I've read a lot of anti-communist books already. These books are not hard to come by. I am interested in things that are not as common, I am interested in things that came from the USSR, China, etc. but stuff related to the USSR and communism is only part of my interests... Right now I have a set of books that I have specifically in mind. And I have a lot of other things to get around to. I am currently reading a history of warfare, a few speeches from Khrushchev, some Salmon Rushdie, a giant bio of Hitler, a book on argument and a Star Wars novel. I'm also skimming through a bio of Che today that I've already read to pick out any interesting quotes I may have marked. I can only handle so much.
Stalin didn't murder millions, but this is exactly what the US did... 4 million Vietnamese. And try reading about the South government that the US backed. And they still lost.
Except for the fact that, the US has not abandoned war at all.
You must also be reading those new books put out in Russia today by Putin and company.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...andfather--terrifying-Putin-turning-hero.html
As new Russian schoolbooks whitewash Stalin's atrocities, one writer's very personal response.
Fifty-six years have passed since Josef Stalin died, unattended by doctors because his closest aides lived in such fear of the Soviet dictator that they dared not even approach his deathbed.
But ever since, his ghost, and the ghosts of the 20 million he killed, have refused to lie quiet. Russia is still haunted, and divided, by the memory of this most diabolical of tyrants.
For many, he's the butcher who sent hundreds of thousands of Communist Party men to their deaths in political purges and who callously condemned millions of peasants to die during man-made famines in the early Thirties.
But for most modern Russians, he is also the victor of World War II and the greatest hero of the Soviet century. And now the Kremlin is summoning Stalin's spirit in a bid to support a dangerous new brand of Russian nationalism.
This insidious process began under Vladimir Putin, with a relentless Kremlin-backed campaign to cleanse the image of Stalin and revive the notion of a Greater Russia.
And now, under Putin's supposedly liberal successor, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's schoolchildren are being fed this altered history.
A new generation of textbooks, which present Stalin as a national hero, are being used in history lessons across the nation.
'Positive history' is the message; positive even about the horrors of Stalin.
It is wrong to write a textbook that will fill the children who learn from it with horror and disgust about their past and their people,' was how the project's coordinator, Aleksandr Filippov, explained this latest propaganda campaign.
'A generally positive tone for the teaching of history will build optimism and self-assurance in the growing young generation and make them feel as if they are part of their country's bright future.'
Filippov's cheery platitudes - so reminiscent of Stalin's thought police - could have come straight out of Soviet history. And for the good of Russia's young generation, they should have stayed there.
For what's particularly worrying is that Filippov seems to share the mindless Soviet belief that all human endeavour - from history and literature to science - should serve the state.
Teaching lies about Russia's dark history won't create a generation of carefree, happy and positive youngsters. But it will - I fear - create a new generation of automatons who imagine that the State is always benevolent, always heroic and always right. Even when it is anything but.
For me, the rehabilitation of Stalin's memory and the resurgence of the secret police is more than just an abstract concern. My grandfather, Boris Bibikov, was shot somewhere near Kiev on October 14, 1937, a victim of Stalin's great Purge of the Party.
Bibikov had been a senior party man and had won the Order of Lenin aged just 29, for his role in building a giant tractor factory in Kharkov, Ukraine.
But he had also dared to support a rival of Stalin's for the top job, and, along with more than 80 per cent of the leadership of the Ukrainian party, he was arrested, tried on trumped-up charges of allegedly sabotaging the factory he helped to build, and then shot.
Like thousands of party men, he was persuaded to sign a series of detailed confessions to hair-raising crimes - confessions undoubtedly extracted under extreme psychological and physical torture.
Since the careful bureaucrats who compiled his police dossier neglected to record where he was buried, the thick KGB file which now sits on a shelf in an archive in Chernigov is the closest thing to my grandfather's earthly remains.
As the wife of 'an enemy of the people', my grandmother was also arrested and sent to the Gulag for 15 years, where she went mad. Bibikov's two children, my mother Ludmila and her sister Lenina, named after my grandfather's hero Lenin, were sent first to children's prison and then to a series of orphanages.
There, they were taught to sing: 'Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood.'
In the new textbooks, this horror show is glossed over. True, the book does cite the number of party cadres officially sentenced to death - 786,000.
But what it fails to mention is the far bloodier and more indiscriminate campaign of mass murder which Stalin was prosecuting at the same time as the Purge of the Party - his war against the peasants.
And that cost millions of lives, more even than Hitler's diabolical Holocaust.
The Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee's decree of January 5 1930, for example, declared, 'the Party is justified in liquidating the prosperous peasants [or kulaks] as a class' - and unleashed a wholesale campaign of extermination.
The Wannsee memorandum of 1942, which mapped out the Nazis' Final Solution of the 'Jewish Problem', is more famous, or rather infamous. But the Soviet Communist Party's condemnation of the kulaks was to prove twice as deadly.
Man-made famines killed millions in what the Ukrainians now describe as a 'genocide' of their people.
And while the people starved, Stalin sold grain at Depression-era prices to America to finance his industrialisation drive.
'There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness,' wrote Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, after a trip to the Ukraine.
The young British socialist Malcolm Muggeridge took a train to Kiev at the height of the famine, where he found that what grain supplies that did exist were being given to army units brought in to keep starving peasants from revolting.
Embittered, the idealistic Muggeridge left the Soviet Union, convinced he had witnessed 'one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened'.
In Germany, Holocaust denial is a crime. In Russia, denying Stalin's crimes - or at least diminishing them - has become part of the Kremlin's new political correctness
And these changing attitudes are most strikingly demonstrated not in Kremlin directives but in the details of Moscow life.
On the recent anniversary of the Soviet victory in World War II, Russia's capital was filled with reproduction Soviet posters from the Forties featuring red flags and a smiling Stalin.
And last month, a gleaming brass inscription in praise of Stalin was restored in the Moscow metro.
One journalist who wrote an article critical of Soviet war veterans found his flat picketed by thugs from the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth group, and the internet flooded with a seemingly orchestrated campaign calling for him to leave the country as a traitor.
But most strikingly, last year an internet poll organised by a national TV station to find the Hero of Russia put Stalin in third place - amid widespread rumours, spread by his admirers, that the results had been rigged and he'd really come first.
Last month, Stalin's grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, even tried to sue a Moscow newspaper for defaming his famous ancestor, claiming that Stalin never personally signed any death warrants. Mercifully, a Moscow court threw out the case.
But Anatoly Yablokov, author of the offending Novaya Gazeta piece, says such a legal case as Dzhugashvili's would have been unthinkable until recently. Under Putin, however, it has become all too possible.
'I am depressed to say that there has been a change in the way society views Stalin,' Yablokov told a preliminary court hearing. 'We hear much more now about how effective Stalin was at modernising Russia, and much less about the repression.'
It's not just the memory of Stalin which is being buffed up - it's the legacy of the KGB, too.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, when Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost revealed the full enormity of the crimes of the KGB and its predecessors, a deep and visceral hatred of the KGB was unleashed.
That hatred found its most dramatic manifestation on the night in 1991 when a screaming crowd toppled the statue of the KGB's founder, Felix Dzherzhinsky, from its plinth in front of the KGB headquarters on Moscow's Lyubyanka Square.
Their wrath was understandable: of all the murderous machines of state terror which the 20th century produced, from Hitler's SS to Mao's Red Guards, it was the KGB which was the most deadly.
They spied on the entire nation, ran the death camps and created a national culture of fear, suspicion and paranoia.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has promoted some of the country's top spies to top positions in the FSB
But Vladimir Putin, a career KGB officer, has done everything in his power to rehabilitate the image of his alma mater. 'There is no such thing as a former KGB man,' Putin said early in his reign. And so it has proved.
In his nine years in power, he has managed to achieve the seemingly impossible: not only to cast the KGB's successor, the FSB, as a heroic band of patriots battling to protect the Motherland, but also to make the FSB far more popular than the KGB had been in the Soviet years.
Recent polls show that the FSB is now one of the most trusted institutions in modern Russia, with nearly 60 per cent of respondents saying that they believed that being a secret policeman was an 'honourable' profession.
At the same time, the FSB is, amazingly, larger than the Soviet KGB ever was, and more powerful, as Putin has promoted former spooks to top positions in the Kremlin, the government and the regions.
'I can report that the takeover of Russia by the Special Organs is going well,' Putin joked to an audience of KGB men in 2004 - but there was nothing to laugh about because his remark was totally true.
Russia's tragedy is that horror stories are commonplace. Nearly every family has some tale of a relative who suffered under Stalin.
How, then, has this drive to cast Stalin as a hero, rather than a mass murderer, become so successful?
Part of the reason is that Russians were so deeply humiliated during the Yeltsin years - when their country slipped into abject poverty before disintegrating and being looted by its rulers - that they are willing to believe any myth of national greatness that can erase the reality of the nation's fall from grace.
For the reality of Russia's past is just too hard to face. Even for the descendants of gulag prisoners and peasants murdered by Stalin, it's often easier to believe that they are citizens of a great nation which was led by a great man to a great victory against the Nazis.
The alternative - that Russia was led by a psychopathic Georgian bank-robber who ordered the deaths of millions of his own people and would have preferred to sit out the war as Hitler's ally if the Nazis had not reneged on their non-aggression treaty and attacked Russia in 1941 - is just too depressing.
Germany can afford to wallow in guilt for its role in the war and the Holocaust because it has half a century of great economic achievements and a liberal society to point to as proof that things have changed.
Russia has no such achievements, so it's no surprise that it has to reach into its past for myths to shore up the nation's collective ego, which has been so badly battered by two decades of military defeat, shrinking influence and economic meltdown.
Stalin is the dominant figure of the Russian century - and since the Russians can't afford to hate him, they have begun to love him instead. And that should make us all very worried indeed.
million-people-including-grandfather--terrifying-Putin-turning-hero.html#ixzz2fuX48KiM
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
