Posted on 06/21/2007 4:11:05 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said Thursday no one should try to make Russia feel guilty about the Great Purge of 1937, saying it may have been one of the most notorious episodes of the Stalin era but "in other countries even worse things happened."
Speaking at a televised meeting with social studies teachers, Putin noted that this is the 70th anniversary of a year many Russians regard as a synonym for state-sponsored terror. It is an anniversary that has, however, gotten relatively little attention in Russian media.
"Yes, we had terrible pages" in Russia's history, Putin said. "Let us recall the events since 1937, let us not forget that. But in other countries, it has been said, it was more terrible."
Russia should never forget the abuses of the Communist era, Putin said. But he also said no one had the right to make Russia feel guilty about those abuses.
"No one must be allowed to impose the feeling of guilt on us," he said. "Let them think about themselves. But we must not and will not forget about the grim chapters in our history."
Political arrests on dubious charges were common throughout Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's rule, resulting in the execution of hundreds of thousands of Russians. Millions more became inmates of the gulag, the Soviet system of thousands of slave labor camps.
Large-scale arrests of Communist Party members began in 1934 and seemed to reach a crescendo in 1936-37, when a series of show trials was held in Moscow featuring dramatic courtroom confessions.
Thousands of bureaucrats, military officers and party officials were rounded up and imprisoned by the NKVD, one of the predecessor agencies to the KGB. Many were shot after secret trials.
Russia has never sought to bring to justice KGB officials implicated in human rights abuses committed during the Communist era. Putin, a proud alumnus of the KGB, headed its main successor organization, the Federal Security Service, in the late 1990s.
Speaking with the teachers, Putin suggested the United States' use of atomic weapons against Japan at the end of World War II was worse than the abuses of Stalin. He also cited the U.S. bombing campaign and use the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
"We have not used nuclear weapons against a civilian population," he said. "We have not sprayed thousands of kilometers (miles) with chemicals, (or) dropped on a small country seven times more bombs than in all the Great Patriotic (War)" — Russia's name for World War II.
"We had no other black pages, such as Nazism, for instance," he said.
His remarks came just over a week after President Bush unveiled a monument to the victims of communism in Washington. At the ceremony, Bush compared those totalitarian regimes to modern terror groups.
Putin said he regretted some of Russia's history textbooks had been written using grants from foreign groups, implying foreign governments were dictating how Russian history should be told. Textbook authors "dance to the polka that others have paid for," he said.
In recent years, the Kremlin has cracked down on the operations of foreign non-governmental organizations, saying some were pursuing political agendas.
Putin is truly dangerous. He will turn Russia into a militarized neofascist state, convince Russians that they as a society are victims, not perpetrators, and strike a truly aggressive stance with Western nations, all the while establishing a nonagression-pact-like detente with the Chinese, and (pant, pant, all in one sentence) treat the Islamic threat like a dangerous animal: you’re safe as long as you have it pointed away from you and at your enemy (the U.S. or could I have just left that out?)
“There is no truce with Adam-Zad, the bear that walks like a man!”
And that was just a low-ball estimate.
::Sigh:: Yet another historical revisionist, this time for the epicenter of World Communism, which has gotten away mostly scot free for its crimes!
50,000 dead from a nuke is worse than 20 million hooligans dead /s
This Putin is turning out to be one PITA. That he would excuse the excesses of Stalinism and then lament the demise of the USSR would cause me to think he would like nothing better than to resurrect that fowl system.
Don’t forget that the USSR helped Germany develope tanks and combat aircraft between the wars, even during Weimar.
Can any intelligent person still deny that Putin is an unrepentant Stalinist? Any Soviet dictator after Stalin could have said this.
The USSR provided quite a bit of training for the Luftwaffe, and there were many, many ties between the SS and other parts of the Wehrmacht and the Soviets. The partitioning of Poland in this sense was a deal between partners.
A number of historians believe Hitler and the Nazis got their ideas for the Holocaust from the Soviet pogroms and the willfull starvation of millions of small private farmers - the kulaks - the Nazis were flabbergasted that the rest of the world ignored the death of so many millions and (thanks in good measure to Walter Duranty of the New York Times) actually fawned over the Soviet totalitarian state.
The Nazis assumed that there would be the same indifference shown if they killed Jews, Gypsies and other political undesirables on mass scale - in a sense, they were right - the world was pretty much in denial about first the rumors, then the mounting evidence of the Nazi atrocities.
The Communists, so dearly beloved by so many leftist Jews, are thus responsible for the Holocaust by executing its immediate precursor, the mass killings and starvation of millions.
Putin is quickly burning up any shred of credibility he ever might have had -- sound to me that things in the new USSR aren't going quite they way the old KGB hands who put Putin in power thought they would. Seems to me Putin in starting to sound like Cindy Sheehan...
Putin sounds more and more like a stock Soviet apparatchik or nomenklatura member from the bad old days, justifying his pathetic existence from atop a mountain of corpses.
Joseph Brodsky nails the type in one of his essays from the collection “On Grief and Reason”, describing an East Bloc literary function and the creatures in attendance with their moral equivalency, trumped up phony outrage at western “crimes” and “demands” for this or that in furtherence of Soviet policy goals.
Brodsky made perceptive if unflattering observations about western fellow travelers and agents of influence attending such events, revealing them as self hating professional malcontents and witting dupes, ie., softheads and traitors.
The Treaty of Rapallo, 1922 IIRC. The Reds had just won the Civil War in Russia, Mussolini had just or was about to seize power and the Western Allies were putting the screws to Germany over reparations.
The two pariah nations decided to pool their military R&D efforts; Germany got to evade the limitations on
Versailles (sp?) placed on her military and the USSR got the benefits of tank, aircraft and submarine technologies.
bump
Nope, China killed more .... but it was over more time.
I think the Soviets used WWII to bury the real statistics of Stalin’s atrocities.
It also gave them the propaganda value of sustaining so many casualties during WWII.
Of course, they always fail to mention that Stalin and Hitler conspired to start WWII.
President Vladimir Putin has raised the prospect of a return to Soviet-style academic censorship after he accused the West of plotting to distort Russian history in an attempt to crush patriotic sentiment in schools.
The Russian leader claimed that a generation of schoolchildren was learning a version of their past that had been deliberately skewed by historians in the pay of the West.
"Many of our textbooks are written by people on foreign grants," Mr Putin told history and science teachers at a conference outside Moscow.
"They are dancing a polka ordered by those who pay for it. This is undoubtedly an instrument for influencing our country."
In a warning that will send a chill through Russia's dwindling ranks of liberal academics, the president indicated that publishing houses that did not print more patriotic textbooks would face state censorship.
"Publishing houses should become more responsible," he said. "The state should play a greater role in this respect." According to the president, Western historians have attempted to belittle the Soviet Union's role in World War II and exaggerate the negative aspects of Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s, which saw millions of Russians die.
He said Russia's past was much more benign and much less blood-soaked than that of the United States.
bttt
bttt
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.