Vladimir Putin: Volgograd Could Be Stalingrad Again With Votes

breitbart

By Mary Chastain 

Russian President Vladimir Putin claims he does not want to put back together the USSR, but the little things he does says otherwise. 

Nikita Krushchev changed the city to Volgograd in 1961 to de-Stalinize the USSR. From the Associated Press:

But regional lawmakers decided last year to use the historic name in some city statements related to the war, angering many in Russia, where Stalin's name and legacy continues to cause fiery disputes. Putin made the statement Friday during a meeting with Russian war veterans in Normandy, France, where he attended D-Day commemorations.
Responding to a veteran's suggestion to restore the name of Stalingrad, Putin said it could be decided by a public vote.

This is not a surprise, though. In January 2013, the Volgograd city council said that for six days in a year the city will be known as Stalingrad. One of the days is February 2, which was the last day of the historic and bloody Battle of Stalingrad. This battle is the reason why the city is so important to Russia. The Russians fought the Nazis from August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943 at Stalingrad and was the turning point on the Eastern Front. The German 6th Army was destroyed and the Axis started to retreat from the East. A total of 1.7-2 million on both sides, including civilians, were killed.

Yet, it could be renamed for other reasons. Putin said the fall of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. He was a top KGB man in St. Petersburg before he moved to Moscow. During his first presidency and when he was prime minister, he bullied ex-Soviet states in order to dissuade them from forming closer ties to the West and Europe. In 2008, Russia and Georgia engaged in a war over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It did not last long, but it is one of the reasons why Georgia wants to join NATO.

Former Georgian Prime Minister and representative to NATO Ambassador Grigol Mgaloblishvili told Breitbart News Russia wants to cripple much of Eastern Europe.

“The main objective of Russia is to regain its sphere of influence over the post-Soviet states,” he said. “After violating international law, after invading and occupying territories of European nations and violating the basic principles and consensuses of the post-Cold War order, Moscow has not paid any political price.”

His latest power grab is Ukraine. He bullied President Viktor Yanukovych to turn down a trade deal with the European Union for a $15 billion bailout and cheap gas. Russia cut the price of gas to $268.50. Yanukovych’s actions were met with a three-month protest in Kiev and he was ousted on February 22. In retaliation, Russia and Gazprom decided to use gas as a political tool and raised the price to $485 per 1,000 cubic meters. Gazprom also threatened to cut off gas if Ukraine does not pay off its debt and Putin made a few remarks that Europe’s supply could be in danger if they do not help Ukraine.

In mid-March, Putin annexed Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula, from Ukraine to "protect the ethnic Russians and Russian speakers" in the country. Pro-Russian forces erupted in east Ukraine after Crimea was annexed, but Putin claimed Russia was not involved. Donetsk and Luhansk held a referendum on May 11 and claimed independence from Kiev. On May 25, it was revealed Chechens from Russia were in Donetsk. These men told Courtney Weaver from Financial Times that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who is very friendly with Putin, sent them. The new prime minister of Donetsk People’s Republic is Alexander Borodai, a Russian citizen from Moscow.

Due to Russia’s actions, other countries believe they might be Putin’s next target. A Russian diplomat told the United Nations Human Rights Council that Moscow is concerned about the treatment of Russian speakers in Estonia. Russia’s ambassador to Latvia told a radio station Russia will grant citizenship to ethnic Russians in the country.

Moscow implemented a new law that accelerates the citizenship process for any ethnic Russian or Russian speakers from another country. They also passed a law that allows them to intervene in a country they feel are mistreating any ethnic Russians or Russian speakers.

Stalin's dacha in Sochi: CNN Overlooks 'Uncle Joe' Stalin's Mass-Murder of Millions

www.thestar.com

breitbart

By John Nolte 

CNN.com's latest angle on the Sochi Olympics is what could have been a fascinating story about Joseph Stalin and his summer home. Instead what we have is an unbelievably sloppy piece of "journalism."

Built in that city in 1937, twenty years after the October revolution, the murderous dictator's dacha is now a tourist attraction in Sochi. For the uninformed, though, CNN presents "Uncle Joe" as a "notorious dictator," but also a loving family man who did remarkably good things for social justice:

"No doubt that when our leader began to visit Sochi, the city benefited from great development," [tour guide Anna] Hovantseva says.
"Earlier our city was the resort for the nobility, for only rich people. There had been tourists' villas long before Stalin came here.
"But when Stalin began to visit Sochi, he began to develop it as a resort town for all people. Thanks to him, a lot of sanatoriums and hydropathic establishments (and) a road to Matsesta were built. All in all, he did really much for the development of Sochi."

CNN tells us the reclusive "Uncle Joe" -- a man of simple pleasures -- needed the dacha to replenish himself after  a tough day of "ruling over 200 million people":

Nestled in the coniferous, cypress-tree forest of the Matsesta mineral springs area and perched in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, it was seen as the ideal refuge to replenish the man whose day job was ruling over 200 million people. …
"Generally, he liked to be all alone. He loved his wife  Svetlana and his children. He had no friends. He read and thought a lot. He enjoyed hunting. He also loved farming. He grew lemons (for medicinal drinks). So he was an unsociable man, I think."

Stalin might have loved his wife (CNN, the tour guide, or both are incorrect: the wife was named Nadya - Sveltlana was the daughter) but he also serially cheated on her, even with her friends. Nadya shot herself dead in 1932 after a dinner party where he humiliated her in front of another woman.

And Stalin didn't love all his children. He couldn't stand his eldest son from his first marriage or the reprobate son he had with Nadya. Stalin was devoted to his daughter Svetlana … until she betrayed him by falling in love. Stalin had his daughter's first love arrested and banished for ten years to an industrial town near the Arctic Circle where he was likely a slave to The State.

Hitler built the autobahn and Stalin developed Sochi into a "resort town for all people." But in order to complete his oh-so lofty socialist goals, such as resort towns for "all people," Stalin starved, murdered, and personally called for the executions of millions of "all people," and not just the upper class intellectuals, industrialists, and wealthy landowners. Millions of peasants were starved to death; their grain stolen to feed the cities and industrialize the "Motherland."

The day Stalin died in 1953 was the same day millions of Jews were scheduled to be shipped Nazi-style out of their homelands and into the Soviet death camps known as Gulags.

CNN points out that the portraits of Stalin found everywhere in the dacha were only hung after his death. "[S]uch was his dislike of them," CNN adds.

Actually, no. In fact, the complete opposite is true. Stalin commissioned untold numbers of portraits and statues of himself and peppered them throughout the country he terrorized for 25 years. Stalin's likeness was everywhere: streets, homes, businesses, streetcars…. This was how he built a death cult to himself and became Russia's god after destroying thousands of Christian churches and synagogues.

dacha-stalina.g-sochi.ru

The biggest factual error in this report is that Stalin didn't socialize. All his life, Stalin socialized and took his toadies home after work for dinner, movies, and drinks. Stalin used this "honor" to terrorize the ideologically-pure sociopaths who made up his inner circle. You were either forced to attend (until around 4 a.m.) or frozen out -- which generally meant you could expect to be shot.

 While married to Nadya, the Stalin's Kremlin apartment was a regular compound for friends and children. It was only later after the Purge and the Terror that Stalin traded in his friends for  sycophants. This is what happens when you personally have all but a few friends (and their wives and children) murdered. But only after they were forced to star in show trials and publicly confess to crimes they had not committed (though these gangsters were guilty of almost everything else).

Stalin might have grown lemons and watched Chaplin movies at his Sochi dacha,  but mostly he used it as a place to plan crimes against humanity in the last century rivaled only by Hitler. Can you imagine CNN writing something like this about Hitler? It's different with Stalin, though, because he was ideologically-correct -- you know, not all bad.

One thing Stalin always counted on to spread The Revolution was the "blind kittens" in the left-wing Western media sympathetic to his cause and easily flattered and fooled into covering him favorably.

Some things never change. 

Last Surviving Member Of Siberian Family Who Isolated Themselves From Society In 1936 Begs The Outside World For Help

Business Insider

Adam Taylor

Agafia Lykova/ Screenshot

In 1936, fearing persecution from Joseph Stalin's Soviet Russia, the Lykov family cut themselves off from Russian society. They were Old Believers, and thus part of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect that was facing intense persecution from Russia's atheist Bolshevik government in Moscow. The family's patriarch, Karp Lykov, had seen his own brother shot by Communist troops, and decided it was better for his family to escape into the harsh Siberian wilderness.

The family lived in complete isolation, barely knowledgeable of the outside world, for decades. Now there's only one surviving member — a 70-year-old named Agafia who's facing a harsh winter by herself, according to a heartbreaking article in the Siberian Times today.

"I don't know how God will help me survive the winter," she said in a letter to a local newspaper, which was cited by the Siberian Times. "There aren't any logs. I need to get them into the house, and I need to keep reading my prayers. I'm suffocating, and I am getting too cold while doing it when the weather is freezing."

It was only in 1978 that the wider world heard of the Lykov story, when, by chance, a helicopter carrying Soviet geologists looking for a spot to land, discovered the family's base camp, 150 miles away from the nearest known settlement.

Since then, the Lykov family has become something of a legend. They were the family who never learned of World War II; paid no taxes and knew no laws; read only prayer books and an ancient bible; and sustained themselves in one of the world's harshest environments with no outside help and no technology. The discovery of their story was itself tragic, however — three of Karp's eldest children died within weeks of each other shortly after the geologists visited. It's widely believed they died from pneumonia caused by the outsiders' visit.

Last year the incredible story of the Lykovs was brought renewed attention after an article from Mike Dash of Smithsonian Magazine in January. A few months later, Vice Magazine went to the deepest parts of the Siberian taiga to visit the family's last remaining member, Agafia, who was born into the family in 1944 and never knew the outside world. She had lived alone for decades, and told Vice how her only regular contact with the outside world was a radio she now owned.

“I listen to the news about crime and explosions,” Agafia told them. “It’s scary. What’s wrong with [those] people who make suicidal public explosions?”

While Agafia's story made a big splash last year, the media cycle moves on, and the attention was fleeting until today's story in the Siberian Times.

"I am all alone, my years are big, my health is bad, I keep getting ill," Agafia said in the letter cited by the newspaper. "There is a lump on my right breast, and my strength is going. There is a need for a person, a helper, assuming there are kind people in the world, as the world has always had kind people."

The thought of the elderly Agafia facing such a harsh winter is tough. But not all locals are sympathetic — she has been offered a winter home in a local village before, the Siberian Times reports, but has refused it.

"She is being a little cunning," Vladimir Pavlovsky, editor of the local paper Krasnoyarskiy Rabochiy, told the Siberian Times. "She has no hunger. She wants to attract more attention. She has enough cereals, bags of them lie on her porch, and everywhere. And she has enough potatoes."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/agafya-lykova-asks-for-help-2014-1#ixzz2qhNtKCYv
VICE

More at Smithsonian Magazine >>

Cuba: Una ilusión sin porvenir

Cuba Encuentro

Alejandro Armengol

armengol.blogspot.com

Sorprende el afán de los marxistas cubanos por encontrar asideros en un mundo que sobrevive en medio de las ruinas. Habitan un país con un sistema que no llegó a derrumbarse —como ocurrió con el socialismo en Europa Oriental—, pero que lo único que ha logrado es una salvación fragmentada. Alguien con un convencimiento verdadero en la existencia de un porvenir para el socialismo —no viene al caso referirse a los montones de oportunistas— se enfrenta a la paradoja de vivir en una nación cada vez más alejada de este sistema político. Al tiempo que su vida es regida por un gobierno alabado como símbolo de la resistencia anticapitalista, encuentra que mencionar esa resistencia es uno de los pretextos más socorridos para no emprender las transformaciones imprescindibles para salir de la crisis económica y social en que está inmersa la Isla. Al final, la retórica que impide hablar de reformas y cambios —y se limita a señalar una pálida actualización— es un cubo de agua fría que cae a diario sobre los cubanos. Da la impresión que los planteamientos sobre el futuro, que hacen estos supuestos herederos de Marx, resultan más bien una racionalización para justificar el aferrarse al pasado.

En primer lugar, en Cuba nunca ha existido socialismo. Fidel Castro, por conveniencia política circunstancial, jugó la carta de situar su gobierno dentro del campo del comunismo soviético. Lo demás son diferencias, matices que vale la pena estudiar y semejanzas bastante conocidas. El comunismo ―tal como se conoce y como se puso en práctica en la desaparecida Unión Soviética― es un sistema malsano por naturaleza, como en su momento lo fue la esclavitud. No tiene ni nunca tuvo salvación. El engendro que llevó a la práctica Vladimir I. Lenin fue el de un sistema totalitario cruel e inhumano. Desde hace largas décadas muchos defensores del comunismo han buscado en las características personales lo que no es más que el fundamento de un programa que desprecia al individuo y encadena a toda una sociedad bajo un mando despótico. En lo que se refiere a forma de gobierno, Stalin no fue ni un desvío torpe y sanguinario, ni tampoco el hijo putativo de Lenin. El estalinismo fue el fruto y el logro de la práctica leninista. Por supuesto que existen diferencias tácitas y estratégicas entre el modelo adoptado por el primero, al inicio de la revolución rusa, y la puesta en marcha después por el segundo de una teoría centrada en la URSS y fundamentada en un nacionalismo ajeno a los planteamientos de Lenin, pero en cuanto a la maquinaria del poder, esta comenzó a edificarse tras la toma del Palacio de Invierno. Hay quizá una paranoia y un antisemitismo propios de Stalin que llenan su biografía, pero sólo en algunos aspectos particulares podrían trazarse diferencias. Lo demás es aplicar al estudio de la historia una de las mejores tramas novelescas jamás creadas: Dr. Jekyll y Mr. Hyde.

Considerar al estalinismo como una desviación del comunismo, y no como el resultado a partir de su esencia, es un argumento repetido una y otra vez en las argumentaciones que muchos marxistas cubanos continúan sosteniendo. Tal asidero ―que ya no resulta conflictivo como años atrás― encierra una esperanza: que en un futuro justificaría trasladar igual tesis a la mayor parte del mandato de Fidel Castro o incluso de su hermano. Así, todo se limitaría a definir el momento de desvío dentro del proceso revolucionario cubano y a partir de ahí hablar de un Fidel o un Raúl similares a Stalin, pero al mismo tiempo salvaguardando el ideal leninista.

Cualquier estudioso del marxismo que trate de analizar el proceso revolucionario cubano descubre que se enfrenta a una cronología de vaivenes, donde los conceptos de ortodoxia, revisionismo, fidelidad a los principios del internacionalismo proletario, centralismo democrático, desarrollo económico y otros se mezclan en un ajiaco condimentado según la astucia de Fidel Castro. No se puede negar que en la Isla existiera por años una estructura social y económica —copiada con mayor o menor atención de acuerdo al momento— similar al modelo socialista soviético. Tampoco se puede desconocer la adopción de una ideología marxista-leninista y el establecimiento del Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC) como órgano rector del país. Todo esto posibilita el análisis y la discusión de lo que podría llamarse el “socialismo cubano”, pero no por ello libra de moverse en un modelo fantasioso.

Cuba sigue siendo una excepción. Se mantiene como ejemplo de lo que no se termina. Su esencia es la indefinición, que ha mantenido a lo largo de la historia: ese llegar último o primero para no estar nunca a tiempo. No es siquiera la negación de la negación. Es una afirmación a medias. No se cae, no se levanta.

Por eso la pregunta de ¿por qué no se cayó el socialismo cubano? puede ser respondida en parte con otra interrogante: ¿qué socialismo? Y luego complementada con otra más correcta: ¿por qué no se cayó el castrismo? La desaparición de un caudillo no es igual a la de un sistema. En Cuba el PCC nunca ha funcionado como una estructura monolítica de poder real, que actua con una verticalidad absoluta, sino era y es más bien un instrumento de poder del gobernante

Son muchas las contradicción en que viven quienes aún defienden una vía socialista para la Cuba del futuro. Quizá la más importante es que la cúpula de gobierno que dice constituir la principal garantía para impedir el establecimiento de un capitalismo, al estilo norteamericano, es a la vez el principal obstáculo a la hora de buscar soluciones de acuerdo a un pensamiento revolucionario.

La noche en que Churchill y Stalin se fueron de fiesta

BBC Mundo

Rusia y Reino Unido firmaron un pacto para luchar contra Alemania en 1941.

Las conversaciones en tiempo de guerra entre el británico Winston Churchill y el georgiano Joseph Stalin resultaban muy incómodas hasta que un día ambos decidieron beber juntos hasta las 3 de la madrugada, según muestran archivos recientemente desclasificados.

En una información publicada por el Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de la visita a Moscú en 1942, un funcionario recuerda haber encontrado a los dos hombres disfrutando de "comida de todo tipo... y un sinnúmero de botellas".

Estaban "más felices que unas castañuelas" aunque Churchill "se quejaba de un leve dolor de cabeza" hacia la una de la madrugada.

La carta añade: "Los dos grandes hombres realmente hicieron migas".

En las anotaciones de Alexander Cadogan, quien fue subsecretario permanente del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Reino Unido, se puede leer que esta reunión establecería unas condiciones en que "los mensajes intercambiados tendrían un mayor significado que anteriormente".

La primera reunión con Stalin durante su viaje "fascinó" al primer ministro británico, antes de una segunda reunión en la que el líder ruso abordó el asunto "más delicado que encontró".

La carta es uno de los casi 600 archivos relacionados con la inteligencia británica que fueron desclasificados, datan de entre 1936 y 1951.

Cadogan escribe: "Fue exactamente la misma estrategia que utilizó en diciembre pasado cuando, en la primera reunión, todo era miel y en la segunda, todo salió mal. Una técnica muy extraña, no entiendo bien la intención de la misma".

Y continúa: "Esto creó un ambiente enrarecido, que no mejoró durante el banquete en la noche siguiente. No hay nada más terrible que un banquete del Kremlin, aunque teníamos que aguantar".

"Desafortunadamente, a Winston (Churchill) se le notaba que no podía soportarlo", concluye.

Impresionado

Los líderes superaron sus diferencias a la noche siguiente durante unas nuevas conversaciones, que Churchill solicitó a condición de que fueran a solas con Stalin. El entonces primer ministro británico se vio "decidido a disparar su último chartucho".

Después de que la reunión comenzara a las 19:00, era ya la una de la madrugada cuando Alexander Cadogan fue "convocado a acudir al despacho de Stalin en el Kremlin".

Cadogan anota: "Allí me encontré con Winston, Stalin y Vyacheslav Molotov -ministro de Relaciones Exteriores ruso-, que se había unido a ellos, sentados compartiendo una bandeja muy cargada de alimentos de todo tipo, coronada por un cochinillo, y un sinnúmero de botellas.

"Lo que Stalin me hizo beber parecía bastante salvaje. Winston, quien en ese momento se estaba quejando de un leve dolor de cabeza, parecía sabiamente limitarse a beber un vino tinto europeo inocuo y efervescente", agrega.

La hospitalidad de Stalin era conocida por la implicación en sus reuniones de grandes cantidades de alcohol, puesto que prefería negociar con los grandes bebedores.

Cadogan confía en la carta que "Winston, ciertamente, estaba impresionado; y creo que ese sentimiento era recíproco".

"Es muy difícil conseguir esa sensación, sobre todo a través de intérpretes. Aunque, por ejemplo, en una ocasión Stalin respondió a un comunicado de Winston 'No estoy de acuerdo con ello, pero me gusta el espíritu'", escribe.

La carta descubre, someramente, la guinda de la reunión: "Nos hemos escapado poco después de las 3 de la madrugada, teniendo así el tiempo justo para llegar al hotel, hacer las maletas, e irnos hacia el aeródromo sobre las 4:15 de la madrugada".

Esta carta es uno de los casi 600 archivos del gobierno británico, casi todos en relacionados con el servicio de inteligencia y que datan de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y los primeros años de la Guerra Fría (1936-1951), que acaba de publicar los Archivos Nacionales del Reino Unido.

Cuando EEUU freno el expansionismo sovietico-chino

Juan Abreu

fullbook.com.ar

Llego a la Guerra de Corea. Mao quiere la guerra porque así se asegurará la ayuda de Stalin para crear una infraestructura bélica que convierta a China en una gran potencia militar. Para Stalin “el principal aliciente de esta guerra era que los chinos, con sus inmensos efectivos militares, que Mao se mostraba impaciente por utilizar, podían ser capaces de eliminar, o en cualquier caso mantener ocupados, a un número tal de soldados estadounidenses que el equilibrio de poder podía inclinarse a favor de Stalin y permitirle hacer realidad sus planes, que incluían apoderarse de varios países europeos, entre ellos Alemania, España e Italia.”

Hubo un momento, en que Stalin consideró la posibilidad de atacar desde el aire a la flota estadounidense que se encontraba en alta mar, en septiembre de 1950. En octubre, Stalin le comenta a Mao que “la coyuntura constituía una oportunidad única (y fugaz), dado que dos de los países capitalistas más importantes, Alemania y Japón, estaban militarmente fuera de circulación.”
Mientras debatían sobre la posibilidad de desatar la Tercera Guerra Mundial, Stalin reflexionó: “¿Deberíamos temerla? En mi opinión, no… Si es inevitable que haya una guerra, librémosla ahora y no dentro de unos cuantos años”.

Voy leyendo como estos dos asesinos comunistas ( Kim Il Sung no es más que un títere) arman la trama cuyo objetivo es convertir la mayor parte del planeta en un enorme campo de concentración.
Y entonces, se produce un momento de gran belleza y magnífico esplendor humano e histórico. El momento en que lo único que se interpone en el camino del esclavismo comunista mundial son los soldados de Estados Unidos de América que desembarcan en Inchon, justo por debajo del paralelo 38, cortando el paso al ejército norcoreano y al ejército chino.

Detengo la lectura y dedico un emocionado momento a recordar y agradecer a esos muchachos que combatieron y murieron en defensa de nuestra libertad.

Y después de esto naturalmente me produce un desprecio aún mayor el antiamericanismo español.

Fallece Svetlana Stalina la única hija de Stalin

Yakov, Svetlana y Stalin


Leer en  Libertad Digital

Stalin's Secret Lair [Documentary]

Joseph Stalin, Terror of the Tundra, Honored on D-Day Anniversary

Men With Foil Hats | We're not crazy... Just informed!

Statue of Mass Murderer Stalin unveiled in Virginia. The individual responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler celebrated on American soil during the anniversary of Operation Overlord, during which thousands died in the fight against tyranny that Stalin himself represented so well.

Portrait of a Killer

By Kevin Whiteman|Wilmington Conservative
Today is the 66th anniversary  of the D-Day landings in Normandy.
Over 71,700 American, British, Canadian, Belgian, New Zealander, Free-French, Czech, Greek, Dutch, Polish, Australian, and Norwegian  troops died less than two and a half months of slugging it out in the French bocage country.
Not a single Soviet soldier, sailor or airman participated in Operation Overlord.
Yet today in the sleepy Virginia town of Bedford, a memorial to the beginning of the liberation of Western Europe will unveil statues of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Harry Truman.
And Soviet dictator and mass murderer Joseph Stalin.

Uncle Joe, Friend To The Common Man
It’s conservatively estimated that during Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror, tens of million of Russians as well as other ethnic groups were slaughtered at the hand of Stalin.
Also, at Stalin’s order, millions of the following peoples were deported completely or partially: Ukrainians, Poles, Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Kulaks, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Finns, Bulgarians, Greeks, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Jews.
It is conservatively estimated that most died during Stalin’s bloody forced relocations.
And The Others At Normandy?
Although sons of their respective nations fought and died on the beaches of Normandy, the Bedford Memorial has no statues of Canadian Prime Minister William King, King Leopold III of Belgium, Prime Minister of New Zealand Peter Fraser, Gen. Charles DeGaulle of France, Czech President Dr. Emil Hacha, King George II of Greece, Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, Polish leader Edward Smigly-Rydz, Australian Prime Minister John Curtin, or King Haakon VII of Norway.
But Joseph Stalin is there.
It is interesting to note that there is no statue of Allied leader Chiang Kai-Shek at the Bedford Memorial, who, like Stalin, had no connection whatsoever to Operation Overlord.
Yet the powers-to-be in Bedford saw fit to include Comrade Stalin.
Truthin’ It Down South
Dr. Lee Edwards, a Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has released the following statement:

“Since the fall of the Soviet Union, statues of Joseph Stalin have been torn down all over Europe and even in the former Soviet Union itself. The world is closer than ever before to a consensus on the evils of communism and Stalin’s primary role in the worst crimes of the last century. And yet a statue of Stalin is included in the National D-Day Memorial, to be dedicated in Bedford, Virginia, this Sunday, June 6.
Near the statue of Stalin, a plaque catalogues Stalin’s crimes against millions of people both in Russia and throughout Europe. But no mere plaque can justify the inclusion of the statue which dishonors the heroic individuals who sacrificed so much on D-Day and in the Cold War.
A bust of Joseph Stalin has no place in a memorial whose purpose is to salute the brave soldiers who made D-Day a vital victory in the crusade for freedom.”

Don't Go There: Chasing the dying memories of Soviet trauma

By Orlando Figes

In November 2004, Nona Panova was being interviewed by a researcher from the Russian human rights organization Memorial, working under my direction on an oral history project about private life in the Stalin era. Nona, a 75-year-old woman whose father had been arrested during the purges of the 1930s, had been talking for several hours about her upbringing in St. Petersburg and her family when she saw the tape recorder with its microphone. The conversation went like this:

Panova: So that's how it was.… [Notices the tape recorder and shows signs of panic.] Are you recording this? But I'll be arrested! They'll put me into jail!
Interviewer: Who'll put you in jail?
Panova: Someone will.… I've told you so much; there's so much I've said.…
Interviewer: [Laughs.] Yes, and it was very interesting, but tell me, who today would want to put you in jail?
Panova: But did you really make a recording?
Interviewer: Yes, don't you remember? I warned you at the start that our conversation would be recorded.
Panova: Then that's it. It's all over for me -- they'll arrest me.
Interviewer: So where will they send you then?
Panova: I don't know -- no doubt to Kolyma, if I don't get killed before.
Interviewer: When?
Panova: Very soon.
Interviewer: What are you saying?
Panova: I won't be able to sleep tonight; I won't sleep.
Interviewer: Just because you told so much to me?
Panova: Of course!
Interviewer: But you know that I've come from Memorial.
Panova: Well.… But maybe you … maybe you're not from the true Memorial.
More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet regime, it was not unusual to find people of Nona's generation who were still afraid to talk about their private lives during the Stalinist period. Growing up in the 1930s, they had learned from an early age to hide their feelings and opinions -- people were arrested "for their tongue" -- and were still afraid of getting into trouble if they said too much to a stranger. The microphone was a device associated with the KGB.
In the interviews, we were entering a forbidden zone of memory. For though a wide range of new material has become available since the glasnost era of the late 1980s -- newly published diaries, memoirs, and letters -- there is much we still do not know, and it remains unclear what to make of this new material even now, two decades after the Soviet collapse. At the heart of this historical debate is a question: Did Soviet-era subjects allow themselves a private life at all?
That was the issue we wanted to approach in our interviews. All in all, we interviewed 454 people. Like Nona, many were reluctant to talk or very anxious about our conversations. At best, they were reflecting on traumatic events that had occurred several decades before, when most were no more than teenagers. The problems of memory and interpretation were daunting. But it seemed a worthwhile project. Today, more than half of those we interviewed just a few years ago have passed away, and most of the rest would now be too old or frail to answer intimate questions of the sort we asked. The door is closing on the last living sources of information about what it was like to survive in Stalin's Soviet Union.
  
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