« Previous ·
Home
· Next »
Filed under: Russia
Can you imagine any more horrible, googly-eyed pumpkin on any doorstep this Halloween season?
As his All Hallow's Eve gift to the world, Vladimir Putin visited a site of Soviet mass murder, the proud KGB spy defiling it with his very presence, and rationalized the killing, saying: "Such tragedies have occurred more than once in the history of mankind."
You're a shameless liar, Mr. Putin, and you behave just like the Soviet thugs who came before you and taught you, at whose teet you sucked. The Soviet government was BY FAR the worst killer of civilians in world history, its actions have no parallel in the records of human habitation of the Earth. The Soviet Union killed 54.7 million between 1917 and 1987, and China killed only 35.6 million between 1949 and 1987. Even if there were other regimes that were worse than Russia's, or remotely close to being as bad, rationalization only helps to justify and continue the outrage. Not until the people of Russia become civilized enough to understand this, and to demand that their leaders do as well, will their lives ever begin to genuinely improve over the long haul.
Talk about a ghost story!
Publius Pundit takes this opportunity to wish all our readers a happy, ghoulish, horrifying Halloween! Ve vant to drink your blood! And those concerned about Russia can take this holiday also as a kind of Thanksgiving Day if they are lucky enough not to live in Russia, and a day of prayer for those who do. In Russia, they have no such luxury as this holiday, for every day is the real thing, not a matter for light-hearted jocularity.
Social Bookmarking:
 del.icio.us |  digg |  technorati |  stumble upon |  furl |  reddit
Comments
Artfldgr says:
i am getting tired of how many people are A-Historical.. that they talk as if their imaginations represent the actual history. they percieve that nothing happened not because it didnt happen, but beacuse how audacious, evil, and nasty it would be if it did, and that they HAVE to deny it, in order to feel better about themselves. otherwise they were a small part of it, not understanding that complicity DOES make a difference, and ignorance in THIS case IS a valid excuse.
however, Russian Bear shows that even accepting humble ignorance is not in the 'nature' of the situation. one cant accept the diminishment of not being fully aware of the totaltiarian states actions, as if some denial of that, proves that it wasnt that way.
well, here is my answer to you.. you wanted sources. you get sources... the sources were the Russian state itself!! now who are you going to believe, when all your options are against your point? the only people believing different are useful idiots who have a different feeling about events. obviously the russian state who released the day to day records, believes what happened. obviously putin believes what happens, being a chekist he can apprciate the false benifits, and usefulness. and those in the west not deluded by their own inability to get their mind around it, know what happens.
is it lonely where you are, standing by yourself in a land of fantasy?
I am one of the live withesses. I lived in the USSR between 1954 and 1987. And I do not remember, and even had never heard of any events that could cause unnatural death of 8.1 mln. of Soviet people. What was that? Famines, wars or any kind of government actions? What kind of democide is your sourse talking about?
You admit that you were there DURING totalitarian state control, a control that they admit to, and you still sit there and believe that you would actually know what is happening? however, lets give you your wont.
At least 15 of 114 GULAG camps supported the construction of nuclear facilities.6 In late 1947, over 20,000 prisoners were working in Ozersk, and about 10,000 were in Sarov. There were over 18,000 prisoners in Novouralsk during 1950-51. Over 27,000 were in Zheleznogorsk in 1953.
Source: These 15 camps contained about 100,000 prisoners out of the 2.7 million in the GULAG as of 1950. E. Animitsa, N. Vlasova, E. Dvoryadkina, N. Novikova, and V. Safronov, Russia's Closed Nuclear Cities: Features of Development and Management (Yekaterinburg: Urals State Economics University, 2002).
The Soviet government adopted several measures to minimize the security risk posed by the prison labor force. The KGB's policy was not to send prisoners with sentence terms of less than five years or those with sentences expiring in less than three years to nuclear sites. After completing nuclear construction projects, the prisoners finished their terms at the Vorkuta camps in Siberia, which were famous for their remoteness and harsh conditions. When released from the camps, the prisoners were sent to far away regions in the north and to Central Asia. Only in 1955, after several cooling-off years, were some of them allowed to return to central Russia. According to a journalist's account: "[T]he news spread quickly throughout all GULAG camps that [a nuclear construction assignment] was effectively the same as a death sentence." Source: [Vladimir Gubarev, "Main Object," Sovetskaya Belarrusia, 23 August 2003.]
Did you know what was going on at the nuclear development sites? Did you know what was going on at the biological weapons sites? Were you high up in the Dumas, or were you just an average lumpen proletariat who they would not inform anything to as there is no need for you to know?
Its hard to just pick out stuff from 1954 onward to the fall of the wall.. but not that hard, the prisoners sent there in 1953 were not let out… and after that, the things get a bit harder as the numbers were never as large as before stalins death. But that doesn’t reletivate that torture and experimentation on the population (even now with their policies), is the way of life of the leadership.
And you picked your date because 1953, the year of stalins death marks for soviets the presumed end of the system. meanwhile, it deflects the actual assertions date… which is 1917 to 1987.. NOT 1954 to 1987…
You conveniently cut off 37 of the worst years, and then assert that she is wrong as if those 37 years were not included in the original assertion..
Since it starts in 1917, and NOT 1954… lets include some of the largest things…
First, check out the SIZE of Kolmya, it was an area 6 TIMES The size of france and composed of more than 100 camps.
In 1956, kruschev made the public think he was a good guy by pardoning everyone in the system… but he was a part of those purges himself!!! Particularly the period in the 1930s when they murdered well over 400,000 ukrainians.
in 1944-46, Khrushchev was responsible for the liquidation of the Ukrainian Catholic Church and continued the suppression of the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalic Church.
in 1954-55, with his so-called virgin land policy, he precipitated a forcible resettlement of countless Ukrainian youth, male and female, to Kazakhstan. This, too, was really an act of genocide, a nation-destroying type of deportation under cover of economic resettlement.
Mr. Arens. - How many graves were discovered?
Mr. Pavlovych. - During the period from May 24 to October 7, we discovered on Pidlisna Street 39 graves. One was empty; 5,644 bodies were in them.
Then, in the Orthodox Cemetery, 42 graves, 2,405 bodies; and in the Park of Culture and Recreation - we call it Gorky Park - 14 graves, 1,390 bodies.
Mr. Arens. - How many bodies were discovered in all?
Mr. Pavlovych. - 9,439.
Mr. Arens. - In how many mass graves?
Mr. Pavlovych. - Ninety-five graves altogether.
Mr. Arens. - Where photographs taken of the bodies and the graves?
Mr. Pavlovych. - Yes.
They dug them up themselves, they photographed them… and you sit here and play games as to these things asserting that you would know as if you were stalin himself!
Mr. Prychodko. - I was in slave labor camps in Ivdel, about 600 miles northeast of Sverdlov. At the end of my time in the concentration camp, I was on the edge of death because of extremely hard work and scarce food. In the entire complex there were 350,000 slaves. In the particular camp in which I was interned, there were around 3,000 slave laborers. The rate of death was approximately 15 per day while I was there.
Maybe we know because not everyone was killed… because the archives were opened… because generals defected not being able to stomach being a part of that system.
Its not just the murders, its this process of cultural genocide too
The Russian language is being forced upon Ukraine and is being branded as a second mother language. What I mean to say is that now it appears that there are two mother languages: on is the Ukrainian's native language and another one is forced - Russian.
Moreover, the population of Ukraine forms actually 21 percent of the whole population of the Soviet Union. Of the journals in the Soviet Union, there are being published at present only 3 percent in the Ukrainian language.
However, when we consider the Russian population, which is about 50 percent of the Soviet Union's, we see that there are about 92 percent of journals and magazines in the Russian language and 81 percent of books being published in that language.
This naturally is another means of the Russification policy being pursued by Khrushchev. Even during Stalin's regime the figures were more favorable toward Ukraine.
The teaching of the complete history of Ukraine is not permitted.
THIS is why the states that have separated want them out…
How about the Katyn Forest Massacre? 21,857 executed outright…
One of the things fitrs what stalin said… he realized that our minds were not meant to handle numbers that are so large…
One death is a tradjedy, a million deaths a statistic.
The outrage for the 3000 killed in the world trade center is humongous compared to the outrage from one of thousands of events the soviets have accomplished that killed many many more.
250,000 executed by the Cheka during the "Red Terror" and Russian civil war. (citing The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police by George Leggett)
Between 300,000 and 500,000 Cossacks killed or deported in 1919 and 1920
7.2 to 10.8 million deaths during dekulakization and collectivization (citing Stalin and His Hangmen: the Tyrant and Those Who Killed For Him by Donald Rayfield)
700,000 executed during the Great Terror of 1937-38 (citing Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore); [this does not include those who were beaten/tortured to death during "interrogation" or deaths in the gulag during this time, which would put it over a million.]
1 million Polish citizens deported by November 1940; 30% of whom were dead by 1941 (citing Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore) and 21,857 executed outright (i.e. Katyn) by the NKVD during the Nazi-Soviet pact (citing Autopsy for an Empire by Dimitri Volkogonov)
4.5 million (citing Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum) to 12 million (citing How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the Concerned Citizen by John G. Heidenrich) deaths in the Gulag from 1918 to 1956.
To all this you can add the ethic cleansing of minorities… Chechens, Crimean taters, kalmyks, Volga germans, and the list goes on…
I do want to begin with a brief account of what we have learned about the camps since the time of Stalin's death, and in particular what we know now that we did not know 10 years ago. For I do not want to claim that, in writing a narrative history of the Gulag,1 I have discovered a new topic that has never been touched upon before: Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, the history of the camp system that he published in the West in the 1970s, largely got it right. Although he had no access to archives, and based all of his writing on letters and memoirs of other prisoners, he did, it now appears, get the general outline of the history right, proving that prisoners' gossip was not so wrong as many historians tried to claim.
In the years I spent researching this book, however, I concluded that archives can make a difference. I was able to work in archives in Moscow and Karelia, and had access to many documents already copied out of archives in St. Petersburg, Perm, Vorkuta, Kolyma, and Novosibirsk. At one point, I was handed a part of the archive of a small camp called Kedrovy Shor, in the far north, and politely asked if I wanted to buy it--which I did, of course.
What was available to me was often quite ordinary--the day-to-day archive of the Gulag administration, for example, with inspectors' reports, financial accounts, letters from the camp directors to their supervisors in Moscow. Yet when reading these documents, the full extent of the system, and its importance to the Soviet economy, comes into focus.
Thanks to archives, we now know that there were at least 476 camp systems, each one made up of hundreds, even thousands of individual camps or lagpunkts, sometimes spread out over thousands of square miles of otherwise empty tundra. We know that the vast majority of prisoners in them were peasants and workers, not the intellectuals who later wrote memoirs and books. We know that, with a few exceptions, the camps were not constructed in order to kill people--Stalin preferred to use firing squads to conduct mass executions.
Ok… so the reasearcher got his information from the records of the camps themselves. you can also see that stalin was also acutely aware of the semblance difference between efficiently killing people with special facilities, and just killing them with no special attention..
between 1929, when they first became a mass phenomenon, and 1953, the year of Stalin's death, some 18 million people passed through them. In addition, a further 6 or 7 million people were deported, not to camps but to exile villages. In total, that means the number of people with some experience of imprisonment in Stalin's Soviet Union could have run as high as 25 million, about 15 percent of the population.
Could this be why the older people don’t want to go near the internet? That they know that the whole thing can come back with just an order from someone… that the reason it doesn’t exist is not that its BAD, but that no one thinks it will fulfill their current goals, since their games are with the west who does care. if the west fell, you can be sure that these camps WOULD come back… you only need to know that the same forces in the US have already built similar ones in the US!!! (you can find the documentation at army.mil). after all, the biggest lesson that stalin taught us was that the state can get away with it IF the state does it in a big way… then the minds cant comprehend it and the dissonance causes it not to register. Everyone believes its an exaggeration, that it couldn’t be that big, etc.
That in and of itself is a major portion of soviet intrigue in the world… AUDACITY as a cover.
If we had sent civilians, we would first have had to build houses for them to live in. And how could civilians live there? With prisoners it is easy--all you need is a barrack, a stove with a chimney, and they survive. - Alexei Loginov, former deputy commander of the Norilsk camps, north of the Arctic Circle
Maybe this is how we know… unlike the pharohs, stalin didn’t have everyone else killed upon his death.
The reports reminded me of the inspectors of Gogol's era: The forms were observed, the reports were filed, and effects on actual human beings were ignored. Camp commanders were routinely reprimanded for failing to improve living conditions, living conditions continued to fail to improve, and the discussion ended there.
The level of detail also, however, clears up any remaining doubt about who was in control of the camp, the central government or the regional bosses. Back in Moscow, they knew what the camps were like, and they knew in great detail.
No wiggle room, its their own archives that is the source of the information.
Without question, the expansion of the camps distorted the Soviet economy. With so much cheap labor available, the Soviet economy took far longer than it should have to become mechanized. Problems were solved by calling for more workers. With so many poorly trained people working under coercion, construction was not of the highest quality either. By one account, labor productivity among free workers in the forestry industry was nearly three times that of the prisoners working in the forestry camps.
But the camps also distorted the way people in the lands of the former Soviet Union think about economics, a point I would like to illustrate by describing a trip I took a couple of years ago to the city of Vorkuta, on the Arctic Circle.
Vorkuta's history begins in 1931, when a group of colonists first arrived in the region by boat, up the northern waterways. Although even the tsars had known about the region's enormous coal reserves, no one had managed to work out precisely how to get the coal out of the ground, given the sheer horror of life in a place where temperatures regularly drop to -30 degrees or -40 degrees in the winter, where the sun does not shine for six months of the year, and where--as I can testify--in the summertime flies and mosquitoes travel in great dark clouds.
But Stalin found a way by making use of another sort of vast reserve. Vorkuta's 23 original settlers were, of course, prisoners, and the leaders of that founding expedition were, of course, secret policemen. Over the subsequent two and a half decades, a million more prisoners passed through Vorkuta, one of the two or three most notorious hubs of the Gulag.
With the help of prisoners, the Soviet authorities built a city with shops and schools and later swimming pools. Yet the cost of heating shoddy Soviet apartment blocks for 11 months of the year was astronomical, far more than the value of the coal itself. The city's infrastructure, built on constantly shifting permafrost, required huge efforts to maintain. Miners could, instead, have been flown in and out on two-week shifts, as they are in Canada or Alaska. Nevertheless, Vorkuta, now a city of 200,000 people, kept going throughout the 1970s and 1980s and still exists today.
The truth, of course, is that Vorkuta was and still is completely unnecessary. Why build kindergartens and university lecture halls in the tundra? Why build puppet theatres? Vorkuta has three. Yet in Vorkuta, you cannot ask such questions, even now.
You cannot ask them, for example, of Zhenya, a retired geologist with whom I spent the better part of a day. Together, we walked around the city, around the prisoners' cemeteries, around the ruined geological institute--a once-solid structure, complete with a columned, Stalinist portico and a red star on the pediment. Although her Polish parents had been arrested and deported here in the 1940s, although she knows and willingly recounts the city's history, Zhenya nevertheless spent a good part of the day railing against the "thief-democrats" and "greedy bureaucrats" who had, rather sensibly, decided to shut the institute down. If your whole life has been associated with a place, it is hard to admit that the place need never have existed.
So rather than be the good hero they now make him out to be, like a socialist in the west, the actions ended up increasing the misery for longer and longer. (fdr and the new deal)
One of the things that always strikes contemporary visitors to Russia is the lack of monuments to the victims of Stalin's execution squads and concentration camps. There are a few scattered memorials, but no national monument or place of mourning. Worse, 15 years after glasnost, 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been no trials, no truth and reconciliation commissions, no government inquiries into what happened in the past, and no public debate.
This was not always the case. During the 1980s, when glasnost was just beginning in Russia, Gulag survivors' memoirs sold millions of copies, and a new revelation about the past could sell out a newspaper. But more recently, history books containing similar "revelations" are badly reviewed or ignored. The president of Russia is a former KGB agent who describes himself as a "Chekist," the word for Stalin's political police.
The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. Life is genuinely difficult in Russia today, and most Russians, who spend all of their time trying to cope, do not want to discuss the past. The Stalinist era was a long time ago, and a great deal has happened since it ended. Post-Soviet Russia is not the same as post-Nazi Germany, where the memories of the worst atrocities were still in people's minds.
But there is also a question of pride. Like Zhenya, many experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a personal blow. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel, but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad.
Far and away, though, the most important explanation for the lack of debate is not the fears and anxieties of the ordinary Russian, but the power and prestige of those now ruling the country. In December 2001, on the 10th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 13 of the 15 former Soviet republics were run by former communists, as were many of the satellite states.
To put it bluntly, former communists have no interest in discussing the past. It tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their image as "reformers." Sometimes they end discussion subtly; sometimes they do so bluntly. Just a few weeks ago, Hungary's new post-communist government cut the funding and fired the board of directors of Budapest's new museum dedicated to the history of communism and fascism, which the previous government had erected at great cost.
And this matters: The failure to acknowledge or repent affects politics and society across the region. Would the Russians truly be able to conduct a war in Chechnya if they remembered what Stalin did to the Chechens? During the Second World War, Stalin accused the Chechens of collaboration with the Germans, but instead of punishing collaborators--if there were any--he punished the whole nation. Every Chechen man, woman, and child was put on a truck or a cattle car and sent to the deserts of Central Asia. Thousands wound up in camps. Half of them died. To invade Chechnya again, at the end of the 20th century, was the moral equivalent of Germany re-invading Poland, yet very few Russians saw it that way.
Yet the failure to fully absorb the lessons of the past has consequences for ordinary Russians too. It can be argued, for example, that the Russian failure to delve properly into the past also explains the Russian insensitivity to the slow growth of censorship, and to the continued, heavy presence of the secret police.
It may also explain the stunning absence of judicial and police reform. In 1998, I visited a criminal prison in Arkhangelsk and emerged reeling from what I'd seen. The women's cells, with their hot, heavy air and powerful smells, made me feel as if I were walking back into the past. Next door, in the juvenile cell, I met a sobbing, 15-year-old girl who had been accused of stealing the ruble equivalent of $10. She had been in jail, without a hearing, for a week.
Afterwards, I spoke to the prison boss. It all came down to money, he told me. The prison warders were rude because they were badly paid. The ventilation was bad because the building was old and needed repairs. Electricity was expensive, so the corridors were dark. Trials were delayed because there were not enough judges.
I was not convinced. Money is a problem, but it is not the whole story. If Russia's prisons look like a scene from a Gulag memoir, and if Russia's courts and criminal investigations are a sham, that is partly because the Soviet legacy does not haunt Russia's criminal police, secret police, judges, jailers, or even businessmen. But then, very few people in contemporary Russia feel the past to be a burden or an obligation at all. Like a great, unopened Pandora's box, the past lies in wait for the next generation.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/RussiaandEurasia/HL-800.cfm
Post a comment
TrackBack
TrackBack URL: http://publiuspundit.com/mt/contages.cgi/456
|
