orb@whuts.UUCP (SEVENER) (12/20/85)
Jim, you are an intelligent person yet your ideology blinds you to reality. For example you refuse to accept both the courage and the importance of Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes: > > tim sevener > Jim Matthews > > > >Khruschev made public what people were afraid to admit to themselves: > >namely the awful crimes which Stalin committed in sentencing millions > >to labor camps and prisons. > > No, he did not "make public" Stalin's crimes. Khrushchev's > "secret speech" was not published in Russia, and I don't believe it has > been since. Furthermore, he denounced only the purges and executions of good > Communists, a matter of thousands of deaths, not the slaughter of millions > of ordinary Russians. Stalin was condemned for being a dictator, not for > violating human rights. > I don't know if Khruschev's speech was officially published or not. I do know that Khruschev's speech was given to the official Communist Party Congress in 1956 and 1961 with hundreds of Party officials from all over the Soviet Union in attendance. This is the equivalent of Reagan speaking to a joint session of Congress. How much more "public" or "official" can you get? The next point makes quite plain how public such knowledge had become and its official endorsement, yet you totally ignore the patently public nature of this event and simply wish to brush it aside: > > Indeed Khruschev turned Soviet policy > >around to such an extent that Solzhenitsyn was granted the Lenin Prize > >for Literature (the highest literary prize in the USSR) for > >"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" which depicts life in a > >labor camp for a normal innocent but totally naive Soviet citizen. > >(If you haven't read it, I would recommend it) > > Krushchev used "Denisovitch" as a tool against his Stalinist opponents, So Khruschev *did* make public his opposition to Stalin's crimes,eh? I thought you just said he didn't. Giving the highest literary prize to a book about Stalin's Gulags seems quite public to me and more effective in arousing opposition to such policies than any mere speech. Eloquent literature moves people more deeply than speeches. If Khruschev's opponents were Stalinists then I suppose that makes Khruschev anti-Stalin doesn't it? If one is opposing Stalinist crimes of terror then obviously books like Denisovitch are apt tools. Is there anything wrong with that? Would you be more pleased if Khruschev complied with his Stalinist opponents? Your next point is simply wrong: > but he didn't relax censorship across the board, and he didn't shut down > the camps that Solzhenitsyn depicted so eloquently. It is true that censorship was not relaxed across the board although it was relaxed greatly. It is *not* true that prisoners were not released after Stalin's death and denunciations. I quote from Stephen Cohen: "Most of these survivors, perhaps seven or eight million, were eventually freed after Stalin's death. They began to return to society, first in a trickle in 1953 and then in a mass exodus in 1956. To salvage what remained of their shattered lives, the returnees required, and demanded, many forms of rehabilitation: legal exoneration, family reunification, housing, jobs, medical care, pensions." p. 23 The Soviet Union Today Again, I am not about to argue that the Soviet Union is any bastion of civil liberties. But it is a well-documented *fact* that the worse terror of Stalinism *was* changed after Stalin's death and Khruschev's denunciation. You are contradicting yourself in your blind adherence to ideology. tim sevener whuxn!orb