[Mb-civic] Stalin's resurgence in Russia - Cathy Young - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Stalin's resurgence in Russia

By Cathy Young  |  February 27, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

TWO EVENTS last week starkly illustrate the dilemmas of countries 
grappling with a terrible past. In Austria, Holocaust denier David 
Irving received a three-year jail sentence for his public assertions 
that the Nazis did not carry out a systematic extermination of the Jews 
during World War II. Meanwhile, in Russia, as the country marked the 
50th anniversary of its official turn away from Stalinism under 
Khrushchev, many people regard the late dictator's legacy as mostly 
positive -- and a new museum celebrating that legacy is about to open.

Irving's sentence reflects Europe's hard-line approach to its Nazi past. 
Laws prohibiting Holocaust denial and pro-Nazi propaganda are stringent 
in Germany and Austria, the countries most directly implicated in Nazi 
crimes against humanity; but they exist in many other countries on the 
European continent as well. Such laws are troubling to most Americans.

To some, the issue is not clear-cut. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate 
dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that ''while Irving's rants 
would not have led to legal action in the United States, it is important 
that we recognize and respect Austria's commitment to fighting Holocaust 
denial . . . as part of its historic responsibility to its Nazi past."

While I have no sympathy for Irving (who, faced with jail, tried to 
weasel out of his position with the ludicrous claim that new evidence 
has led him to believe people were slaughtered at Auschwitz after all), 
I still think that the law used against him is a bad idea. The state of 
Austria can own up to its responsibility to its past without 
criminalizing even the worst of speech. In the United States, even 
without legal sanctions, Holocaust denial is effectively marginalized by 
public opinion.

Meanwhile, the criminalization of Holocaust denial may perversely 
strengthen the hand of the deniers, leading some to argue that the 
defenders of Holocaust history must have little confidence in their 
facts if they feel they must silence challengers. Historian Deborah 
Lipstadt is concerned that the jail sentence could give Irving publicity 
and martyrdom instead of the obscurity he deserves.

On to Russia, where from the early 1930s and until his death in 1953 
Stalin slaughtered his own people on a Holocaust-like scale. It is 
estimated that at least 20 million died. The extermination was not as 
systematically deliberate as the Nazis', but the victims, in the end, 
were just as dead.

Fifty years ago at a secret Communist Party meeting, Stalin's successor, 
Nikita Khrushchev, gave a speech denouncing Stalin's ''personality cult" 
and the repressions under his rule. This speech began the process of the 
de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union: most political prisoners were 
released, and many of the dead posthumously exonerated. Yet neither the 
Soviet Union nor, in later years, post-Soviet Russia fully repudiated 
Stalin, or fully came to term with his crimes. In recent years, Russian 
president Vladimir Putin has been advocating a more positive view of the 
country's Soviet past. Cities have erected monuments to Stalin.

The British paper The Independent said a Stalin museum is scheduled to 
open in March in Volgograd, formerly known as Stalingrad.

Polls show that 30 to 40 percent of Russians now regard Stalin's role in 
history as mostly ''positive," crediting him with turning the Soviet 
Union into a superpower and defeating Hitler.

Compared with this amnesia about state crimes against humanity, the 
German experience is certainly a good model -- whatever one thinks of 
Germany's Holocaust denial laws. Sadly, amnesia about the crimes of 
communism is common in the West as well; historians who have downplayed 
and minimized those crimes, such as Miami University of Ohio historian 
Robert W. Thurston, have not been ostracized the way David Irving has 
been for a long time.

The resurgence of the Stalin cult in Russia shows the danger of such 
amnesia. Holocaust denial and Gulag denial should be finally seen as the 
twin evils they are.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/27/stalins_resurgence_in_russia/
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