Tag Archives: Soviet Union

Remembering Stalin – An Affront to His Victims?

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A bust of Stalin at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia

A bust of Stalin at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia

The recent addition of a bust of Joseph Stalin in the National D-Day Memorial located in Bedford, Virginia, has created a firestorm of controversy.

Many people question whether the less-than-amicable “Uncle Joe” should be a legitimate part of a display of World War II leaders that includes U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek and French Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle.

Stalin led the former Soviet Union from 1928 to 1953. In 1939, he entered a pact with Adolph Hitler to divide Eastern Europe, but when Hitler later initiated an invasion of Soviet-held territories, Stalin joined the Allied forces to crush the Nazis.

The Memorial Foundation’s board members are reported as saying that Stalin — whether loved or hated — was an integral player in the Second World War.

But Lee Edwards, the chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, condemned the addition of the bust of Stalin, telling the Wall Street Journal: “Since the fall of the Soviet Union, statues of Joseph Stalin have been torn down all over Europe. The world is closer than ever before to a consensus on the evils of communism and Stalin’s primary role in the worst crimes of the last century.”

Even the artist commissioned to sculpt the Stalin bust had mixed feelings about his subject. “He was just a terrible person,” artist and professor Richard Pumphrey is reported as saying.

Stalin’s policies resulted in the deaths of an estimated 20 million people, and some commentators maintain he should in no way be memorialized. To do so is an affront to the survivors of his victims, they say.

Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But the question is: How should we remember the past and people like Stalin? And, in what context?

Reading Solzhenitsyn in Soviet times

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Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who passed away August 3, revealed the abuses of Soviet Gulag prison camps in the 1970s. For many, his death brought back memories of secretly copying clandestine writings and passing them hand to hand under the noses of the Soviet authorities.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, whose 2003 book Gulag: A History won a Pulitzer Prize, recalled how the first copies of Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 The Gulag Archipelago his Russian audience saw were unbound and hand-typed — “blurry, mimeographed text” with “dog-eared paper.”

“Usually, readers were given only 24 hours to finish the lengthy manuscript … before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant spending an entire day and night,” she wrote. Readers also were encouraged to type or write another copy if they could.

Clandestine books and writings by Russian authors were known as “samizdat,” meaning “self-published,” as opposed to “tamizdat” which was forbidden literature smuggled in from overseas. Along with Solzhenitsyn, some of today’s Russian classics such as Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov began their public life as samizdat.

Famous scientist and political dissident Alexander Bolonkin tried to publish samizdat on a large scale in the 1970s before his arrest, imprisonment and eventual exile to the United States. Knowing the KGB monitored printing houses, he first experimented with photo printing, and then discovered a crude form of mimeography.

“The text was typed on the fibrous paper sodden with paraffin with the help of typewriter. The obtained matrix was put on the bland print and was pressed by the roller with paint. There appeared a copy below. All the process took few seconds. The components were sold at stores. Anybody could make or buy a photoroller. Indeed the quality of the imprints was quite low,” he wrote in his memoirs.

After the collapse of Soviet Union in the late 1980s, once-forbidden literature, much of which had been smuggled abroad, became widely available. But, thanks to samizdat, writers like Solzhenitsyn did not have to wait for a new era but instead had the chance to hasten its arrival.