Stalin lives
Sep 2, 2009 Oppression, Stragety
Uncle Joe
The Stalinistic tendencies of the Soviet Russian regime are hardly news. Neither is the fact that Russia as a whole has never come to terms with Stalinism — not surprising considering how painful it would be, and how many co-conspirators would be implicated by the truth. After all, it would hardly hurt the West to come to acknowledge, not merely in history books but culturally, the enormity of the evil of Lenin and Stalin both. And that is never going to happen.
Russia, meanwhile, continues to ramp up its revanchism. Now a Stalin descendant is bringing a lawsuit in Russia against a Russian paper that dared to mention the historical fact that, well, Stalin killed some people. I can hardly imagine how Russian law permits defamation against a dead person to be prosecuted by his family, but what do I know about the law in what is essentially a gangster-run society anyway?
There is reason to be hopeful and not all that scared. Though they surprise us from time to time, the Russians are today a second-class military power, if they were ever anything else. No less importantly, while there is always ample support in Russia for oppression of the other guy and chest-beating, without the gloss of building a New Socialist Man it is doubtful that there will be too many fellow travelers here, besides that handful of omelet-loving academic russophiles (i.e., defrocked sovietologists) who always have a soft spot for Lenin’s favorite recipe — breaking a few eggs.
September 10th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
[...] Toplitt (Unruly of Law) and Ron Coleman discuss a legal action recently filed in [...]