Stalin's murders and the West

[Derek C. Maus]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, Dave Monroe wrote:

> In the Soviet Union one simply did not have the opportunity, and
> Stalin, who not only was not held accountable for his abuses, also had
> no small control over the documentation thereof.

Um, what? Granted, Stalin wasn't *tried* for his abuses, but that was
largely because he *died*. The 1956 Party Congress distanced itself from
Stalin's policies considerably (although admittedly not with the fervor
that Nazis, other than those with rocket-knowledge or Austrian political
ambition, were pursued) and there are tons of books that document the
Gulag, whether in the form of fiction, memoir or documentary history. The
idea that the Soviet system of camps was not as accurately documented as
the Nazi camps were is a wholesale myth. Once you cut through the
euphemisms (i.e., "arrested for Trotskyite activities") the degree to
which interrogations and such were meticulously recorded in the Soviet
penal system is absolutely mind-boggling. Stalin may have controlled it,
but he certainly didn't limit it accordingly.

Check out some of the sources from these ytwo bibliographic pages if you
don't believe me:

http://www.osa.ceu.hu/gulag/bibliography.htm

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~rummel/USSR.REFERENCES.HTM

> Although given anticommunism in the postwar US--and I imagine that
> most who have actively pursued the study and memorialization of the
> Holocaust are/were no fans of Stalin, the USSR, communism,
> either--it's surprising that more wasn't done, if only for propaganda
> purposes, to document the atrocities of Stalin's regime.

How exactly would one get access to the files of the KGB and the GuLag
system during the Cold War? This is why memoirs or fictions like
Solzhenitsyn's and the vastly superior (in artistic terms) KOLYMA TALES by
Varlam Shalamov or JOURNEY INTO THE WHIRLWIND by Evgenia Ginzburg were so
popular. Nobody gave a shit that Solzhenitsyn was generally anti-Western
and an unreconstructed Russian nationalist/monarchist, since he whacked
on those dirty Commies so much.

> Point of coldwar diplomacy?  The problem of the US's own skeletons in
> the closet?  At any rate, there seems to be no end of documentation
> ongoing these days, for example, not that I've done much more than
> flip through it, Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of
> Communism ...

You think it's big in the U.S., you should see the number of books on the
subject that have come out in the F.S.U. If Sergei K. is still around, he
can probably give hte skinny on this better than I can.

This article from NY Review of Books gives a sampling of what's emerged
recently:

http://nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20000615033R

Again, I'm not trying to play the "your atrocity ain't as bad as my
atrocity" game...only to disabuse folks from a few notions about the
Stalinist terror that seem to have spread thanks to leftover Cold War
disinformation.

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Derek C. Maus               |   "Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be
dmaus at email.unc.edu         |   human beings if you didn't have some 
UNC-CH, Dept. of English    |   pretty strong feelings about nuclear
http://www.unc.edu/~dmaus/  |   combat."  --Major Kong, DR. STRANGELOVE
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