Ah, the grand old days of black-is-white socialist realism are not entirely behind us. In the revisionist Russian regime of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin & President Dmitri Medvedev that old blackguard Josef Stalin is on his way to rehabilitation. & the latest step in that process is a libel suit being brought by the Man of Steel’s grandson against a historian who wrote a journal article that would not qualify as hagiography.
Seems that Stalin never made policy of the destruction of whole classes of Soviet citizenry (in their tens of millions); didn’t really make a deal with Adolf Hitler & refuse to believe that his fascist friend would actually breach the pact by, you know invading the Soviet Union; didn’t eviscerate the Red Army with the show trials of the 30s; didn’t order the murder of 21,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest; & blah, blah, blah.
This is an example of the cyclical nature of both historiography & national development. Were it not a desecration of every soul starved, shot, drowned, frozen, tortured & overworked to death in the service of Stalin’s ambition & by his direct mandate it would be rather farcical.
I mean, really—suing for libel instead of just eviscerating the offender in the bowels of the Lubyanka & sending his family to Siberia? Somewhere Stalin is whirling like a dreydel.
Any road—it doesn’t bode well for Russians today or the nations that interact with them.
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