A Hidden History of Evil

City Journal ^ | 05/12/10 | Claire Berlinski

[TigerLikesRooster]

Claire Berlinski

A Hidden History of Evil

Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?

Though Mikhail Gorbachev is lionized in the West, the untranslated archives suggest a much darker figure.

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.

[spycatcher]

You forgot Gorby's ally, Maurice Strong, who also has a curious lifetime pass when it comes to scrutiny. Glenn Beck will soon discover that everything comes back to Green Gorby as the real wizard behind all the Communists in Crime Inc.