Entering Gulag (a leaf from Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya's notebook)
Source: Kersnovkaya foundation; Wikimedia Commons & GNU Free Documentation License
Tony Halpin, Textbooks rewrite history to fit Putin’s vision, Times OnLine (July 30, 2007):
***[T]he Kremlin is turning its attention to schools to instil a new sense of nationalism in children.Two new manuals for teachers have been accused of glossing over the horrors of the Soviet Union and of including propaganda to promote Mr Putin’s vision of a strong state.
***
The [second] book describes Josef Stalin as “the most successful Soviet leader ever” and dismisses the prison labour camps and mass purges as a necessary part of his drive to make the country great. ***
Mr Putin gave [the books] his seal of approval at a conference he hosted for teachers at his presidential dacha last month. He described Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937, in which 1.5 million people were imprisoned and 700,000 killed, as terrible “but in other countries even worse things happened”. Discounting the Soviet Union’s long history of oppression, he said: “We had no other black pages, such as Nazism, for instance.”
Putin's assertion is roughly equivalent to saying, "We had to kill the country to save it." Or perhaps it amounts to the proposition that mass murder to promote fascism is bad but mass murder to promote communism (or nationalism) is o.k.
It used to be said in Hitler's defense that he built the Autobahnen.
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Forest graves mark Stalin's first purge The Australian (Australia) August 6, 2007:
MEDVEZHEGORSK, Russia: Relatives of the victims of Stalin's purges have held a ceremony at an execution site in a Russian forest on the 70th anniversary of the start of the mass killings.
Dozens of family members were joined by a few hundred campaigners, officials, local residents and clerics for the ceremony by the mass graves of Sandormokh.
Yesterday marked the day in 1937 when top Stalin henchman Nikolai Yezhov issued the notorious Order 00447 for the mass executions of ''anti-Soviet and socially dangerous elements''.
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Seven thousand people are believed to lie buried in at least 40 mass graves found at Sandormokh, near the town of Medvezhegorsk, the site of a former prison camp about 1000km north of Moscow.
''It had to be a remote place so the executions wouldn't be heard, it was a secret place,'' said Tatyana Voronina, 30, who helps document the history of Soviet prison camps.
The site is now strewn with hundreds of crosses extending deep into the dense pine forest and flowers ring the mass graves, which are marked by depressions in the ground.
The human rights group Memorial found the graves in 1997 and has held a yearly ceremony at the site in an effort to keep alive the memory of the millions who perished in the purges.
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Russian media has paid scant attention to the anniversary, and Memorial campaigners and relatives of the victims complain that there is a reluctance on the part of officials to commemorate the Soviet purges.
''There's a new regime that wants heroes, not victims ... They prefer to celebrate the victory in World War II. It doesn't make you feel proud when you know that it's your own people who did this,'' Ms Voronina said.
There is also widespread indifference among many Russians, campaigners said.
During a visit yesterday to the local museum in Medvezhegorsk, housed in a former prison camp building, relatives confronted a guide over a large portrait of Stalin there and little mention of the purges. The museum is housed in a former prison camp building.
Ceremony Marks Anniversary of Terror, The Moscow Times (July 26, 2007):
Several hundred people gathered at Lubyanskaya Ploshchad on Wednesday to mark a grim milestone: the 70th anniversary of the Great Purge of 1937.
The crowd, which included many elderly gulag survivors, braved rain and unseasonably cold weather to lay flowers on the Solovetsky Stone, a monument to Stalin's victims located near the former headquarters of the NKVD, Stalin's secret police. The building now houses the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
Tamara Voronina, 74, clutched a flower as she told how her father was arrested in 1941 and how she found herself living in ramshackle wooden barracks near the Arctic mining town of Vorkuta.
"In the winter, it was always freezing," she said, recalling how her mother used to stuff rags into the cracks in the walls to keep in the heat.
Although Stalin started eliminating his political rivals well before 1937, the Great Purge began in earnest on July 31 of that year, when the Politburo set region-by-region quotas for how many people were to be arrested and executed.
By the time the purge ended in November 1938, more than 1.5 million people had been arrested and more than 700,000 had been shot.
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