Untold truths

[unixronin]

Political dissidents have smuggled thousands of pages of stolen documents out of the former Soviet Union documenting the internal workings of the Soviet regime.  But almost nobody in the West is interested in printing or studying them.

The Russian state cannot sue Stroilov or Bukovsky for breach of copyright, since the material was created by the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, neither of which now exists.  Had he remained in Russia, however, Stroilov believes that he could have been prosecuted for disclosure of state secrets or treason.  The military historian Igor Sutyagin is now serving 15 years in a hard-labor camp for the crime of collecting newspaper clippings and other open-source materials and sending them to a British consulting firm.  The danger that Stroilov and Bukovsky faced was real and grave; they both assumed, one imagines, that the world would take notice of what they had risked so much to acquire.

The documents implicate various Western political figures in collaboration with the Supreme Soviet, including former British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock, French President François Mitterrand, EU Foreign Minister Baroness Catherine Ashton, and others.

Bukovsky’s book about the story that these documents tell, Jugement à Moscou, has been published in French, Russian, and a few other Slavic languages, but not in English.  Random House bought the manuscript and, in Bukovsky’s words, tried “to force me to rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective.”  Bukovsky replied that “due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship.”  The contract was canceled, the book was never published in English, and no other publisher has shown interest in it.  Neither has anyone wanted to publish EUSSR, a pamphlet by Stroilov and Bukovsky about the Soviet roots of European integration.  In 2004, a very small British publisher did print an abbreviated version of the pamphlet; it, too, passed unnoticed.

Required reading.

“I know the time will come,” Stroilov says, “when the world has to look at those documents very carefully.  We just cannot escape this.  We have no way forward until we face the truth about what happened to us in the twentieth century.  Even now, no matter how hard we try to ignore history, all these questions come back to us time and again.”

[...]

We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate those who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology.  But the world exhibits a perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of Communism.  These documents should be translated.  They should be housed in a reputable library, properly cataloged, and carefully assessed by scholars.  Above all, they should be well-known to a public that seems to have forgotten what the Soviet Union was really about.  If they contain what Stroilov and Bukovsky say—and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that they do—this is the obligation of anyone who gives a damn about history, foreign policy, and the scores of millions dead.

Comments

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

nohistorians? no univsersity publishers? no cold war political scientists? there have got to be people who want to see this stuff available...
i think maybe our inclination towards trying to maintain better diplomacy with russia has caused a lot of people to try to forget the cold war, stalin, lenin, et al, like a bad dream. but we have an ex kgb head head pulling the strings in russia now. he's got bloody hands and any information we have about that is important.
and not just him... is this saying current european leaders are implicated in collusion??

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It does indeed appear to be saying that.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

I'm sure http://wikileaks.org/ would love the stuff.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they would. I'm not sure how one goes about bringing it to their attention.

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

proff at suburbia.net ...?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Soviet Russia is "old news" -- Stalin even more so. "Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the entire sixth grade."

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

It's interesting how much material is out there for potential theses. I had a discussion earlier today about the evolution of English as a result of many people moving to a large percentage of their daily conversation being textual electronic communication.

One example was that acronyms no longer had to be orally pronounceable and migrated more rapidly from all uppercase to all lowercase, to avoid "shouting."

The retired journalist I was talking to said, "Hey, great material for a book." I (of course) said, "Sorry, I need to write the books I get paid for."

But the existence of archives that probably go clear back to the beginnings of Usenet News, or at least very far back, provide a rich "paper" trail for researching the progress and reasons for electronic textual language evolution. I told the guy that the proper people to cover it was grad students in English departments.

The material from the USSR has all kinds of angles for various programs of study. History, political science, international affairs, some of it almost certainly bears on military history.

Of course, a lot of what decides thesis and dissertation topics are whether they're sexy to the faculty.

Still.

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Kinnock and Ashton's involvement with the USSR would be treason under British law, wouldn't it?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It would indeed, since at the time the USSR was considered an active enemy state.