Remember Stalin

In her article “Reins on Rememberance” Marsha Lipman in the today’s Washington Post laments Russia’s tendancy to forget it’s own bloody history during the Stalin purges of the late 1930s;

This month marks 70 years since the drastic surge of Stalin’s terror: In 1937 the Kremlin butcher scrapped even the faintest appearance of court procedures. The infamous “troika trials” — a system of justice by rubber-stamped death sentences — killed more than 436,000 in one year. The anniversary observances were intended to honor the victims. But the ceremony held earlier this month at Butovo, the site of mass killings on the outskirts of Moscow, revealed the government’s desire to keep the public’s mind off reflections about terror and its perpetrators.

The Russian Orthodox Church oversaw the ceremony, a religious service focused on the martyrdom of the executed, not on the crimes or who committed them. In an interview about three years ago, the superior of the Butovo church said he thought it best not to differentiate between those who were shot and those who shot them: “One shouldn’t search for who was right and who was wrong.”

 

Well, that might be convenient for the Russians today, but publicizing who was “wrong” could save another million-or-so lives in the near future.

There are still purges occuring throughout the world – most notably, in Iran, but the Serb government was just purging it’s territory of Kosovars just a scant few years ago. The Rwandans were ridding themselves of each other less than ten years ago. Zimbabwe is busy freeing themselves from starvation by killing farmers and their families.

I used to read voraciously about the Stalinist years since I was a teenager when Alexander Solzhenitsyn finally published his books in the west. My favorite has to be “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” which described in great detail a single day as a prisoner in the gulags – the reader can’t help but feel relief at the conclusion of the book/day. Another was Robert Conquest’s “Harvest of Sorrow” and perhaps a fitting appendix to the era was Martin Ami’s “Koba the Dread”.

I guess my point is that, although it’s probably to be expected that a Church would urge people to forgive and forget, to forego judging our antecedents – because afterall, it’s up to God to make final judgements. But in the meantime, all of us mortals should remember what misjudgements of the past brought to the world, and how close to the brink of total anhilation we came all in the name of a single man

Category: Historical, Media, Politics, Society