'They Served the Cheka' Billboards in Russia Honor Stalin's Executioners

VLADIMIR, Russia -- Anna Galinkina was appalled recently to see portraits of Stalin-era secret-police officers festooning celebratory billboards at local bus stops.

Her father, Zinovy Galinkin, was sent to the gulag shortly after World War II on flimsy accusations of "anti-Soviet propaganda," and she resents the rehabilitation of those who persecuted her family under the government of President Vladimir Putin.

"Today it is obvious that they've removed their masks...The ruling corporate elite of heirs of the Soviet chekists" -- a reference to the former secret police -- "are openly taking revenge on those who refuse to let society forget about the crimes of their predecessors."

Putin and many of his closest advisers are veterans of the Soviet KGB. Over the nearly two decades that Putin has been in power, Russia has seen the steady buffing of the image of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and efforts to downplay the significance of his crimes against his own people.

The Vladimir billboard campaign, created by the local museum of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor organization to the KGB, features portraits and short, sanitized biographies of officers who served in the Soviet security services.

The campaign uses the slogan, "They served in the ChK," referring to the Russian abbreviation for the "extraordinary commission" that was set up in 1917 to combat "counterrevolution." That abbreviation -- pronounced "cheka" -- produced the word "chekist" to refer to anyone who served in security forces, including the notorious NKVD under Stalin and the KGB during the later Soviet period.

To be fair, it’s kind of hard to blame him when Karl Marx, the guy who practically instigated the Russian Revolution with his crackpot theories (with there being plenty of evidence he instigated it largely so he could make a gorier remake of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror), was at least ethnically Jewish (not to mention a whole lot of the Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, were ethnically Jewish). Of course, that being said, Marx was arguably an even WORSE anti-Semite, since he denounced Jews as “money-lovers”, and strongly implied they should be either completely separated, or otherwise wiped out (in other words, Marx was arguably the guy who first asked the “Jewish Question” that Hitler’s Final Solution was meant to address).

I see this differently. I see it as Solzhenitsyn being a very talented and capable, but with few significant flaws main being that he got attached to ideologies. He entered his GULAG chamber as a full on communist thinking Stalin has done nothing wrong except for the small oversight of sending him to GULAG by mistake and mistakes happen.

He was sent to an “elite” part and was surrounded by very educated men, who admired his natural intellect and were aghast by his brainwashing.

What is often not mentioned is that he spent his evenings in GULAG using this intellect to argue against these erudite and smart men justifying all these atrocities and Stalin’s actions. He couldn’t avoid them as the chamber door was locked and there was no one to talk to, but here’s the important part: HE STAYED FANATICAL COMMIE THROUGHOUT the whole time. Mellowed down by the end I am sure, but he still stayed commie.

Only after those who survived were released and the immediate heat of an argument was gone did he start to consider the arguments he had heard and reconsidered. ONLY THEN.

He was a good enough man who then seeked up his former mentors and admitted them he had been wrong. Only after that we got GULAG Archipelago.

Then quite a bit after that he was given a new ideology and he showed bad judgement just as before ab embraced it just like he had embraced Stalinism before. The new ideology said IT WAS THE JEWS. At that time he was no longer locked in a chamber with erudite men holding him in check and that JEW thing was what he ran with until the rest of his life.

He was by all accounts a very brilliant person, but he was someone who was impressionable to dishonest manipulators and really needed erudite and smart men to hold him to reality. Something more was given in some aspects in brain and something less in others.

Like I said, Solzhenitsyn sort of has a point regarding blaming the Jews for Communism, especially the Soviet-style of Communism, since a surprisingly large percentage of the Bolsheviks (including Leon Trotsky), not to mention Karl Marx himself, were ethnic Jews (note that I didn’t say they were religious Jews, just that they were ethnic Jews. All of them were atheistic, and thus obviously didn’t adhere to a religion. Well, okay, there were rumors that Karl Marx was a Satanist, but the others, no, they didn’t hold to religion at all, being militant atheists.).

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