Sean has been wondering whether it would be a good idea to bury Lenin or not, and he concludes with an interesting idea on Lenin’s importance in Russia, an idea not commonly heard in the West:

I think what Lenin stands for is changing in Russia. For better or for worse, he is becoming more like Peter the Great: a firm and decisive, but necessary ruler who thrust Russia into modernity. But that is historical memory for you. A new historical narrative emerges at the moment of forgetting. Even the Lenins of the world can find their place in the genealogy of the present.

I think he’s probably correct and, further, I think Stalin is beginning to be viewed in the same light.

Otto Pohl has just posted the first part of a series on the Russian Diaspora in Australia:

In the wake of the failed 1905 Revolution, the Tsarist regime exiled numerous Social Democrats, Social Revolutionaries and other political opponents to Siberia. Thousands of these internal exiles,however, managed to escape to Manchuria and then make their way to Queensland on Japanese ships by 1915. After 1915, the First World War cut off this first wave of Russian immigrants to Australia.

The Australian government was clearly suspicious of the, shall we say, leftward leanings of many of the new arrivals and it looks like they had a pretty tough time of things in their first few years.

This article came about, by the way, as a result of Ian’s attempts to buy a copy of a Solzhenitsyn book in rural Queensland, which you can read about here.

The Bolshoi Theatre closed for renovations earlier this year, and won’t re-open until 2008 at the earliest. However, if you want to take one last look at the old place, you won’t do better than Cyber Generation’s photo-essay, giving an intimate backstage look at the last performance at the theatre, and the party that followed.

What happens when you try to buy Russian literature in small town Queensland?

So I asked the old half-deaf biddy in the second hand bookshop if she had any books by Solzhenitsyn.
“Soldier Nixon, I don’t think so. Are they crime or thrillers or what ?”
Brushing aside the concept that Stalinist era oppression might have been a crime against humanity, I said,”No, SOLZHENITSYN”.
“Oh, Soldier Nitsyn ! No I don’t think we’ve got any. How do you spell that ?”
At which point I pretty much gave in.

I guess you’ve just got to accept that some battles just aren’t worth fighting any more…

What does one do with an Iron Curtain, once it has been drawn back to let the light in?  Turn it into a 4,500 mile heritage trail for tourists, hikers and cyclists, of course:

Spanning the strictly controlled Finnish-Russian border and winding through the former Soviet satellites of the Baltics, the trail will criss-cross the old front line between East and West Germany, and then follow the path of the Danube. Nothing like this has ever been tried and, though cycling its entire length would take more than two months, organisers believe sections of the Iron Curtain trail will become a magnet for everyone from hikers to historians.

The idea of keeping its memory alive comes from a German MEP and Green activist concerned that the watchtowers and barbed wire are disappearing, not just from the consciousness of Europeans, but from the physical landscape. Michael Cramer argues that action is needed to salvage the trail before it is lost. "Some parts of it are being recultivated, some has gone back to nature, some has been returned to former owners or sold off for real estate," he says, sitting in his office in the eight floor of the European Parliament.

[Hat tip: Candy at The Agonist]

What does one do with an Iron Curtain, once it has been drawn back to let the light in?  Turn it into a 4,500 mile heritage trail for tourists, hikers and cyclists, of course:

Spanning the strictly controlled Finnish-Russian border and winding through the former Soviet satellites of the Baltics, the trail will criss-cross the old front line between East and West Germany, and then follow the path of the Danube. Nothing like this has ever been tried and, though cycling its entire length would take more than two months, organisers believe sections of the Iron Curtain trail will become a magnet for everyone from hikers to historians.

The idea of keeping its memory alive comes from a German MEP and Green activist concerned that the watchtowers and barbed wire are disappearing, not just from the consciousness of Europeans, but from the physical landscape. Michael Cramer argues that action is needed to salvage the trail before it is lost. "Some parts of it are being recultivated, some has gone back to nature, some has been returned to former owners or sold off for real estate," he says, sitting in his office in the eight floor of the European Parliament.

[Hat tip: Candy at The Agonist]

An expedition has discovered the wreckage of an American bomber from the Second World War - in the middle of Siberia, reports RIA Novosti.

The wreckage of a World War II U.S. bomber has been discovered in the Siberian republic of Yakutia, a local official said Thursday.

[…] The expedition in Siberia discovered parts of a fuselage, propellers, a bomb rack, parts of the cockpit panel and engine, armor plates, machineguns, and pilot’s personal items.

The team has not found the remains of the pilot or his documents, though.

The discovery of an American plane from that era in central Siberia isn’t actually all that unexpected, as during the WW2 the US used to send bombers to Russia along a route that crossed Alaska and Siberia.

One of my pet subjects is the Russian Civil War.  I’ve long been fascinated by the way that Russia split into so many competing feifdoms between 1917-1921.  Most nominally supported either the Reds (Communists) or the Whites (Tsarists) but, in reality, they were usually run more for the benefit of their local warlord. 

So I was thrilled today when I found an email from James Bisher telling me about his new civil war book - White Terror: Cossak Warlords of the Trans-Siberian. 

Bisher’s book builds around the biography of the most notorious
warlord, Ataman Grigori Semenov, following his life from a small
Cossack village to intrigue in China’s rebellious Mongolian outback,
through heroic Carpathian and Mesopotamian campaigns of the Great War,
to the revolutionary chaos of Moscow, back to counter-revolution in the
far-flung provinces of the Russian Far East, wandering the world in
exile from Seoul to Tientsin to Vancouver to New York, then into the
organized crime world of Japanese intelligence in Manchukuo. Semenov’s
associate warlords are also profiled, including Baron Roman
Ungern-Shternberg and Ataman Ivan Kalmykov, whose names have become
synonyms for sadism. Bisher describes in detail the Cossacks’ armies,
ever-changing orders of battle, key officers, armored trains,
atrocities against prisoners and civilians, battles against Bolsheviks
and even the Cossacks’ fellow Whites, dirty deals with the Japanese and
conflict with the Americans. It’s the story of a forgotten Russia in
turmoil, when the line between government and organized crime blurred
into a chaotic continuum of kleptocracy, vengeance and sadism.

Bisher really looks to know his stuff, and has put together an excellent website about the Civil War and about his book.  The links section, in particular is fantastic, containing several sites that I’d never heard of and the site is, frankly, worth visiting for them alone.

The one drawback, as with most academic books, is the high price.  I don’t know about you, but $125 is a bit out of my price range.  Hmm, I wonder if I can get my sticky mitts on a review copy…?

Following the furore over ABC’s interview with Shamil Basayev, which some have interpreted as a (not very thinly) veiled warning to Russia’s own journalists not to overstep the line when reporting Checnhnya, Masha Gessen has published an instructive essay on the history of foreign journalism during the Soviet Union:

Before 1961, all foreign journalists were required to file their reports from a particular room in the Central Telegraph building on what was then called Gorky Street. The reports were read by the censor, who sometimes held them up for days and sometimes returned them with multiple deletions — or marked "not cleared." The censor made few decisions by himself or herself. During the Stalinist era, all questions were phoned directly in to Stalin’s secretariat, which issued instructions.

When they got caught cheating the system, reporters would get expelled. At one point in the late 1940s, expulsions became so frequent that there was only one foreign correspondent in Moscow: the great Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times.

Alarmingly, though, Gessen notes that some of the bad old ways seem to be returning:

Expulsions of journalists resumed after the second war in Chechnya began. But until recently there was always a formal reason for expelling journalists, banning them from re-entering Russia or revoking their accreditation. An exception is a bizarre incident in May when a Latvian TV crew was detained in the Pskov region and kicked out of the country with no explanation.

Andrei Lankov, at North Korea Zone writes about Terenti Shtykov, the first Soviet ambassador of North Korea:

Terenti Shtykov… Few people in the Korea of the late 1940s would not recognize his name. For all practical purposes he was the supreme ruler of the North in everything but name. It was under his tutelage that Kim Il-sung’s system was born.

Terenti Shtykov was an archetypical “Stalin’s man”: a ruthless, cautious, and hard-working autodidact who combined the vestiges of revolutionary idealism with cunning, shrewdness, and efficiency.

Read the full article here.

Alexei Pankin has trumped all other historians and analysts, and uncovered the root cause of all Russia’s recent political crises - battles over holiday homes:

My humble contribution to Russian and world political thought is what I call the "dacha theory" of history. The gist of the theory is that fighting over dachas among the ruling elite has been a major driving force behind the social development of the country in recent times.

The Prosecutor General’s Office announced last week that it had opened an investigation into Mikhail Kasyanov’s acquisition of a government-owned dacha shortly before he was fired as prime minister in early 2004. The "Kasyanov affair" provides additional empirical evidence to back up my theory, and makes possible a number of predictions.

[…] With the Kasyanov affair, dachas have once more emerged at the center of a political battle. Mark my words: Major upheavals are on the way.

Compelling.

David McDuff notes that today is a national day of mourning in Estonia, marking the 1941 mass deportations to Siberia, and quotes from a factsheet provided by the Estonian government:

On the night of 14 June, families were woken up in the middle of the night, given a few hours to pack, taken to the train stations, and separated without warning. Women, children and elderly people who were to be deported for 20 years were sent to Siberia, while men were sent to forced labour camps in the far north. The total number of deportees on 14 June was equivalent to about 1 per cent of the Estonian population. […]

Towards the end of the 1950s, survivors were granted the opportunity to return to their homeland. However, approximately only one in four June deportees benefited from this decision. It is known that at least 6,957 persons never returned home because they were either murdered or tortured to death, starved to death in prison camps or during their forced migration, or simply went missing.

You can’t ask for anyone better than Anne Applebaum, author of the definitive book on gulags for the answer to this question.  And, despite its problems, she definitely doesn’t think Guantanamo Bay qualifies as a gulag, unlike some at Amnesty International.

After all, during Joseph Stalin’s lifetime, still a recent memory, some 25 million people had been arrested in the Soviet Union, mostly arbitrarily, and placed in thousands of forced-labor camps and exile villages all over the country. Millions died of starvation and overwork. This prison camp system, known as the gulag, cast such a horrific shadow that people were still afraid of it, 30 years after Stalin’s death. […]

I am appalled by this administration’s detention practices and interrogation policies, by the lack of a legal mechanism to judge the guilt of alleged terrorists, and by the absence of any outside investigation into reports of prison abuse. But I loathe these things precisely because the United States is not the Soviet Union, because our detention centers are not intrinsic to our political system, and because they are therefore not "similar in character" to the gulag at all.

In her article, she also goes on to point out that Amnesty International was at the forefront of exposing gulags during the 1970s and 1980s.  If anyone should know the true extent of the horrors perpetrated in the Soviet Union’s gulags, it truly should be Amnesty International.  And yet, it appears they’ve either forgotten or forsaken this knowledge.  Is this corporate incompetence, I wonder, or is the desperate search for the next hyperbolic headline undermining Amnesty’s ability to effectively publicise the plight of prisoners of conscience?

(Thanks to MPC at Blog de Connard for the link).

Via Normblog, I’ve just discovered that Leon Trotsky used to work at the New York Public Library in 1917.  Norm comments:

You can get free internet access here. I’m sure Trotsky would have been pleased about that. But it’s only for half an hour. Not so good.

The spirit of Trotsky lives on, American style.

Far Outliers has put together a fascinating series of posts about the Soviet Gulags.  Most revealing of the depravity of the prison camps is this discussion of the "almost sacred status" of bread:

While camp thieves stole almost everything else with impunity, for example, the theft of bread was considered particularly heinous and unforgivable. Vladimir Petrov found on his long train journey to Kolyma that "thieving was permitted and could be applied to anything within the thiefs capacity and luck, but there was one exception–bread. Bread was sacred and inviolable, regardless of any distinctions in the population of the car." Petrov had in fact been chosen as the starosta [leader] of the car, and in that capacity was charged with beating up a petty thief who had stolen bread. He duly did so. Thomas Sgovio [an American] also wrote that the unwritten law of the camp criminals in Kolyma was: "Steal anything–excepting the holy bread portion." He too had "seen more than one prisoner beaten to death for violating the sacred tradition." […]

In his memoirs, Dmitri Panin, a close friend of Solzhenitsyn’s, described exactly how such a death sentence might be carried out: "An offender caught in the act of stealing bread would be tossed in the air by other prisoners and allowed to crash to the ground; this was repeated several times, damaging his kidneys. Then they would heave him out of the barracks like so much carrion."

Also worth checkng out is this post about the tapping code that allowed Gulag prisoners in solitary confinement to communicate:

Alexander Dolgun learned the code in Lefortovo, memorizing it with the help of matches. When he was finally able to "talk" to the man in the next cell, and understood that the man was asking him "Who are you?" he felt "a rush of pure love for a man who has been asking me for three months who I am."

Thankfully, nothing exists today in Russia on the scale (both physical size and depravity) of the Gulag, but there are still plenty of prisons throughout Russia where conditions would be considered appalling by the standards of many in Europe.

UPDATE:  A Step Out of Time notes that a pair of Estonians who were imprisoned in the Gulags have published a letter to world leaders asking them not to attend the celebration of the end of World War 2 in Moscow until Russia makes amends for crimes it committed during and after the war.

UPDATE 2:  In the comments, Tim Newman notes that I’ve forgotten to credit Anne Applebaum.  The excerpts above come from her excellent book Gulag: A History.