Free Republic

A Russian historian whose exposure of Soviet leader Josef Stalin's crimes angered state officials is due to begin enforced psychiatric testing this week amid fears he will be falsely declared insane, his lawyer said on Tuesday. Yuri Dmitriev, 61, is on trial in northwest Russia on charges brought by state prosecutors of involving his adopted daughter, then 11, in child pornography, of illegally possessing "the main elements of" a firearm, and of depravity involving a minor. Some of Russia's leading cultural figures say Dmitriev was framed because his focus on Stalin's crimes - he found a mass grave with up...

20,762 people were shot here during the Great Terror, from August 1937 to October 1938. This former NKVD shooting range is known as one of the places of mass executions and burials of victims of Soviet-era repression. Relatives of the victims, parishioners of Moscow churches, representatives of public organizations, and the diplomatic corps take part in this “Voice of Memory” campaign every year.On Friday, October 30, 2020, on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression, the annual "Voice of Memory" will be held at the Butovo training ground in Moscow, and many will pray for the victims...

Seventy-five years ago, on August 5, 1937, one of the most horrific — and most ignored — episodes in human history began. “Operation Kulak” ("kulak" meaning rich peasants) was the Soviet Union’s effort to repress those farmers who had a little more than other farmers (according, at least, to the definitions of the Communist Party), and who resisted collectivization. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin (pictured) had begun the development of “Operation Kulak” the previous month, when he contacted all the regional Party leaders as well as the NKVD (roughly the Soviet equivalent of the Gestapo and SS in Nazi Germany), asking...

The Great Terror by: Jeff Waldmann, July 29, 2008 As a new edition of his illuminating book, The Great Terror, makes its way to the shelves, author Robert Conquest reflected back on the torrent of illuminating information about the former Soviet Union that has come out since the first edition was published four decades ago. Perhaps most shocking of all of Conquest’s revelations is that even members of the Soviet Politburo did not definitively know the truth about atrocities committed by the communist regime. This became the subject of much contentious debate under Mikhail Gorbachev. Conquest, a research fellow at...

An article in The Wall Street Journal (April 12) breathlessly informs us of the latest fad on the Incredible Shrinking Continent -- "As Religious Strife Grows, Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit: Islam's Rise Gives Boost To Militant Unbelievers; The Celebrity Hedonist," the headline teases. The "Celebrity Hedonist," isn't geriatric frat-boy Hugh Hefner, but Michel Onfray, a 48-year-old author dubbed "France's high-priest of atheism" in the Journal piece. Reporter Andrew Higgins describes the doyen of disbelief -- commander of the faith-less -- strutting onto the stage of Caen's 500-seat Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium, dressed in black from head to toe, to deliver...

THEY are barely mentioned in Russian history books and are considered an unsuitable subject for polite conversation in the post-Soviet era.Joseph Stalin’s purges left over 30 million people dead, created an enormous slave labour system known as the Gulag, and brought about the forcible deportation of whole nations of peoples. Now Russians are being forced to confront their brutal past by two new television dramas which attempt to convey the full horror of Stalin’s war against the people. The two series, one of which began broadcasting last week, aim to counter the growing perception among Russians that Stalin was a...

After 12 years of stalling, the Russian Duma has finally passed a law to compensate the sons and daughters of victims of Stalin's purges. Each will receive the equivalent of £2 a month, one free train ticket a year, 50 per cent off the cost of medicines and free false teeth. The award, paltry even by Russian standards, is the latest sorry chapter in a compensation process that has been blocked by Communists and Right-wingers alike. In Russia there has been a concerted effort to brush over the crimes of the Communist era. Officials refuse to countenance talk of atrocities...