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From: matthews@harvard.UUCP (Jim Matthews)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: "We will bury you." -Khruschev
Message-ID: <553@harvard.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13-Dec-85 13:03:55 EST
Article-I.D.: harvard.553
Posted: Fri Dec 13 13:03:55 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 18-Dec-85 20:12:49 EST
References: <252@gargoyle.UUCP> <1951@akgua.UUCP> <1272@ames.UUCP> <13734@rochester.UUCP> <434@whuts.UUCP>
Reply-To: matthews@harvard.UUCP (Jim matthews)
Organization: Aiken Comp Lab, Harvard
Lines: 51

In article <434@whuts.UUCP> orb@whuts.UUCP (SEVENER) writes:
>> Khruschev revealed Stalin's crimes to whom?  The Russian government?  The
>> Russian people?
>>
>> ray
>
>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.

> 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,
but he didn't relax censorship across the board, and he didn't shut down
the camps that Solzhenitsyn depicted so eloquently.
>
>Some of the people in the government now were those sent to Labor camps
>under Stalin.  Those people do not wish to return to such a system.

        No, few of those people are still around, and even fewer are in
any position of influence.  Stalin's lasting influence is in the fact that
the Brezhnev-Andropov-Gromyko generation got their jobs as a result of the
purges.  It is thus no wonder that these same men have presided over a
partial rehabilitation of Stalin's name.

>I am not about to condone actions such as breaking up the recent
>vigil in Moscow commemorating the anniversary of the UN's Human
>Rights declaration.  But it is totally inaccurate to say that
>nothing has changed in the Soviet Union since Stalin's time.
>
>         tim sevener   whuxn!orb

        Things have changed, but only insofar as a system like Stalinism
cannot be sustained indefinitely.  The camps still exist, however, and the
Soviet state has not repudiated the use of Stalinist methods against its
people.

Jim Matthews
matthews@harvard