Hideous power

[Botnst]

As he wanders through the streets of St. Petersburg contemplating murder, the hero of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment notices “that special Petersburg stench” which seems to be everywhere. Somehow, that stench constitutes the atmosphere in which lethal and repulsive ideas arise.

When Jonathan Brent arrived in Moscow, he detected the same stench. It was 1992, just after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Brent seized a unique opportunity that, if not for him, would doubtless have been missed. He came to negotiate a deal to publish sensitive and secret documents from the Central Party Archives. But despite the new openness, the old Russian smell, or spirit—the Russian word dukh means both—persisted. Brent noticed “the smell of Moscow—flat, unwashed, sour—an accumulation of fifty years without sunlight or cleansing breeze, as if inhering in the things themselves.” The odor differed from the stink of garbage or stale apartment-building air in New York because it had no specific source. On the contrary, it seemed to be there all on its own, not like the smell of rotting objects in the refrigerator, but, rather, the smell of the refrigerator itself.

Brent describes how he learned to negotiate the bureaucratic obstacles, slovenly work habits, anti-Semitism, and lawlessness that make Russia enduringly Russian as he pursued what has turned out to be the most significant publishing venture of the past fifty years: Yale University Press’s Annals of Communism series. About two dozen volumes already published reveal documents, never seen before in Russia or the West, of the greatest importance in understanding world Communism. Though invented by Lenin in Russia, totalitarian Communism has, after all, ruled nearly twenty countries and about 40 percent of the world’s people at one time or another, and it has inspired true believers almost everywhere, including the United States. The documents show that, if anything, the ideology was more pervasive and dangerous than we thought.

The first volume in the series, The Secret World of American Communism, caused shock waves by demonstrating that the American Communist Party was not a group of home-grown idealists, as so many apologists claimed, but, from the start, conducted espionage and took orders directly from Moscow. Despite decades of leftist mockery and vilification, the basic picture provided by Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley of Alger Hiss and many others was correct. The Comintern, too, was from day one directed by Moscow as a tool of Russian foreign policy.

And despite the desperate strategy of throwing all blame on Stalin so as to excuse Lenin, The Unknown Lenin, which reproduces a selection from some six thousand Lenin documents never before released, reveals bloodthirstiness that surprised even anti-Communists. During a famine, Lenin ordered his followers not to alleviate but to take advantage of mass starvation:
It is precisely now and only now when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.

more at: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-lingering-stench--airing-Stalin-s-archives-4028

[Skippy]

Interesting read.

[Botnst]

The era doesn't interest me enough to buy & read the book series, but I sure would like to see a TV series from the book. Maybe History Channel. It's funny how disinterested we (Americans ... Others too?) are in the rise and fall of the greatest socialist totalitarian threat in history.

[LUVMBDiesels]

..."The first volume in the series, The Secret World of American Communism, caused shock waves by demonstrating that the American Communist Party was not a group of home-grown idealists, as so many apologists claimed, but, from the start, conducted espionage and took orders directly from Moscow. Despite decades of leftist mockery and vilification, the basic picture provided by Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley of Alger Hiss and many others was correct. The Comintern, too, was from day one directed by Moscow as a tool of Russian foreign policy."...


Imagine that! The ACP was directed from Moscow!
These books should be required reading in High School.

Funny how McCarthy was right...

I like the idea of a TV documentary too. They did a big expose' on the German-American Bund's connection to the NAZI's so why not this one.

[mgburg]

Originally Posted by LUVMBDiesels

... Imagine that! The ACP was directed from Moscow! ... These books should be required reading in High School. ... Funny how McCarthy was right... ... I like the idea of a TV documentary too. They did a big expose' on the German-American Bund's connection to the NAZI's so why not this one.

Can't.

Too many Trotskyites still in positions of power. Can't kill the beast while he has YOU in the cage, yet...