…that is of no interest:
Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The commonly accepted version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.
For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.
Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:
H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .
M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .
H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.
M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!
H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.
One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.
As she points out, there should be at least as much opprobrium for defending, or being associated with communists as there is with Nazis. They did, after all, murder many more people. Instead, their fellow travelers continue to travel freely in academia, and pollute the minds of our youth. And as the documents show, they continue to run Europe as well.
[Update a few minutes later]
I hadn’t read the whole thing when I first posted this. Here is another gem:
And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?
Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.
Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
You should really read the whole thing.
If I was someone who had made a fortune during the dot-com era, I would offer to finance the translation of these documents as well as provide a place to archive them. Or if I had made money like Mark Cuban in the telecom bubble. Unfortunately, I did neither.
I am not surprised that many in the E.U system are “fellow travelers”. I suspect many far left democrats here in the U.S. are the same.
Bob-1 will be bored again, too much anti-communist stuff for his taste.
I did read it. Scary, glad I moved to the U.S. My brothers still live in the UK and they keep telling me not to go back! It would seem from their point of view that a general air of futility has settled over the continent and no matter what happens there is always going to be an overbearing and very large self-serving bureaucracy. No intention of going back now, to much invested in this country.
BTW; if any Americans ever think the US bureaucracy is bad, it pales into insignificance compared with Europe. We must never let it get any larger and we should preferably shrink it.
In that case we should talk about any red herring he might offer instead should he deign to do so.
I don’t think anyone should be surprised at Gorby’s cold bloodedness. One does not rise to that position (in that kind of system) without a willingness to see other people as expendable. The most charitable thing you can realistically say about the man is that his misunderstanding of the true nature of his own system, caused him to take actions that helped lead to the system’s demise. His part in ending the cold war was unintentional.
Not at all surprising, even though it should be. Another good reason for gutting our humint. right? Journalism? [crickets chirping] Leadership, uh huh. Corruption and liars with the media playing along. We need a radical revitalization of principles.
Biden, the coal miners daughter.
Several years ago, I visited the Holocause Museum in Washington, DC. It was a very moving experience, especially since I knew a survivor of Buchenwald. Perhaps one day there will be a museum to the victims of this other, much larger holocaust. I’m not holding my breath.
They did, after all, murder many more people. Instead, their fellow travelers continue to travel freely in academia, and pollute the minds of our youth.
Talk to someone who defends Chinese Communism about the 30+ million Mao killed and they’ll tell you it’s old news — yesterday’s ChiComs may have been bad but today’s ChiComs are oh so much better, enlightened even. (Just ignore those 800 missiles pointed at Taiwan.)
Your comment misrepresents me (and doesn’t provide the context). I wouldn’t be surprised if a communist note taker similarly misrepresented Biden’s views.
Biden doesn’t have any views Bob, he’s presidential, a real statesman (blithering idiot.)
Ken, “blatherskite” is a better description. More forceful and a single word! Describes most politicians.
The point is that the narrators are particularly unreliable. I see questioning about whether the documents are authentic, but none over whether they are accurate. And yet, the narrators are the sort that killed more people than Hitler; they are definitely liars, and probably lie to themselves. Note that the commentary on Biden is self-serving to the politburo members.
The point is that the narrators are particularly unreliable. I see questioning about whether the documents are authentic, but none over whether they are accurate.
No, Bob, the point is that no one in the media or academia is even curious about whether or not they are. You’d think that at the least they’d want to ask Biden and Lugar.
I’m curious about what Gorby says. The article claims that he says the notes are authentic, but I wonder if he ever said anything about the accuracy of their content. In any case, you’d never believe what Biden, Lugar, or Gorby said (which is why it seems funny that you’d even consider what commie note takers said)
Bob, do you understand how historians do history?
It doesn’t matter what or who I believe. We have the Soviets’ version of the story. We ought to get the other side, and document it. But for some reason, no one seems to want to know.
Including you. I wonder why?
By the way, Cecil, if you want to promote the false idea that I’m sympathetic to communism, I want you to know that I personally know many victims of Soviet and Yugoslavian communism. In the 1980s, when Soviet Jews were trickling out of the Soviet Union, my family assisted newcomers to America. Their stories of oppression made a life-long impact on me. We also knew a Czech who got out the hard way. In my part of Chicago, it hard to not know people from Poland with stories of their own, and my wife is very close with a family who left Poland (again, in the 1980s). I was in Hungary shortly after it became free, and in one small village where Americans were quite the novelty, my party was asked to sing the Star Spangled Banner before dinner (needless to say, dinner was full of stories about communist oppression). These days, I’m good friends with Croatians who have vivid stories about how the communists stole everything their family owned, and then had the nerve to punish them further when communist propaganda didn’t seem to be very persuasive. I don’t know a thing about you, but now you know something about me: I’ll never truly understand the depths to which the communists made my friends and acquaintances miserable, but I do have some idea.
Essentially we already have a Communist country now in the southwest portion of what used to be the United States of America. All that remains is for the People’s Republic of Aztlan to declare itself. All of California and New Mexico and major parts of Arizona, Nevada, and Texas are Aztlan-controlled, and both major political parties in the US have offered their support.
Ken, I assume you are not Ken Anthony, who knows better.
There’s an Arizona business owner with a nice house. The People’s Republic of Aztlan comes to his house with armed men, throws him out on the stret, turns his house into a dorm, shuts down his business, makes sure he is eligible for only menial labor jobs while his kids go to a uniformed indoctrination program.
Right? If not, then what do you mean?
Bob-1,
I think Rand is saying that whatever the validity of Stroilov’s work (and none of should be taken at face value), western academia and media do not seem interested in looking into it. The subject of communist atrocities does not seem to be a valid area of study.
Andy, I like it. I’ll add it to my vocab.
do you understand how historians do history?
He may be confusing historians with history book writers.
not Ken Anthony
Correct. I wouldn’t think a Bob-1 would be confused. I’m not sure what Aztlan-controlled means. I do know lot’s of La Raza types would like to cut away parts of our country for their own. As for communism, I’m not sure their are any capitalist left (as Rand points out, capitalism is a Marxist word. That is a form of infiltration right there.) Free enterprise has never really been fully tried. Unlike communism, the little free enterprise that has been tried has worked spectacularly well… even in communist countries. Communism leads to death.
I’m saying that if the narrator is as unreliable as I expect, the history to be learned will only be a history of Soviet self-deception. The subject of communist atrocities is certainly a valid and current area of study. I don’t know much about the current research but here’s some speculation: There are millions of living witnesses and participants of communist oppression to be interviewed directly, so perhaps official communist records get put on the backburner.
Communism leads to death.
I should have finalized my thought. …which everyone would know if journalistic organizations did their job and weren’t ideologically inclined to continue last centuries genocide into the next.
the history to be learned will only be a history of Soviet self-deception
So be it. You don’t filter the data, you collect it.
if the narrator is as unreliable as I expect
How can your preconceived notion be validated if nobody bothers to translate and compare it with other sources?
Gorbachev not a nice guy? How shocking!. I have a book called Biohazard. It was written by a Soviet scientist who was a researcher in the old USSR’s bioweapons program. The man defected to the West just prior to the collapse of the the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. He tells about how Gorby signed off on a very large increase in the Russian biowar program including, if I recall correctly, efforts to weaponize nasty stuff like Ebola. Apparently, given the then terminal state of the Soviet economy, he viewed bioweapons as a poor man’s nukes.
M. Gallagher
There are millions of living witnesses and participants of communist oppression to be interviewed directly, so perhaps official communist records get put on the backburner.
Bob, did all the official Nazi documents “get put on the back burner”? If not, should they have? And if they had, what would Shirer have done?
Do you think before you post?
The Nazis’ records weren’t nearly as compelling as the physical evidence and the testimony of the victims and the participants. Trying to learn about Biden from Soviet note taking isn’t as awful as trying to learn about Jews from Nazi note taking, but it isn’t that persuasive either. There is plenty to be learned from Soviet records, but I don’t see why we would put much weight on what they said about Biden.
Bob, given your stated claim of personal knowledge of life in certain communist countries it is even more shocking now than before that you find anti-communism “boring”.
Bob, given your stated claim of personal knowledge of life in certain communist countries it is even more shocking now than before that you find anti-communism “boring”.
Well Cecil, you do only have his side of the claim. Perhaps the narrator of his claim is unreliable. Oh wait, that would be him. Heh, take it for what it is worth then.
Bob,
I think you’re giving us possible a glimpse into why editors and historians find this so uninteresting.
In the 70s, 80s and 90s, there were plenty of fools – who now live among the leaders of progressives – who were spouting childish gibberish in the name of comity with the Soviets. Insofar as that gibberish comes to light, we will be reminded of left-wing stupidity and how it’s now being recycled for use on terrorists. Someone will have to make excuses about why the progressives of the time weren’t the braying imbeciles they demonstrated themselves to be.
For example, “Biden wasn’t the unfeeling, dimwit he seems to be because of a note-taking error.”
Who needs that kinds of work?
But you’re right, these two defectors might have forgeries that are so obvious that no one need bother translate them. They could could be written in crayon or be documents dated from the 70s written using MS Word.
So anti-communistic discussions are boring, but trying to persuade others to the same view is a compelling use of time?
I’m reminded of the attacks by the left on Joe McCarthy and their raucous denunciations that there were no communists in the government until USSR documents proved otherwise.
Fool me once…
The Nazis’ records weren’t nearly as compelling as the physical evidence
That’s a non-sequitor Bob. Let’s try again. We have Nazi historical docs. We have Commy historical docs.
Why are Nazi docs of interest, but the Commy docs are not?
Hint: Every argument beyond the existence of the docs. themselves is irrelevant. Can you answer without irrelevancy?
I find it amusing that some of you think you’ve really got the goods on me over this “anti-communism is boring” idea. No one bothered to supply the context. It is here: http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=26514 Did I say that anti-communism discussions were intrinsically boring? No. Did I say anything at all sympathetic to commuism? Of course not. I also didn’t say anything clever or profound — I was just musing in a rather silly way about a song. A smart-ass commenter on another blog suggested that “Imagine” might have been sarcastic anti-commuism, and I entertained the unlikely possibility while supplying yet another personal interpretation that I found more interesting (even if it was even farther from Lennon’s original intent). Your commentary on my remark illustrates my point about note-taking quite well: it is subject to bias and inaccuracy.
Joe, the documents might be forgeries, but Gorby says they authentic. I’m just saying that authenticity doesn’t equal accuracy.
Ken Anthony and Rand: Of course it is good to go look at official records. Invoices, packing slips, tranfer orders, that sort of thing might possibly be quite revealing. I’m just saying that the sort of note-taking we’re talking about, by the sort of people we are talking about, is not going to be particularly revealing. Rand, you say that the story about Biden is a gem. Why is it a gem? Do you think it accurately informs us about Biden?
Extremism of any sort is always bad. It only benefits a few people. History has shown that few extreme systems can keep people under the heel of the jackboot for much more than two generations and so communism in Russia fell. It is starting to fall in China too. The replacement systems may not be ideal but they do not have the same collective mantra of communism and they are moving haltingly towards a free enterprise system of sorts. Free enterprise is good, most benefit for all if allowed to exist. However, truly “free enterprise” scares the hell out of politicians.
Politicians believe that their role is to tax and otherwise regulate the things that bring wealth to all. I’ve thought about this on and off for many years and I have come to believe that politicians and the bureaucrats that support them are those who cannot really succeed in a “Free Enterprise” system and therefore think we all need to be protected from ourselves. So we wind up with laws designed to help everyone and no one. The politicians however also win because we allow them to.
Is it not time to change the mold and bring politics back towards what the founding fathers wanted? Perhaps if we can make this happen in November then the politicians and their alter egos, the lobbyists, will again be servants of the public and not just public servants. Semantics, but important in this case.
Bob-1, don’t hurt yourself bending over backwards or getting twisted up in slippery little knots.
A movement or belief that has not had opprobrium attached to it is not truly defeated.
Rand, you say that the story about Biden is a gem. Why is it a gem? Do you think it accurately informs us about Biden?
I have no particular reason not to think so. I don’t think it out of character for him, and I don’t know why they would lie about it.
They might also be “fake but accurate.”
I have no particular reason not to think so. I don’t think it out of character for him, and I don’t know why they would lie about it.
It’s worth noting here that the Soviets did have a very impressive reality filter. IMHO such a report would emphasize Biden’s weaknesses because that was what the writer would have been looking for. Similarly, documentation of Soviet plants and moles in Western society would have experienced bias, both to confirm the official view that the Soviets’ espionage/propaganda efforts had lots of fifth column support, to exaggerate the effectiveness of the particular group that the report writer belonged to, and perhaps to impugn rival bureaucracies.
Similarly, the documentation that shows Gorbachev in a negative light might be 100% accurate or it might a way for a rival to smear him. We might be able to figure a lot of this out through context since a lot of this bias was, to say the least, unsubtle, and it’s likely that many such report writers found ways to conform yet inform. Like the reviewers of commercial products who would laud the product in the first third or so of the story and then say what was wrong with it (and a bit of what they really thought) in the rest of the story.
Bob-1 has a point here. These are reports made by a nation of liars. Their accuracy has to be questioned by default. But I don’t see how you could question them without being able to read them. So yes, translating these documents, especially given their insight into modern times, is a worthwhile endeavor.
Yep, the annihilation of 120 million people was just one big transcription error.
“Did we say 120 million lives were lost? No no, 120 million lives were created or saved! Now pass me the Corn Nuts”
is not going to be particularly revealing
Because you say so?
Bob-1 seems to be saying that the communists’ own records are less interesting than the testimonies of people who survived the commuists’ persecution.
The trouble with that attitude is that the personal testimonies are those of the survivors — the worst atrocities won’t be told, because the victims are dead.
(And the apologists will say, “Eh, how bad could it have been? You lived through it, didn’t you?”)
BTW Bob, were you aware that enough false testimony can reveal the truth? It’s because people lie about different things and a comparison can reveal the truth.