Indicting the Soviet Past

...High degrees of collaboration and apathy, as well as resistance, among the population were necessarily involved...

...Yakovlev believes the persecution of the three groups undermined the foundations of traditional Russian civilization...

...the deportations of Chechens and other peoples of the north Caucasus, as well as Volga Germans, to Kazakhstan during and after the War...

...A Centwy of Violence, knowledgably translated by Anthony Austin, is exceptional not only for its wealth of evidence but for its concise, forceful presentation...

...Moreover, there was no authoritative synthesis of these materials with older Russian and Western scholarship and the personal testimonies that appeared in samizdat (material "selfpublished" in the USSR) and tamizdat (published abroad...

...Not surprisingly, a question the author repeatedly raises is why so much of the legacy of the past is still not being confronted...

...Well before the next election Yeltsin designated a former KGB agent, Vladimir V Putin, as his successor, to more or less general satisfaction...

...Writers & Writing Indicting the Soviet Past By Anatole Snub In many respects Russia today is a more normal country than the "stagnant" Soviet Union during Leonid I. Brezhnev's rule, not to mention the terrible years of Vladimir I. Lenin and Joseph V Stalin...

...Nevertheless, a decade into the post-Soviet era Russia is evolving in fits, starts and long pauses...

...Hardly anything resembling this has occurred in Russia since 1991...

...But he also believes—rightly, in my opinion—that without a thorough "de-Bolshevization" Russia cannot move forward as a full partner in European civilization...

...Between 1989 and 2000, as an opinion analyst for the U.S...

...In the Russia of 1913 that Yakovlev now admires, doctors and teachers formed an essential base for the emergence of a liberal middle class...

...In summing up Lenin's terror against the Russian Orthodox clergy in 1918, he reports: "Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev was mutilated, castrated, and shot, and his corpse was left naked for the public to desecrate...

...Some observers believe that, absent a thorough democratization, what mainly happened in Russia after 1991 was the accession to power of the second andjunior ranks of the old Soviet nomenklatura, whose promotions had been held back by the Kremlin gerontocracy between 1976 and 1986...

...The Marshall Plan and other Western aid fueled an "economic miracle...

...They focus on the Bolshevik wars against the peasantry (1918-23 and 1929-33),the unremitting harassment of the intelligentsia (whom Lenin despised as "shit"), and the campaigns against the Orthodox clergy...

...When the late Russian poet Anna Akhmatova learned in 1956 that Nikita S. Khrushchev was freeing millions of political prisoners, she shrewdly remarked: "Now the struggle will begin, between those who "sat' [in prisons and labor camps] and those who put them there...

...Lenin and Stalin and their henchmen callously and consistently destroyed the nation's gene pool, consciously undermining the potential for the flowering of science and culture.' Yakovlev realizes, though, that the Russian saga is not an entirely black and white story...

...Anatole Shub, a former NL editor, was Moscow correspondent of the Washington Post from 1967 to 1969...

...To this day," Yakovlev laments, "the country proliferates with monuments to Lenin and streets named after him...

...Yakovlev was also instrumental in securing the return of many churches, monasteries, synagogues, and mosques seized by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev, and in facilitating the restoration of artistic treasures in those buildings that had been ruined or defaced by Bolshevik hooligans...

...Like Khrushchev and Gorbachev before them, Yeltsin and Putin have had trouble coping with the old Soviet militaryindustrial complex, and Putin's former security associates have doubtless been active behind the scenes in squeezing the media and discrediting liberal politicians and intellectuals...

...Participants in Communist rallies often carry portraits of Stalin in his generalissimo's uniform...

...Like others, he attributes ultimate responsibility to the heritage of Byzantium and of the Mongol occupation...

...Throughout the book Yakovlev offers interesting bits of information gleaned when he was a Kremlin insider under Khrushchev and Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

...As for wartime atrocities, the name of the radical Ukrainian nationalist Simon Petliura has become synonymous with anti-Semitic pogroms...

...and the suppression of the rebel sailors of Kronstadt (1921) and striking workers at Novocherkassk(1962...

...To be sure, since 1987 countless books, articles and television programs have been devoted, in Russia and abroad, to Bolshevik atrocities...

...It comes, fittingly, from Alexander N. Yakovlev in his new book, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (Yale, 254 pp., $29.95...

...Metropolitan Veniamin of St...

...monstrous speeches defending Stalin and attacking the victims of the evil regime are delivered in the Duma...

...To the extent that Russians take the trouble to read it, Yakovlev's masterful book (published in Russia two years ago) is bound to advance that process...

...The first two deal with the Soviet persecution of children (alleged "enemies of the people") and of Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Anarchists, and others who cooperated with the Bolsheviks at some point during the civil war...

...Yakovlev thinks the KGB's power was fully equal, and probably superior, to that of the Communist Party apparatus, Indeed, in the early months of the Soviet regime, Lenin relied more on the Cheka/ KGB under Felix Dzerzhinsky than on the Party organization, which was a mess until Stalin took over in 1922...

...The genealogy of terrorism goes back to the 19th century People's Will that assassinated Tsar Alexander II...

...Allied licensing of new democratic media...

...A theme that weaves in and out of the postwar chapters is the rising power of the KGB and its infiltration of all government, party and "public" organizations (like the Writers Union...

...Initial doubts led inexorably to total disillusion and a deepening concern with the victims and survivors of Soviet repressions...

...many a local government leader has Lenin's portrait hanging in his office...

...Yeltsin mused about removing "the mummy"— the embalmed body of Lenin—from its mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square, but chose not to risk the mass disorders said to have been threatened by the Communists...

...According to a postwar joke, the Nazi party was a singularly miraculous institution because it had 12 million members on May 7, 1945 and none—acknowledged—on May 8.) Several of the preconditions for overcoming the Nazi heritage were controversial at the time (disputed mainly by political foes of President Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...That is primarily because Alexander F. Kerensky, Paul N. Miliukov and other democratic leaders of 1905-18 left the country (and died abroad), while successive generations of potential Russian leaders were decimated by two world wars, civil war, politically induced famine, and the terror unleashed by the Soviet regime between 1918 and 1953—calamities that claimed at least 65 million lives...

...Yakovlev believes that, "in the last analysis," both Khrushchev and Gorbachev were ousted by the KGB...

...In passing, Yakovlev notes that he was unable to clear up one of the abiding mysteries of those days: namely, the assassination on July 6,1918 of the German ambassador in Moscow, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, by Yakov Bliumkin, a Left Socialist Revolutionary who had become the Cheka official responsible for counterespionage against the German Embassy...

...Putin has remained popular primarily because he is «or the boorish Yeltsin, even though (or perhaps because) he has largely evaded the issues posed by Lenin and Stalin...

...Often allied with the protofascists led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the CPRF under Gennady I. Zyuganov won veto power in national and local legislatures as well as influence in state bureaucracies...

...The three strongest chapters follow...

...and close supervision of the 1949 drafting in Bonn of a new constitution for the Federal Republic that the East Germans gladly accepted 40 years later...

...But those Soviet citizens who survived Bolshevik terror did not escape unscathed...

...There has been nothing resembling the systematic Bewältigung der Vergangenheit (mastery of the past) that tookplacein West Germany between 1945 and 1955...

...Archbishop Vassily was crucified and burned...

...Information Agency, he supervised nearly a hundred focus group discussions in a dozen Russian cities...

...The killing served Lenin as a pretext for cracking down on the Left Social Revolutionaries, although Bliumkin mysteriously escaped abroad...

...Yakovlev concludes: "The Bolshevik regime is guilty not only of the deaths of millions of people and the tragic consequences for their families, not only of creating an atmosphere of total fear and lies, but of a crime against conscience, of producing its notorious 'new historic community of people' distorted by malice, doublethink, suspiciousness and pretense...

...Yakovlev provides two verbatim pages of the fascinating debate on the question of individual responsibility featuring Zhukov, Khrushchev and the Stalinist veteran Lazar M. Kaganovich...

...the Nuremberg trials and other "de-Nazification," such as outlawing the Nazi party and banning Mein Kampf...

...Zhukov's effort was repelled, leading to his ouster as the Defense Minister a few months later and to freezing discussion of Stalin until 1961...

...Stalin's final anti-Semitic campaigns (against "rootless cosmopolitans" and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and in the alleged "doctors' plot...

...In 1989, for example, he published the full text of Khrushchev's speech in a remarkable monthly magazine, News from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which under his guidance specialized in such revelations...

...For instance, he sheds new light on the dramatic Central Committee plenary meeting of June 1957...

...it has yet to make a decisive, unequivocal break with the Soviet legacy...

...Petersburg, in line to succeed the patriarch, was turned into a pillar of ice: He was doused with cold water in the freezing cold...

...Stalin, meanwhile, remains buried in a place of honor behind the Kremlin wall...

...When he returned to Russia in Stalin's time he was not prosecuted, and the author notes a continuing suspicion that the assassination was a provocation organized by the Bolshevik leaders...

...Petersburg...

...Meanwhile, the principal victims of ill-considered economic "reforms" have been doctors and teachers, thus accelerating both a mounting public-health crisis and the atrophying of the school system (Russia still cannot "afford" compulsory secondary education...

...an occupation by Western forces (continuing under NATO cover) to this day...

...Perhaps most important, Russia has lacked literate, irreproachably democratic leaders of the caliber of Konrad Adenauer, Theoder Heuss and Willy Brandt...

...Pressed by a Supreme Soviet elected under the Communist regime, however, he soon acceded to the formation of the new Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), which has regularly polled a protest vote of 20 per cent in various Tammany Hall-style "free" elections...

...It has long been common knowledge that at that meeting Khrushchev reversed a 7-to-4 Politburo vote to remove him...

...That struggle continues, with no clear victor...

...Volume upon volume of formerly secret documents have been released, but few Russians—beyond the members of the democratic intelligentsia, who already understood the past and agreed with those wishing to repudiate it— have rushed out to buy them...

...These included the Allied insistence on "unconditional surrender," disbanding of the "Wehrmacht and dismantling of arms factories...

...There is, furthermore, a strain of violence and brutality in Russian history apart from the Bolshevik regime...

...The next four chapters take up the harsh fate of Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans, and of workers carried off to Germany by the Nazis, during World War II...

...In 1991, Yeltsin did outlaw the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and seize much of its property...

...On February 25,1956 this wounded World War II veteran and junior Communist Central Committee apparatchik sat in the back of the Kremlin hall listening to Khrushchev's "secret speech" detailing Stalin's crimes and was never the same again...

...hundreds of Bolshevik and frankly Fascist newspapers are being published...

...Primarily an indictment of Lenin, Stalin and their accomplices, it consists of a prologue, an epilogue and nine substantive chapters...

...The documents bear witness to the most savage atrocities against priests, monks, and nuns: They were crucified on the central doors of iconostases, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled with priestly stoles, given Communion with melted lead, drowned in the holes in the ice...

...No single individual played a greater role than Yakovlev, the father of glasnost and perestroïka, in prying open formerly inaccessible Soviet files and publicizing their contents...

...Now, we have such a synthesis...

...Early in 1996, polls suggested that Zyuganov might defeat the ailing Yeltsin in the coming presidential election—an outcome averted by a media blitz orchestrated by "oligarchs" who had profited from ""privatization...

...Lenin and Stalin could not have prevailed alone, any more than Hitler could have...

...Former President Boris N. Yeltsin, encouraged by Yakovlev among others, did transfer the remains of Tsar Nicholas II and his family from Yekaterinburg, where they were murdered in 1918, to the Romanov imperial crypt in St...

...To understand what has not happened in postSoviet Russia, one need only recall West Germany's experience in exorcising Nazism, which at its peak in 193 8 probably enjoyed greater popular support than the Soviet regime ever did...

...Archbishop Andronnik of Perm, who had been renowned earlier as a missionary and had worked as such in Japan, was buried alive...

...But until now it was not generally known that Marshal Georgi ?. Zhukov led an effort to pursue "de-Stalinization" to its logical conclusion: criminal prosecution of those who ordered or carried out the mass murders...

...Bishop Germogen of Tobolsk, who had voluntarily accompanied the [Tsar] into exile [in the Urals], was strapped alive to the paddle wheel of a steamboat and mangled by the rotating blades...

...As chairman of a Russian government commission on rehabilitating the victims of Soviet repressions, he has publicized both the details of Kremlin decision-making laid out in official documents and the sufferings of the victims, disclosed in personal letters as well as transcripts of KGB interrogations...

...According to [Church] statistics, nearly 3,000 members of the clergy were shot in 1918 alone...

...Yakovlev is aware that a "slave mentality" among the population is still quite widespread...