As Claire Berlinski writes in “A Hidden History of Evil,” former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky also has a massive collection of papers from the Central Committee of the Communist Party. They sit online at bukovksy-archives.net (where we see the remnants of Bukovsky’s 2008 campaign for president of Russia), but they also are not organized or translated.
The Stroilov papers seem to intrigue Berlinski most, particularly for the unflattering things they say about the Soviet Union’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Berlinski writes:
Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The ‘commonly accepted’ version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.Iraq ‘pressure.’ There also is a transcript of an April 28, 1990, discussion between Gorbachev and Syrian dictator Hafez Assad in which Assad suggests that Iraq needs to expand its borders to be better positioned to “pressure” Israel. And Gorbachev agrees with Assad.For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
The world needs to see these documents, all of them translated in every language, if the human race is to learn anything from Communism in practice.
On a sympathy scale of 1 to 1 million, Communism gets 1 point for pretending to be for equality and against bigotry. (Historians go out of their way to give Communism that point.) But Communism loses that point for pretending, for enslaving and for being the most deadly ideology in the history of the world.
Yet who knows that? Do our children know that Communism killed 140 million people in the 20th century, and primarily in “peacetime”? Do even most adults know that? The history has yet to find its way to our history books.
Frank Warner
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