Free Republic

Archives from Stalin’s secret police have become a flash point because of the rise of a movement that has sought to idolize Stalin as a leader who defeated Nazi Germany, spurred industrialization and made the Soviet Union a superpower. Last year, the Kremlin promoted a study guide for high school teachers that deems Stalin “one of the most successful leaders of the U.S.S.R.,” while describing his “cruel exploitation” of the population. Mr. Putin himself has acknowledged the losses under Stalin, but has said Russians should not be made to feel ashamed of them. “We do have bleak chapters in our...

Tens of millions were swept up in the gulag, shipped off to exile, forced labor, and often death. The victims included ethnic minorities and the intelligentsia, but also, less well known, the so-called kulaks. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who documented the Soviet penal system in "The Gulag Archipelago," wrote of the nearly 2 million kulaks deported between 1930 and 1931: "This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it." ... As the "resettlement" of the kulaks continued, millions of other "undesirables" joined them in internal exile. Yagoda's "grandiose plan" to...