Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 2 – It is not
enough for the rulers of Russia today to celebrate Stalin, claiming that his
contributions far outweighed his crimes.
They are now promoting books that whitewash his henchmen who carried out
the Soviet dictator’s orders and were directly responsible for the deaths of
millions of people.
Such books inevitably are playing a
major role in rewriting the history of the Stalin era in the minds of ordinary
Russians; and one of the worst of them has just appeared, Feliks Chuyev’s hagiography
of the man who built the Soviet rail system on the graves of thousands and
carried out the terror famine in Ukraine that killed millions – Lazar Kaganovich.
The book is based on the poet’s
conversations with the Stalinist factotum who died at 97 in the summer of 1991
just before his Soviet Union collapsed. He is celebrated in the book as an
effective manager who helped save the USSR from Hitler because of the railroads
and oil fields he developed.
What is disturbing is that the book
itself and certainly the initial reviews entirely ignore his role in the Holodomor
and other mass killings and that Kaganovich is now being praised as a
thoughtful man of penetrating thought who recognized what was happening but
after being expelled from the leadership in 1957 was powerless to stop it.
According to the reviewer in
Nakanune, Kaganovich lived out his last years in modest circumstances, never
gave up on his commitment to communism, and wrote proposals for how things
should be done and how the demise of the Soviet Union could be avoided (nakanune.ru/articles/115516/).
The reviewer says that Chuyev plans
other such books, including one on Vyacheslav Molotov. One can only imagine how
it will deal with the secret protocols of his accord with Ribbentrop that opened
the way to war in 1939. It is tomes like these, more than any words of Kremlin
leaders, that will define how Russians view the past – and thus their future as
well.
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