Stalin's murders and the West

[Dave Monroe]

Do note that I was responding to an earlier post taking me to task for
focusing on Hitler at the expense of, say, Stalin.  Of course, I would note
that we're ostensibly discussing a book largely set in and shortly after WWII,
in the European Theater, not to mention in Germany, in which the Germans do
figure rather more prominently than the Russians (who nonetheless are a
presence as well, and well worth discussing, i'm sure, but I've just been
doing a little reading on the V-2, is all), but ... but I think the point
being made by Jody (jporter), and being concurred with by me, concerned the
realtive paucity of outside, readily and publically available documentation,
at least in comparison to that compiled since the war in re: the Nazis.
Indeed, I think my interest in the subject goes back to a traumatic encounter
with a grandfather's set of Nuremburg Trial transcripts, complete with
photographs ...

I think the points about Stalin and access were, if not at least implicitly
acknowledged along the line, taken as so obvious they might not have needed
mentioning.  And it's always intriguing as to just how thoroughly such
atrocities are documented by their perpetrators, reminds me of how Carlo
Ginzburg (The Cheese and the Worms, The Night Battles, et al.), for example,
has been mining the excrutiatingly detailed records of the various
Inquistions, precisely ecause of their wealth of detail.  The references are
appeciated, by the way, they'll no doubt prove interesting and useful.  I do
hope nobody here is playing duelling atrocities, as the comparison of such
events does come with a certain set of problems.  I think that Doug (let me
know ...) and myself have been discussing Pynchon's references to the
Holocaust because (a) they're there and (b) they do seem particularly germane,
given the whole V-2, Germany in WWII, whatever thing.  Pynchon's texts deal
with no end of atrocities, that's for sure, and were written, published in a
context, in contexts, in which atrocities were yet ongoing, and perhaps the
biggest atrocity of 'em all (at least in terms of sheer scale) still hangs
over our heads, as it might well have over those theatergoers at the end of
Gravity's Rainbow ... question is, just how are such atrocities figured in
Pynchon's texts, and to what effect?  Still working on that here ...

"Derek C. Maus" wrote:

> Stalin wasn't *tried* for his abuses, but that was ;largely because he
> *died*

> there are tons of books that document the Gulag, whether in the form of
> fiction, memoir or documentary history.

> the degree to which interrogations and such were meticulously recorded in
> the Soviet
> penal system is absolutely mind-boggling.

> 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

> How exactly would one get access to the files of the KGB and the GuLag
> system during the Cold War?

> 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.