café historia

famine or genocide, ukraine probes the millions of stalin deaths

Famine has been a recurring feature of Russian history. Most recently in 1890-1 under Nicholas II, then 1919-20 during the civil war and Lenin's War Communism and largest of all the 1932-3 famine which grew out of Stalin's Collectivisation programme. Now the Ukraine plans to open a formal investigation into the Soviet-era 1932-3 famine that killed millions of people to see if it can prove the famine was an act of genocide.

The 1932-33 famine was engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to force the more prosperous, kulak peasants to give up their private plots of land and join collective farms. The Ukraine, which has rich farmland, suffered the most of all Soviet regions in 1932-3. Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko has led efforts to win international recognition of the tragedy as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation. In 2006, the Ukrainian parliament declared the famine a genocide and prosecutors and the state security service will now seek to prove that in court.

Historians are divided on whether "death by hunger" – or the "Holodomor" as it is known here - was an act of genocide. Some are convinced the famine targeted Ukrainians as an ethnic group. Others argue authorities set out to eradicate the kulaks as a social class and say the Soviet Union sought to pay for its rapid industrialization with grain exports at the expense of starving millions.

The probe is likely to anger neighbouring Russia, which insists the famine was not genocide because Russians and other ethnic groups also suffered.

Estimates of the number of Ukrainians who died vary between 10 million and 3.5 million. Even if it is debatable as a genocide, two points are clear: Firstly that the famine has become a defining moment in cementing modern Ukrainian nationalism, but also that even if the deaths were not racial genocide they were most clearly a social genocide not just in the Ukraine but across the entire Soviet Union.

image origin                 post source: AP News

linked casahistoria site: Stalin & Collectivisation 

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stalin and nicholas II battle it out on tv

The BBC started it with a series where the British public were asked to choose their "Greatest Briton". They chose Winston Churchill; the Americans chose Ronald Reagan; and the South Africans chose Nelson Mandela. (the Germans had problems when it was their turn - Adolf Hitler and all Nazi figures were excluded from the initial list of names pit up for public vote...). Now Russian TV is on the hunt and guess what: Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and Tsar Nicholas II, the country's last monarch, are running neck and neck in a contest sponsored by state-run Rossia television called "Name of Russia," a Russian version of the BBC show aimed at selecting the country's most significant historical figure.

But perhaps true to expected form and given the real history of the two front runners, the findings are shrouded in mystery and subterfuge.... As of 9 p.m. Monday, more than 2.3 million votes had been cast in the Internet poll, which had Stalin in first place with 252,360 votes, narrowly leading Nicholas II, who had 252,262 votes, according to the contest's web site, www.nameofrussia.ru. Trailing the two front-runners were Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, with 171,224 votes, followed by a gritty-voiced folk singer Vladimir Vysotsky, with 150,405 votes, and Peter the Great, with 115,115 votes. Until Monday, Stalin, an ethnic Georgian and one of the bloodiest tyrants of the 20th century, had been dominating the poll. Nicholas II shot past Stalin for several hours Monday, however, thanks perhaps in part to a campaign organized by the contest's producer, Alexander Lyubimov. "I arranged a flash mob for [Nicholas II] on Odnoklassniki.ru," he said Monday evening, referring to the popular social networking site.

Lyubimov, a groundbreaking television host during perestroika, admitted that the poll was ripe for manipulation since it allowed an unlimited number of votes from the same computer. The site was attacked over a three-day span last week, and a flood of incorrect requests caused the system to break down several times and stop counting votes, he said in a statement last week. At the same time, "mass voting for Stalin was being organized from several Internet resources," Lyubimov said.

With Saturday marking the 90th anniversary of the execution of the tsar and his family by the Bolsheviks, it seems that monarchists are fighting back. Nikolai Lukyanov, head of the All-Russia Monarchist Center, said his organization was rallying Internet support for Nicholas II as well. "More than 400,000 users of [the social networking site] Vkontakte.ru consider themselves monarchists, and we are asking them to vote in support of our last tsar," Lukyanov said. Princess Maria Vladimirovna, the self-declared heir to the imperial throne, is not giving any direct support to the campaign, her lawyer, German Lukyanov, said Monday. He added, however, that he was pleased with the tsar's surge. Nikolai Savelyev, who has been impersonating Nicholas II for 12 years, said he was happy that his doppelganger is doing so well in the poll. "I really like him," Savelyev said Monday afternoon while loitering near Red Square waiting for tourists seeking souvenir photos. "He was a very good person: kind but spineless. That was a big minus."

The top 50 in the contest include writer Anton Chekhov and poets Alexander Pushkin and Sergei Yesenin. The first man in space, Yury Gagarin and the father of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolyov, also make the list. The first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, is currently at No. 12. There's no Vladimir Putin, though, since the list does not include living people.

Lyubimov, also downplayed fears that Stalin would win. "Research says that the choice of Stalin as Name of Russia is not possible," he said. Stalin is revered by many for, among other things, leading the Soviet Union during its defeat of Nazi Germany. He predicted a backlash of anti-Stalin sentiment in September, when the top 12 figures will be discussed in television debates. "The majority will be affected by this show only when it's on the air. When they watch the show and see that Stalin is winning, imagine how many people will vote and start being engaged with the show." Lyubimov, who is also deputy head of the state radio and television company VGTRK, said he deliberately decided not to use the word "great" in the title. "If you name this show 'Great Russians,' you actually are almost forced to deny Stalin and Lenin being part of that," he said. "On the other hand, that makes the picture of your country biased by your political approach, and that doesn't leave any discussion for the show."

Asked if this was democratic, he said, "This is a game, and I set the rules."

Both Stalin & Nicholas II would probably have agreed with that!

image origin                 post source: Moscow Times 

linked casahistoria site: Russian Revolution 

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world war 2 – the (red) starry view from the kremlin

Writing the history books in a country which started the Second World War as a dictatorship in alliance with Nazi Germany and then went on to invade and dismember five of its neighbours was always going to be tricky – especially when that same country ended the war on the "other side", proclaiming it was invading eastern Europe (and Manchuria in the Far East) in the name of democracy, liberation and the ending of fascism. Then went on to keep a hold on these territories just as thoroughly as the previous Nazi regime had done…….

So it is hardly a surprise that modern Russia is having problems over the interpretation of the period by those self same neighbours today.

An article in The International Herald Tribune reports tha Russia's new President, Dmitry Medvedev has condemned what he described as attempts to rewrite wartime history by the Ukraine and the three Baltic states. He claims they have challenged Moscow's view of history, saying their nationals suffered from Soviet as well as Nazi oppression, and a Kremlin spokesman said later the criticism was aimed at them.

The article claims that Russia has chided Ukraine for taking steps since the mid-1990s to grant some form of recognition as combatants to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), guerrillas who fought both Nazi and Soviet troops to secure an independent state. Historians say the UPA had 40,000 men in its ranks at its peak. Some Ukrainians donned Nazi uniforms in a unit known as SS Halychyna.

Attention is also drawn to the fact that Russia has also complained about Baltic nationalists who resisted Soviet occupation. Last year Moscow argued with Estonia over the removal of a statue of a Red Army soldier from Tallinn's city centre to a military cemetery. Moscow also says Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia and Latvia have been denied basic rights against a background of strong anti-Russian sentiment.

Interested in reading more? Go to the article by clicking below on "post source"

Perhaps the Russians have just got to accept that one of the features of the democracy, liberty et al that they announced in 1945 is the ability to consider different interpretations of history… 

image origin                 post source: Herald Tribune

 

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remembering katyn

In the 1970's whilst travelling across Poland and the Soviet Union by bus I remember two events that showed the wounds that simmered beneath the surface of postwar Europe. The first was whilst in Warsaw on the day the Warsaw Rising had taken place 30 years earlier. Forbidden to have any open commemoration, red and white ribbons appeared overnight on doors and walls where some of the hardest fighting took place. Little was said officially. But the ribbons were not removed.

Then, several days later we were in the western Soviet Union following the route east of Hitler's Panzers (given the state of the Soviet roads the speed of advance was similar too). We trundled by Katyn, near Smolensk and close to the forests where over 20,000 Polish officers were shot in 1940. Our (Soviet) guide alluded to a (nazi) massacre - but no, there was not an opportunity to leave the official road for westerners and visit the site.......

One torn iron curtain and 30 years on, the Warsaw Rising is a key element not just in the pantheon of Polish history but is acknowledged as one of the less honourable apsects not just in Soviet treatment of the Poles, but also of the western allies who remained stumm and undermined those rising up.

As for the massacre in the forest, Poland this week remembered the 65th anniversary of the disclosure by the Nazis of the Katyn massacre in which over 20,000 Polish officers were murdered by the Soviets. In the spring of 1940, up to 22,000 Polish officers of the army, the police and other formations were murdered by the Soviet secret police, NKVD, on the orders of the highest command of the Soviet Union. The decision to murder prisoners taken captive after the Red Army invasion of Poland in 1939, was made via a decree signed by Stalin on 5 March 1940. Officers, many from Poland's intellectual elite, were systematically shot from April till May 1940 in Katyn, Charkow and Tarnow. The graves of 7,000 civilians are still being searched for. The information about mass graves in Katyn was made public by the Germans on 13 April 1943. Two days later, the Russians tried to blame the massacre on the Nazis.

The USSR admitted to the crime 50 years later, on 13 April 1990 but still refuses to label the massacres as a ‘war crime‘.  Perhaps though it is easier now to get off te bus and go into the forest (although in 2000, when a memorial was set up in Katyn, Russian railways placed restrictions on travellers to the area to reduce the Polish numbers visiting).

image origin                 post source: Polskie Radio

linked casahistoria site: Stalin's Russia

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welcome news: stalin's files to be digitised

 Earlier this year, the Andrew W. Mellon foundation gave Jonathan Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press' "Annals of Communism Project", a $1.3-million grant to develop a digital documentary edition of Stalin's entire personal archive, encompassing some 40,000 files.

Thanks to the donation, scholars from around the world will have double-click access to such things as Stalin's World War II letters to and from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his post-war plans for suspected Soviet dissenters, and his private thoughts on colleagues from Lenin to Trotsky.

Yale will post images of Stalin's original writings in their archival form, alongside translations, highlighted by their direct transcriptions, annotations and links to online discussion formats. "This is a virtual classroom for the study of Soviet history," Brent said, adding that he anticipates a complete online archive in four years, which would mark 20 years since the beginning of the "Annals of Communism."

Interested in reading more? Go to the article by clicking below on "post source".

This is surely what the web was designed to do. If only other institutions would follow suit and make their materials more inclusive. Hopefully access will be free, or demand registration at most. Two other wishes: that selected documents be translated for the non russian speaker, and key files be given commentaries where appropriate.....

image origin                 post source: Hartford Courant

linked casahistoria site: Stalin's Russia

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retro burials russian (soviet?) style

Why do the Russians/Soviets have such grandiose ideas for their funereal arrangements? Where Lenin, (embalmed then put on public view behind glass) and Stalin (embalmed then stuck in a wall when he fell from grace) et al failed, soon to be an ex-President/then a PM, Vladimir Putin is to fulfil an unrealised dream by creating a grandiose state cemetery.

In northern Moscow bulldozers began churning the earth his week in a section of wasteland where Putin and Stalin, the dictator he is said to revere, could one day be laid side by side. The Federal Military Memorial Cemetery, its designers boast, will be Russia's answer to America's Arlington. Arguably the most ambitious architectural project undertaken since the fall of the Soviet Union, it remains to be seen whether the cemetery, due to be completed by 2010, will become the landmark the Kremlin hopes......

Interested in reading more? Go to the article by clicking below on "post source".

and the Romanovs? Not another move...

image origin ...... post source: Telegraph 

casahistoria site: Stalin's Russia

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russia: 1945-2006: a manual for history teachers - putin's guide to history teaching

“Russia's past was admirable, its present is more than magnificent and as for its future—it is beyond anything that the boldest mind can imagine.” Thus Count Alexander Benckendorff in the 1830s, on how Russia's history should be viewed and written. This advice from the head of the country's first secret police is now being heeded in the Kremlin, where a new Russian history is being forged.

“The attitude towards the past is the central element of any ideology,” Yury Afanasyev, a Russian liberal historian, has written in Novaya Gazeta. Indeed, in Russia arguments about history often stir greater passions than do debates about the present or future. What kind of country Russia becomes will depend in large part on what kind of history it chooses. And that is why the Kremlin has decided that it cannot afford to leave history teaching to the historians.

Earlier this year it organised a conference for history teachers at which Mr Putin plugged a new history manual to help sort out what he called “the muddle” in teachers' heads. “Russian history did contain some problematic pages,” Mr Putin told the teachers. “But so did other states' histories. We have fewer of them than other countries. And they were less terrible than in some other countries.” His message was that “we can't allow anyone to impose a sense of guilt on us.”

This is the thrust of the manual, entitled “A Modern History of Russia: 1945-2006: A Manual for History Teachers”. Mr Putin's endorsement has made it one of the most discussed books of the year. New textbooks based on it will come into circulation next year. Russian schools are still free to choose which textbook to teach. But the version of history now proposed by the Kremlin suggests that freedom may not last.

The manual's choice of period is suggestive: from Stalin's victory in the “great patriotic war” to the victory of Mr Putin's regime. It celebrates all contributors to Russia's greatness, and denounces those responsible for the loss of empire, regardless of their politics. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is not seen as a watershed from which a new history begins, but as an unfortunate and tragic mistake that hindered Russia's progress. “The Soviet Union was not a democracy, but it was an example for millions of people around the world of the best and fairest society.”

As Marietta Chudakova, an historian of Russian culture, puts it, for the manual's author totalitarianism “is a warm bath. He splashes in it and enjoys it. The book tries to convince the reader that there was no other way, and most importantly that there was no need for one. Everything was motivated and clear in that social structure.” The book backs its assessment of Stalin by citing recent opinion polls that give him an approval rating of 47%.

Rabid anti-Westernism is the leitmotiv of the new ideology. In return for Russia ending the cold war (“we did not lose it”, the manual insists), America pursued an anti-Russian policy and fomented colour revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, turning them into springboards for possible future attacks. “We are talking about the failure of the course started by Peter the Great and pathetically continued by pro-Western democrats after 1988. We are talking about a new isolation of Russia.”

School's history across the world is inceasingly reflecting central perceptions of what the nation should be thinking and Putin's Russia is no different to this global process.  What governments are doing is indicating the preferred spin to put on a national history.

In the past this was called propaganda.

casahistoria site: Russia                                               image origin 

 

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click for casahistoria home          source: Economist  

putin remembers stalins victims, but avoids the roll call

The names of thousands of people who were executed during the bloodiest period of Stalin’s purges were read aloud in a daylong ceremony here on Monday at a square in front of the Lubyanka, former Soviet secret police headquarters, where many of the victims died or began their journey to execution.

Memorial, the human rights organization that assists survivors of Soviet repression and commemorates its victims, organized the event, one of a series this year marking the 70th anniversary of a period known as the Great Terror, when executions became a daily event.

This year's event had added significance as the 70th anniversary of Josef Stalin's Great Purge in 1 937, when more than 700,000 people were killed and 1.5 million imprisoned.

Memorial has compiled a database on over 2.6 million victims of Joseph Stalin's purges, to be distributed in schools and public organisations, the group's chief said."Our database this far is only 20-25 percent of the total number. This is a result of the work conducted by hundreds of people in many regions throughout nearly 20 years," Arseny Roginsky said as quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency. The group issued 5000 copies of the database, Mr Roginsky said.

However this year another of the commemoration events had a a special visitor: Vladimir Putin who attended a church led service for the first time, but offered no acknowledgement of the role of the secret police in the murder of millions of Russians.The field where the service was held was the scene of state-sanctioned murders until 1953 and is one of hundreds across Russia containing mass graves of victims of the Soviet regime. Viewing a display of photographs of victims, Mr Putin declared: "It seems incredible, madness."

He down-played Stalin's Great Purge in June, however, telling history teachers that it was terrible "but in other countries even worse things happened". He claimed that Russia's history had "no other black pages".

Critics of Putin were unimpressed by his decision to join this year's memorial service. Some said that he should have attended the Monday ceremony to victims in the square outside the Lubyanka.However, Arseny Roginsky, the director of Memorial, welcomed the president's visit, however. "Whatever is behind this trip — whether an attempt to respond to public sentiments on the 70th anniversary of the Great Terror, a sincere desire to pray for innocent victims or some political ideas — at any rate, this is a symbolic and positive event," he said.

casahistoria site: Stalin                                               image origin

 

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click for casahistoria home          source: Herald/ Times

alexey romanov could be finally found

The remains of the last czar's hemophiliac son and heir to the Russian throne, missing since the royal family was gunned down nine decades ago by Bolsheviks in a basement room, may have been found.

Bones found in a burned area in the ground near Ekaterinburg, the city where Czar Nicholas II and his wife and children were held prisoner and then shot in 1918 have been described by a local archaeologist as belonging to a boy and a young woman roughly the ages of the czar's son, Alexey, and a daughter, Maria, whose remains have also never been found.

If confirmed, the finding would solve a persistent mystery about the doomed family, which fell victim to the violent revolution that ushered in more than 70 years of Communist rule.

The spot where the remains were found this summer appears to correspond to a site described by Yakov Yurovsky, the leader of the family's killers, said Sergei Pogorelov, deputy head of the archaeological research department at a regional center for the preservation of historical and cultural monuments in Yekaterinburg. Along with the remains of the two bodies, NTV said archaeologists found shards of a ceramic container of sulfuric acid, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of various caliber. It said they found the remains in a weeks long search using metal detectors and metal rods as probes, not by digging.

A representative of the Romanovs -- the royal family whose rule was ended by the Revolution -- urged caution. "It is necessary to treat these findings very cautiously,'' Ivan Artseshchevsky told NTV from London, citing the controversy over the bones identified as those of the czar and others killed.

Csar Nicholas abdicated in 1917 as revolution swept Russia, and he and his family were detained. The next year, they were sent to the Ural Mountains city of Ekaterinburg, where a firing squad executed them on July 17, 1918. Historians say Communist guards lined up and shot Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, their five children and four attendants in a small basement room in a nobleman's house in Ekaterinburg. The bodies were loaded in a truck and disposed of first in a mine shaft, according to most accounts. According to NTV, a 1934 report based on Yurovsky's words indicated that the bodies of nine victims were then doused with sulfuric acid and buried along a road, while those of Alexei and a sister were burned and left in a pit nearby.

With the bodies lost for decades, hundreds of people came forward claiming to be a surviving member of the royal family. The most prominent was Anna Anderson, a woman who appeared in a mental hospital in 1920 and claimed to be the czar's youngest daughter, Anastasia. She said she had been rescued by one of the soldiers who killed the rest of the family and was carried out of Russia on the back of a peasant cart, eventually winding up in Berlin. In the 1990s, DNA tests revealed she was a Polish peasant named Franziska Schanzkowska.

Parts of the royal bodies were exhumed in 1991 and reburied in 1998 in the imperial-era capital of St. Petersburg, following years of investigation and DNA tests in Britain and the U.S. But the bodies of Alexey and one of the czar's daughters, either Maria or Anastasia, remained missing.

If genetic tests prove positive, the new finds could be the missing family members - and also prove decisevely that the earlier remains found in 1991 were the Romanovs.

casahistoria site: Background to Russian Revolution       image origin

 

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click for casahistoria home          source: Live Science/AP 

remembering stalin's purges

Now in their 70s and 80s, children of the victims of Josef Stalin's political repressions laid flowers and lit candles to honour the victims of the Great Purge of 1937, when millions were labeled "enemies of the state" and executed without trial or sent to labor camps.

The 70th anniversary comes as the Kremlin, focused on restoring Russians' pride in their Soviet-era history, has been trying to soften public perception of Stalin's rule and hushing up the full horror of his crimes.

"Those who call for that are those who have never experienced themselves the hunger, cold and humiliation that we had to go through," said Irina Kalina, 79, who was among those gathered on a square outside what was once KGB headquarters and is now the headquarters of its successor agency, the FSB. She held several red carnations and a framed photograph of her father, Ignaty Kalina, who was serving as foreign minister of the Belarus Soviet republic when he was arrested in 1938 and accused of being a spy. He died in jail several months later. Kalina was sent to a labor camp in Kazakhstan for five years.

President Vladimir Putin said last month that although the 1937 purge was one of the most notorious episodes of the Stalin era, no one should try to make Russia feel guilty about it because "in other countries even worse things happened." Putin, who was speaking to a gathering of history teachers, suggested the United States' use of atomic weapons against Japan at the end of World War II was worse.

This is in line with the Kremlin's recent attempts (see previous post) to control how history is taught, publishing Kremlin-approved textbooks and getting rid of those that deviate from the new official line.

Political arrests on dubious charges were common throughout Stalin's rule, resulting in the execution of hundreds of thousands of Russians. Millions more became inmates of the gulag, the system of thousands of slave labor camps. Large-scale arrests of Communist Party members began in 1934 and seemed to reach a crescendo in 1936-37, when a series of show trials was held in Moscow featuring dramatic courtroom confessions.

Russia has never sought to bring to justice KGB officials implicated in human rights abuses committed during the Communist era. Putin, whose rise to power was through his work inside the KGB, headed the FSB in the late 1990s.

casahistoria site: Stalin                                                     image origin

 

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click for casahistoria home          source: Forbes

stalin as a boy: his mother's story!

The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore is publishinga new book, Young Stalin, on the early life of the Soviet leader. Much has been made of the previously unknown memoirs of his mother, found in a secret former Soviet archive in his home state, Georgia and released by the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

They memoirs reportedly portray Stalin as a sensitive boy,the only child of a cobbler and a seamstress, Beso and Keke Djugashvili. In the memoirs, Keke reveals that, having lost two babies, she regarded “Soso” – short version of Joseph – as a religious miracle.

She details the illnesses and accidents that left him partly crippled, and the shadow he lived under as the son of a brutal alcoholic. His father “could not stop drinking. A good family man was destroyed . . . his hands began shaking and he couldn’t sew shoes”.

Keke was famously beautiful as a young woman, and there is a hint of earthy mischief in the memoirs. She and her mother taught the boy to walk by exploiting his love of flowers: Keke would hold out a camomile and Soso ran to grasp it. Once, when her mother attracted him with a flower, Keke jovially pulled out her breasts and showed them to the toddler, who ignored the flower and dived for the breasts. She says she hurriedly buttoned up after a drunken lodger, spying on her, burst out laughing.

Keke sheds little light on rumours, sometimes encouraged by Stalin, that he was actually fathered by another man – beyond saying, perhaps innocently, that one of the suggested fathers, a wealthy merchant and local wrestling champion, “always tried to assist us in the creation of our family”.

She writes about her struggles to help her intelligent son win a scholarship to a seminary in the Georgian capital, Tiflis (now Tbilisi) to become a student priest. Within a few years, however, he rebelled against the school authorities and declared himself a revolutionary seeking the downfall of the tsar. She took the train to Tiflis to try to save him from expulsion. For the first time “he got angry with me. He shouted that it wasn’t my business. Soso soothed and hugged her, telling her that he was not a rebel. “It was his first lie.”

When, years later, her son became Soviet dictator she refused to move to Moscow to join him in the Kremlin and remained until her death living in a small apartment in Georgia.

Stalin never knew she had written her memoirs. He would probably have been incensed by them. He was outraged when she was sometimes interviewed by sycophantic Soviet journalists. In the archives, Montefiore found this order to the Politburo: “I ask you to forbid the philistine riffraff that has penetrated our press, from publishing any more ‘interviews’ with my mother and all other crass publicity. Spare me from the sensationalism of these scoundrels!”

casahistoria site: Stalin                                                     image origin

 

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click for casahistoria home          source: The Times

dr zhivago, the cia and the cold war

Ivan Tolstoy, a broadcaster for Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, writes in a forthcoming book that the CIA secretly arranged for the publication of a limited Russian-language edition of "Doctor Zhivago" in 1958 to help Pasternak secure the Nobel Prize in Literature that year.

"Pasternak's novel became a tool that was used by the United States to teach the Soviet Union a lesson," Tolstoy said in a telephone interview from Prague, where he works as a Russian commentator for the U.S. government-funded radio stations. The novelist knew nothing of the CIA's action, according to Tolstoy and the writer's family.

A CIA role in printing a Russian-language edition has been rumoured for years. Tolstoy offers