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

[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 ...?