since the Soviet regime was not repudiated, the Russian government became the Soviet regime's legal successor. This has meant that millions of victims of repression were rehabilitated, usually posthumously, by being cleared of official charges -- rather than have those charges voided as the product of a deranged system....

Most important, Russian authorities made no serious attempt to find and memorialize mass graves and execution sites. The victims of Stalin-era terror were executed in secret and Soviet leaders intended that the bodies never be found....

Without an effort to memorialize these horrors, the growing nostalgia for Soviet power is natural: Although communism was the moral nadir of modern Russian history, it was also the period when Russia was at the height of its power. ...[N]ostalgia... is taking frightening forms... in cities, ... history books,... [to] again render honor to Stalin for his role in building socialism and saving human civilization...."

LETTERS to the Editor, WSJ, 5/24/05

The How and Why of Russia's Stalinist Terror

I was pleased to see David Satter's piece ("What Gulag?" editorial page, May 6) draw attention to the often obscured and terrible reality of Soviet Russia's World War II experience. But I regret that Mr. Satter did not go into the matter of the Gulag more deeply.

Historians dispute the number of dead in this vast system of concentration camps, but estimates run into many millions of Russians killed through starvation, forced labor and the brutal conditions of Siberia. The camps were not only for those suspected of "anti-revolutionary activity"; returning POWs were sent to the Gulag for fear they may have been "contaminated" by their contact with their captors. The brutal ethnic repressions, indeed total transfers of populations (the Chechen people, for example, were trucked to Kazakhstan), is yet another matter.

Even if we limit our examination to those brutalities carried out in the name of the war effort, it is entirely possible that Stalin's policies caused more deaths than Hitler's invasion. The fact, to cite just one example, that under-equipped front-line troops were followed by squads of NKVD (equivalent to Hitler's SS) to mow down stragglers or anyone in retreat, should be enough to deflate the obscene rhetoric praising Stalin's leadership during this tragic period in Russian history.

Eugene A. Sokoloff
Yonkers, N.Y.

As a socialist, I would be the last to object to Mr. Satter's demand for the opening of the archives of the former Soviet Union and the exposure of all aspects of the crimes perpetrated by Stalin's regime during the Terror of 1936-39. However, the results of such an inquiry would have political consequences not necessarily to Mr. Satter's liking. While Mr. Satter insists that the entire Soviet era and the revolution from which it emerged be defined as criminal and illegitimate, it is a historical fact that the vast majority of the victims of Stalin's terror were leaders and political partisans of the 1917 October Revolution.

The terror unfolded under the banner of the struggle against the political influence of Leon Trotsky, the most prominent and unrelenting opponent of Stalin's right-wing bureaucratic regime. Virtually all the defendants in the three show trials held in Moscow between 1936 and 1938 -- people such as Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Rakovsky -- had played major roles in the creation of the Soviet state and during its early years. All the Soviet generals murdered by Stalin in 1937 had achieved prominence during the Civil War, when Trotsky commanded the Red Army.

The purges were by no means arbitrary. The terror was directed not against right-wing enemies of the Soviet Union, but against left-wing opponents of Stalin's betrayal of the October Revolution. The blood purges resulted in the physical annihilation of an entire generation of Marxist intellectuals and workers whose lives had been dedicated to the goal of socialist internationalism and egalitarianism. It set into motion a process that culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the final political repudiation of the socialist principles of the October Revolution, and the restoration of capitalism.

If the Russian people knew the political identities of the victims of the terror buried in mass graves on the outskirts of St. Petersburg and Moscow, they would better understand the enduring significance of their own socialist heritage.

David North
Socialist Equality Party
National Secretary
Detroit

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.