Posted on 12/23/2017 4:23:39 PM PST by GoldenState_Rose
A group of Russian scientists have sounded the alarm over what they said were attempts by the head of the security service to openly justify Stalin’s mass purges, the first such attempt in decades.
In an open letter published by Kommersant broadsheet, more than 30 academics slammed Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB security service – the successor to the feared KGB – for seeking to legitimise the mass purges known as the Great Terror.
Historians estimate about one million people perished in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s out of around 20 million who died under his three-decade rule before his death in 1953.
In an interview with Russian government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta published this week Bortnikov said the archives show that “a significant part” of the criminal cases of that period “had an objective side to them”.
He said he did not want to “whitewash anyone” but pointed to “links of coup plotters to foreign security agencies”.
The interview was published to mark 100 years since the establishment of the Cheka, the Soviet Union’s first secret police service, created to stamp out opposition to Bolshevik rule.
President Vladimir Putin – himself a former KGB officer – will run for a fourth Kremlin term in a March presidential election in a move expected to extend his rule until 2024 and cement his status as the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin.
Many liberals have expressed concern that the Kremlin will tighten the screws on civil society even further following Putin’s expected re-election.
In their open letter, the Russian scientists expressed fears that the “revision” of the role of the Soviet-era secret police could be intentional and called on the general public to join their protest.
“Apparently for the first time since the 20th Congress of the Communist Party held in 1956 one of the top functionaries of our state justifies mass purges of the 1930s-1940s which were accompanied by wrongful sentences, torture and executions of hundreds of thousands of innocent compatriots,” they said in the letter.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev used a secret session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party to denounce the horrors of Stalin’s rule.
The letter said that Bortnikov had failed to denounce the arrest or murder of millions of Soviet people including scientists and senior army commanders.
“The goal of Mr Bortnikov’s wide-ranging interview is not clear to us,” said the letter published on the website of the respected newspaper late Friday.
“What is it? A recommendation to a new president? Nostalgia for bygone times or the propaganda of a new doctrine?” the letter added.
“In any case we firmly protest the revision of perceptions about the inhuman and anti-popular nature of the purges and call on all sensible people – who do not wish upon their children to relive the horrors of the 1930s – to join our protest.”
Modern Russians refuse to admit this narrative angle.
Thanks for the video!
Ahha, another protegee of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn
Tell me about that picture.
Norse, I don’t want fluffy lefty Pussy Rioters controlling Russia either...but Russian patriots have been their own worst enemy when it comes to the selective editing of historical memory.
The “catalyst” for war between Russia and Germany was Hitler’s desire to convert most of the western USSR into “lebensraum” for greater Germany. The Slavic population of those areas was to be either killed outright, driven out to the East, or wiped out through gradual attrition using mandatory birth control, abortion, etc.
Stalin signed the Non-Aggression Pact, knowing the end result would be war between Germany France and Britain.
He counted on them all bleeding each other dry, allowing the Red Army to swoop in and take over the continent.
Just one problem, France fell without much of a fight, and Britain was neutralized, allowing Hitler to focus everything on attacking the Soviet Union.
Adolf Hitler, the only person Stalin ever trusted.
Geezzeee, you know your history well.
See the link at post #11
Stalin was warned about Hitler’s attack by Richard Sorge and others, but chose to ignore the warnings. Soviet exports of grain and other goods to Germany continued right up until hostilities started. Stalin was so upset by Hitler’s treachery (!) that he supposedly hid under a table in his office for days, barely able to communicate.
This is the scene in the movie “Stalin” that shows he was pretty messed up.....
https://youtu.be/A57gNcOdduo?t=8060
BTW, this is a good movie, I thought, despite the makeup, that Robert Duval did a good job in this movie.
Stalin mostly killed patriots, fearing them more than anything. Countless Chechen WWII war heroes were sent away. That FSB head is as idiotic as Germans claiming Hitler meant to protect them from Communism when Hitler wanted to replace them with islamists...
I don't know how "secret" those sessions were. I have a contemporary 1950's newspaper clipping of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. (The other side of the clipping regarded family news).
The Russians have always been ambivalent towards St. Petersburg, deliberately planned as a Western city by Peter the Great, a haven of dissident intellectuals and Western cultural influence from its founding, and not a “Russian” city in the way Moscow always has been.
Wow that’s really sick. Mass murders featured on the guys walls.
Maybe Hitler youth are featured in the next room.
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