Posted on 05/21/2009 2:43:47 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A proposed law could make comparing Soviet rule with that of the Nazis a crime. Intellectuals fear a manipulation of Russia’s past.
A bitter joke from the Soviet-era has it that Russia is the world's only country with an unpredictable past.
That jibe has come winging back in recent days, after the Kremlin announced the creation of a special 28-member panel tasked with examining and combating examples of "historical revisionism" that harm Russia's image.
The committee, which has no legal power, is chaired by the head of President Dmitry Medvedev's administration, Sergei Naryshkin, and includes a sprinkling of historians but also lawmakers, Kremlin officials, the armed forces' chief of staff, and members of the FSB security service.
But a companion law, drafted by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party and soon due to be introduced into the State Duma, will stipulate fines and prison sentences of up to five years for anyone found guilty of "denying the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal."
This is a reaction to a growing body of historiography in former Soviet and Eastern European countries that depicts the long years of Soviet domination as similar in nature to the Nazi occupation, and suggests that for these nations, liberation arrived only when the USSR collapsed. Even more irritating for the Russians are perceived attempts in some places, like Ukraine and Latvia, to "rehabilitate" citizens who wore German uniforms during World War II to fight against the oncoming Red Army.
"It is high time to make a study of what is going on here, and to decide what kind of documents we need to dig up and publish to counter these new interpretations," says Natalya Narochnitskaya,
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Of course they weren’t Nazi’s.
They were much, much worse.
Hail to the USSR the best- Hack, cough, spit, Puke, Hurl, etc etc Help me my finger hurt even typing this garbage. Let us tell the truth about them!!
I wish we’d go after the kommissars, Gulag guards and commanders, and members of the Secret police as passionately as we have Nazi war criminals. Both are equally guilty in my eyes.
Well then forget the past. I compare Putin to the Nazis.
Makes sense. The Soviets killed way more people.
As much as communism was bad, you may never, never compare it to the nazism.
Nazism is by far worsest thing happened to mankind.
Communism you can survine, Nazism- NOT
Polish General Wladyslaw Anders once told General Patton during WW II, “With the Germans, we lose our lives. With the Russians, we lose our souls.”
Don't laugh... 
too hard, Nick
Our time... 
is just around the corner!
Bush 1 and Clinton were moron, along with the pernicious plague of fools known as “realists”. The failure to have trials for communists after the fall of the Soviet Union as a prerequisit for US aid was the worst policy decision by presidents this side of Carter’s decision not ot back the shaw and Eisenhower’s double lunacy of supporting the Arabs in 1956 and pushing “Atoms for Peace”.
Don’t forget Eisenhower refusing to sell weapons or support Batista.
I’m sure it’ll be classified as hate speech soon.
Obama Calls for UN to Pass Resolution Condemning Russia,
Forgets Russia Has UNSC Veto [re invasion of Georgia]
LGF [ick!]
Posted on 08/12/2008 12:24:05 PM PDT by chessplayer
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2060690/posts
Tell that to the 20,000,000 Kulaks..or the 80,000,000 other victims of the RED CENTURY...
Long before WWII Will Rodgers visited the USSR, and he wrote about seeing the trainloads of people headed to Siberia "and nobody had a ticket back except the engineer". F.A. Hayek wrote the classic The Road to Serfdom during WWII, before the liberation of any of the death camps. But he predicted them, in general terms - simply by analogy to the Soviet Union. Because the burden of Serfdom is that from the POV of a liberal - he wrote to a British audience, and did not know that in America in the 1920s the meaning of "liberal" had been inverted - the Nazis and the Communists differed only in nuance. Basically there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two.Of course Hayek knew that the Nazis and the Communists were in a ferocious struggle even as he wrote - but reading his take on the relationship between the two socialisms, I could not but think of a line in a movie, wherein one counselor to the sultan said to another about a scuffle between two princes, "They fight as only half brothers can."
So Russia is going to say that Communism is a wonderful thing, that Stalin and Brezhnev were humanitarian leaders? Seems like the USSR is coming back with a vengeance.
It’s closer to the other way around. The Nazis only (only!) murdered about 11 million people, drawing from most of Europe. The Soviets murdered about ten times that many soviet citizens alone, not counting their massacres elsewhere. Of the two, the Nazis were actually the less bloodthirsty. They were also less oppressive to the people they didn’t murder.
It takes some doing to make the Nazis look civilized, but the Soviets managed it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.