POURING PERFUME ON STALIN/ДЕЗИНФИЦИРОВАНИЕ СТАЛИНУ

IN MEMORY OF THE XVII PARTY CONGRESS
A VAGANOV 1989
Imagine a best-selling journalist, polemicist and blogger in Germany writing the following lines.

 ‘Regardless of the controversies, one thing is clear: Hitler was able to maintain and strengthen a giant country, and with tremendous effort made it into one of the superpowers of the twentieth century.’

And who posed the following questions:-

  • ‘Was Hitler a despot in his relations with his colleagues and subordinates?
  • Did Hitler interfere into our army’s management and lessened its ability to fight?
  • What caused the repressions in the period preceding World War 2?
  • Why Hitler’s speeches on geopolitics, are still relevant and important today?
  • Why Hitler’s contemporaries used to think that he was a very witty man?
  • Why is it that in our modern time those that falsify history have taken on the memoirs of Hitler’s associates?
  • Why Albert Speer hated Hitler so much?’

You would I think be astonished. How, given the history of the 20th Century, could someone get away with writing such crap, let alone enjoy a popular following?

Well no popular German writer is writing such stuff, the lines above come from Russia, only I have substituted the word Hitler for Stalin, Speer for Khrushchev.[1]

The quotes come from the Russian Conspiracy theorist and ‘historian’   Nikolay Starikov. They concern his book which I understand has become a best-seller in Russia, ‘Stalin. Let Us Remember Together.’ Thus this disgusting gangster, mass murderer, paranoid psychopath and ‘ethnic cleanser’ is presented as both misunderstood and in many ways admirable.

The attitude to the Soviet Union in Russia is a curious mix of Nostalgia, distaste for its Internationalist and Socialist ideology, and pride in its superpower status and the fear it invoked in the west. Stalin in particular is being resurrected and rehabilitated and a sanitised caricature of the man sold to the Russian public. Starikov is a ‘historian’ in the same way as Goebbels was an educator.

Nikolay Starikov 
The distortions and outright lies of Mr Starikov are too immense to cover here, they would require an entire book to dissect and refute them. To pick out some of the most odious untruths, he depicts Hitler’s attack on Russia as being the result of a Western conspiracy, and dismisses the support given to the Soviet Union whilst failing to draw attention to the mass of raw material Stalin supplied to Hitler while Britain was fighting for its life. He also, interestingly enough, picks up the old Stalinist line that Trotsky was somehow working as a fascist agent!

Now we have our own conspiracy fruitcakes, some even enjoy a small following, though none feed into the mainstream in the way that Starikov does. The lies that he peddles are dangerous in that they feed into a popular mood, encouraged by Putin, to stoke up narrow Russian chauvinism and xenophobia, by lying about the past.  

The Graves of Stalin’s victim’s are scattered all over the former Soviet Union, for their sake alone the odious Mr Starikov should be confronted


[1] I know the parallel’s are not exact, though I feel are sufficiently close for me to make this judgement call.


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