Stalin, Gypsies and Evil Empires...

I don't quite get your point, Sofia.

Stalin died in 1953 - start of 'Glasnost' isn't generally considered to have started earlier than the late 80's of last century.

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The Roma first entered Russia in the 10th century in order to escape Muslim assaults in northern India, their original home. Since that time, many Roma have migrated in and out of Russia to and from other parts of eastern Europe. Also since that time, the Roma in Russia have suffered from various forms of official and popular discrimination and prejudice. After the Russian revolution (1917), the Roma, for the first time, received civil rights along with other ethnic groups. This stimulated a considerable amount of Roma educational and cultural activity. The Communist government also tried to settle the nomadic Roma with a limited amount of success. This ended in the 1930s under Stalin's policy of assimilation and after 1937, nothing was published in the Romani language until 1989. After World War II, in which many Russian Roma were killed by the Germans, Stalin's anti-nationalist campaign continued. This resulted in severe discrimination against the Roma, along with other ethnic groups, until his death in 1953. In 1956, however, Khrushchev outlawed nomadism altogether. Despite this, the new law was enforced unevenly and many Roma continued their nomadic ways. Until the Collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the reaction of Russians toward the Roma was mixed. While some surveys showed a negative attitude towards the Roma by the Russian people, other surveys did not. However, after the collapse, the rise of nationalist fascism has brought a new wave of racial prejudice to Russia, including prejudice against the Roma
see: Crowe, David M. A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia New York: St Martin's, 1994

Abortion was (is?) seen generally by Russians as the favourite kind of ... well, contraceptive.
Russia turns spotlight on abortion

Russian concentration camps were established in East Germany (GDR) until 1955 - exactly on the sites of the former Nazi concentration camps. (The father of a friend of mine was there, KZ Buchenwald, imprisoned 8 years.)

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Squishing gypsies was, and is, sort of a hobby for many nations. Sad

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Yep. Hitler began it in the modern age....sigh.

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hobitbob wrote:

Squishing gypsies was, and is, sort of a hobby for many nations.

Unfortunately, this is too true.

(Some information can be found via these websites/portal:

SINTl AND ROMA ("GYPSIES" ): VICTIMS OF THE NAZI ERA

Roma, Gypsies, Travellers

European Roma Rights Center

CAF-ROMA

Sofia wrote:

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I hadn't known Stalin had practically pulled a holocaust on the gypsies. I had known of ethnic separation and maltreatment--but not concentration, or slave camps.

But you knew about the others in concentration, slave and working camps?

An aside: what is your definition of 'holocaust', here Stalin had practically pulled a holocaust on the gypsies, especially regarding the other minorities in the USSR?

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Under Stalin, the USSR was truly an "evil empire".

Reagan coined the term thirty years later, though.

Was the Soviet Union still an evil empire under, say, Chernenko or Andropov?

Or merely a stultified, bureaucratisized, run-of-the-mill dictatorship?

Think the jury's out on that one. The Soviet Union was still more totalitarian in the extent it exercised control over every town and village, than most third world dictatorships. But mass persecution had given way to a "we'll leave you be if you leave us be" approach.

In the early eighties, dissidents still got arrested. Unless they were too famous - because then they were tolerated. Open rebellion was clamped down on - but grumbling among friends and family fully accepted. There was no hope that resistance would be anything but futile - but no all-pervasive fear that kept regular people from doing most of their daily stuff, either. There was no free media, period, not even a glimmer - but there were alternative rockbands. Well, et cetera - just some random aspects of the Brezhnevite state.

Despicable dictatorship? Hell, yeah. Worse than the Argentine junta? Hmmm ... the junta clamped down much harder on political opponents than the Soviets did, by the eighties ... but for non-politicals, the state grip was more pervasive in the Soviet Union. Worse than, say, Saddam's Iraq or Kim's North-Korea? Surely not - much less worse, in fact.

How bad does a dictatorship need to be, to be dubbed an evil empire? Is putting dissidents in prison enough, or does it need to slaughter them, like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Idi Amin did?

Does "Evil Empire" risk becoming a hyperbole, when you use the term for Stalin-type and Brezhnev-type dictatorships alike? (Compare: Pol Pot's Cambodia vs. Karimov's present-day Uzbekistan, an American ally I may add.)

In any case, Stalin is of little relevance to what Reagan said in 1982 (or what year it was).

But - it's a hell of an interesting range of topics you bring up.

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One last question, though:

Is this is the first you've heard of "a holocaust on the Gypsies", period - or the first on such a "holocaust" in the Soviet Union?

If this is the first you've heard of a Gypsy holocaust, period, then please - no offense intended - allow me to ask for a minute to commemorate the actual Holocaust on the Gypsies (or Roma) - because there was one. It is called the "Porrajmos" (akin to the "Shoah" of the Jews).

Not talking putting people in camps or deporting them here - not talking mass pogroms - but talking the systemic mass slaughter with the explicit intention to exterminate a people. And this is what happened to the Gypsies/Roma, along with the Jews, in the Third Reich.

Making that point is in NO way intended to belittle the crimes of Stalinist Russia - against the Roma or any of the other minorities it forcibly, collectively deported, persecuted or starved.

It is merely intended to get the word "Holocaust" back into its only appropriate place - namely, when it concerns the stated intention to eradicate a people from the earth - and the actual attempted, systematic implementation of that intention on a mass scale.

IMHO, the only appropriate uses of it that I know of, are the Holocaust against the Jews and the Gypsies/Roma in WW2, and the genocide against the Armenians by the Turks three decades earlier.

And the Porrajmos is scandalously neglected as it is already.

Links on the Roma Holocaust

(Vocabulary note: "Gypsy" is like "Indian" and "Eskimo" - an attributed label. Many Gypsies call themselves Roma, which is the 'indigenous' name).

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Re: Stalin, Gypsies and Evil Empires...

Sofia wrote:

Incidentally, the ABC produced docu was lovely and pro-Russian people--but revealed a startling factoid. The average Russian/Soviet woman (circa 1990) had 7 abortions. It was hard to believe.

No pill in the Soviet Union ... few condoms, either.

Didn't fit the priorities the old men in the Poliburo had thought up for the five-year production plans ...

... probably didn't have this proletarian-prowess-industrial-expansion je ne sais quoi ... <sighs>

Abortions were (and ARE, still) standard anti-conception in Russia.

(Yugoslav writer Slavenka Drakulic once wrote this brilliant, sardonic essay, in which she argued that any socialist state that, in fourty years of existence, hadn't managed to produce sanitary towels for its female citizens, didn't deserve to exist.

Let's just say that "consumption goods" were no priority in the communist mindset - no matter how much hardship their lack caused. To hell with individual hardship, in fact.)

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"Latschno Diwes", the info-newspaper of the "German Catholic Sinti and Roma Pastoral Care" published in its 2003 issue the following:

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The Stalinist mass deportations (including of Roma) from Soviet Moldova in 1945 and their legacy

ORIGINAL SENDER: Ionas Rus <[email protected]>

The mass deportation of Romas from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic on account of their ethnicity, which took place in 1945, is part and parcel of Stalinist crimes, and its denial, ignoring, obscuring or whitewashing is a part of broader practices of the Moldovan Communists toward Stalinist crimes in general and particularly those committed in Moldova.

Unfortunately, the Soviet wholesale deportation of Romas from the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic in March 1945 is one of those topics about which hardly anything has been written about. It is also probably a part of a broader practice of ignoring crimes against humanity against Romas, regardless of whether they were committed by regimes that were part of the Axis in World War II (The Roma Holocaust, Porrajmos ) or by the Soviet regime.

The author N. F. Bugai has briefly touched on the wholesale deportation of Romas from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (the present-day Republic of Moldova) for no other reason than their ethnicity in 1945. Bugai is or was the head (in 1999) of the Russian government's Department of Repressed and Deported Peoples, the Deputy Minister of Nationalities of the Russian Federation - see J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleanising in the USSR, 1937-1949, (Westport, Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press, 1999) p. 8 and http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Nikolai+Bougai&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=20000827202810.03489.00000999%40nso-bj.aol.com&rnum=1 . He writes "In March, 1945 the relocation of other nations was undertaken in the Republic of Moldavia, including ... Gypsies... Further on the document was adopted on the "Gypsies" relocation from Bessarabia. They were moved to Nizhni Tagil of the Pavlodar region and to the Akmolinsk region." The source is Nikloai Bougai, The Deportation of Peoples of the Soviet Union, (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., New York), p. 156.

The information is quite credible. Another expert on the topic of Soviet repressive policies, J. Otto Pohl, has praised the book (if not the quality of the translation into English of the text) very much in a review at Amazon.com (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560723718/inktomi-bkasin-20/ref%3Dnosim/104-5947872-0959909). Pohl is the author of two books on Stalinist crimes against humanity, namely J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleanising in the USSR, 1937-1949, (Westport, Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press, 1999) and J. Otto Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System: A Statistical History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930-1953, (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1997).

It is a fact that substantial majorities of the members of all signficant non-Roma minorities in the Republic of Moldova voted in favor of the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova in 2001. Most ethnic Romas (and most of the majority ethnic Moldovan/Romanian group) voted for other parties; it is not difficult to sympathize with their predominantly non-Communist options.

Not all the individuals who ignore crimes committed against Roma should be criticized for their intentions. It was unfortunate, but probably not intentionally insensitive, that Tatiana Sirbu in her essay in the online publication called THE COLLAGE, "Brief History of Bessarabian Roma", published by the Youth Helsinki Citizens' Assembly of Moldova, does not write about the Soviet deportations of Romas from Moldova (see http://www.yhca.org.md/J11/content11.htm or http://www.yhca.org.md/J11/BriefSirbu.html ). On the one hand, it is clear that more research needs to be done on this topic, and about Romas in the Soviet Gulag in general, and that the results should be more widely available. However, there is also a&nbs! p;need to condemn, or condemn more loudly, this kind of Soviet crime, and the Moldovan Communist authorities' and authors' practice of avoiding to mention them is both extreme and unfortunate.

The denial of, and the failure to mention, the Stalinist crimes against humanity against people of all ethnic backgrounds, including Romas, is rather characteristic of the ruling Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova, which has neither properly acknowledged, nor properly apologized for, the crimes committed by the Soviet regime. What it has done was to decorate individuals involved in Stalinist crimes. What president Vladimir Voronin has done in March, 2003 was to decorate the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic between 1961 and 1980, Ivan Ivanovich Bodiul, who was one of the participants in the deportations of 1949 of Moldovan peasants, and, as a republican party leader, violated the human rights of nomadic Roma in 1961 ( see www.azi.md/news?ID=23! 471 ). The official justification was Bodiul's "long and remarkable work in the state supreme bodies, outstanding contribution to the development of the Republic of Moldova, and on [the] occasion of his 85Th Birthday" (see again www.azi.md/news?ID=23471 ).

This decision, which was made public a long time before the awarding of the decoration, has been defended in an editorial in the pro-Communist weekly "Sens", no. 35, January 28-February 3, 2003) authored by Valeriu Renita and called "The Writers and the Windmills" (see http://www.sens.md/showart.asp?aid=544 ). In it, Bodiul is compared to former Chilean military dictator Pinochet for the purpose of whitewashing his crimes. This was the last editorial in Sens signed by Valeriu Renita under his own name; on February 12, 2003, he was appointed the official spokesman of the Moldovan president Vladimir Voronin.

The current (Communist) president of Moldova (since 2001), Vladimir Voronin, stated at the party rally in commemoration of the Great Socialist October Revolution held in 1999 that it is false to argue that the Soviet Communist regime was responsible for the death of millions of people. "It is a team of falsifiers of history, of anti-Communists, of people who are employed [the correct nuance - in the pay] of those countries that were against the USSR all the time; from 1917 until now, they have fought against us" (see MONITORUL, November 9, 1999, at http://www.monitorul.ro/arhiva/1999/11/09/local_news/chisinau.htm ). This kind of statement would be prosecutable in many countries of Europe as a denial of crimes against humanity.

This type of revisionist history is characteristic of the work of the historian and politician Vladimir Taranov, who, in President Voronin's view, was meant to write or edit the "History of Moldova" which was supposed to be introduced in all Moldovan schools in 2002, and of the other people who have participated in the writing of the would-be pro-Communist history textbook. Taranov, was, of course, the pro-tempore speaker in the previous Moldovan legislature because he was the oldest member of the Moldovan parliament (Sfatul Tarii) elected in 1998 before the selection of the permanent leadership of the parliament. Taranov and the others who participated in the writing of the book that he coordinated which was intended for use as a textbook, Istoria Republicii Moldova din cele mai vechi timpuri si pana in zilele noastre, (Chisinau; Tipografia Academiei de Stiinte, 1997)English translation - "The History of the Republic of Moldova from Ancient Times Until Our Own Days") (Chisinau, Moldovan Academy of Sciences Press, 1997)] "fail to mention the 1940 - 1951 Soviet deportations" (see http://news.ournet.md/comment?ID=17826 ). Needless to say, the deportations of Romas in 1945 are not mentioned.

One of those who displayed insensitivity toward the victims of Stalinist crimes against humanity was one of the authors who contributed to the writing of the above-mentioned book (together with V.E. Andrusceac, P.P. Barnea, P.A. Boico, N.A. Ceaplighina, I.I. Jarcutchi, V.P. Platon, N.D. Russev, and Vladimir Taranov as the coordinator), Alla Skvortsova. Even in a book published in the United Kingdom, she used euphemisms such as "forced out-migration" to refer to the Stalinist deportations. See Alla Skvortsova, "The Cultural and Social Makeup of Moldova: A Bipolar or Dispersed Society", in Pal Kolsto, NATIONAL INTEGRATION AND VIOLENT CONFLICT IN POST-SOVIET SOCIETIES: The Cases of Estonia and Moldova (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), p. 170.

The historians who are sympathetic toward the regime are currently crafting a new course of pro-Communist "Integrated History", currently taught expermintally in 42 schools, but which, if the Communists will have their way, will be introduced in all schools in 2005. Realizing that the new textbooks would follow a line similar to the old line of the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova, as updated by Taranov et al. in 1997, anti-Communist historians have resigned from the commission designed to change the curriculum. Therefore, the curriculum committee currently includes mostly the authors whose names have been mentioned above and others of their ilk.

The members of the commission are doing their work in secret, in a totally non-transparent fashion. It is likely that the genocidal measures of the regime of the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu, who deported about 26,000 Romanian Roma to Transnistria, including those who were sent from the present-day Republic of Moldova, most of whom died there, will not appear in the new textbooks. The hints are numerous. Unlike the Romanian authorities, but very much like the old Soviet authorities, the Moldovan Communist authorities have never mentioned these crimes, or the Porrajmos in general, in their official discourse. The Communist and pro-Communist mass media has never dealt with the issue, unlike most of the opposition press. Unlike the authorities in neighboring countries, the Moldovan Communist authorities either have only sent material dealing with war criminals involved in the genocide against the Jews, but not in the genocide against Romas, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, or have simply not publicized the fact that they have also sent information dealing with those who committed the same kinds of deeds against Romas. As I have shown in a recent post in the newsgroup "Roma Daily News", soon after publishing an anti-Roma article in the newspaper that he edited, Tineretul Moldovei, Ion Berlinski was appointed editor-in-chief of the state owned Romanian-language newspaper in the country, Moldova Suverana ("Sovereign Moldova"). See my text, "Moldovan journalist Ion Berlinski's 2002 anti-Roma article" in "Roma Daily News", Monday, September 15, 2003 at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Roma_Daily_News/message/1153. And one could go on and on. Why has the Porrajmos been ignored, and why is it likely that it will be ignored in the future ? The most likely answers are possibly inertia (it was done like this during the Soviet period, this is what the old textbooks said, etc.), contempt toward Romas by the regime, the fact that if historians recycle older texts, they economize on work while still getting paid, because many of the official historians are old, inflexible and dogmatic, and because they think that they could get away with it.

Therefore, the failure to mention the deportations of Romas from Soviet Moldova by the Soviet authorities in 1945 should be seen in a broader context. It is a part of a broader attempt to ignore, obscure or even deny and/or whitewash the crimes of the Soviet regime, particularly during the Stalinist period. It could also foreshadow the obscuring of the Roma Holocaust (Porrajmos) during World War II in the new history textbooks.

All the best,

Ionas Aurelian Rus

SOURCE

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Regarding the Porrajmos, this is a good guide as well

A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust: Sinti and Roma

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

Regarding the Porrajmos, this is a good guide as well

A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust: Sinti and Roma

As nimh already said - most Roma refer to themselves by one generic name, Rom (meaning "man" or "husband"), and to all non-Roma by the term gadje (also spelled gadze or gaje; a term with a pejorative connotation meaning "bumpkin," "yokel," or "barbarian"). Most Roma consider the name Gypsy to be pejorative.

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The Roma recognize divisions among themselves with some sense of territoriality emphasized by certain cultural and dialectal differences. Some authorities delineate three main confederations: (1) the Kalderash (smiths who came from the Balkans and then from central Europe and are the most numerous), (2) the Gitanos (French Gitans, mostly in the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, and southern France, strong in the arts of entertainment), and (3) the Manush (French Manouches, also known as Sinti, mostly in Alsace and other regions of France and Germany, often traveling showmen and circus people). Each of these main divisions was further divided into two or more subgroups distinguished by occupational specialization or territorial origin or both. (Source: Britannica)

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Thanks Walter for that article, very interesting.
Moldovan politics are a wasps nest.

I mean, what, you have the neo-Bolshevik gangster state on the Dnjestr's eastern bank, Transnistria, with European organisations trying to broker some kind of negotiations between it and the Moldovan government - but then in Moldova proper, you have the continuous strife between the unreformed Communists, currently in power, and the democratic opposition, which has been putting up stubborn street protests for much of last year.

And then the democrats themselves are again divided between centrists and nationalists, who are divided even about who or what Moldova and Moldovans are - with, paradoxically, the nationalists submitting that the people in Moldova are simply Romanians and speak Romanian, and the centrists maintaining that there is a separate Moldovan nation and language. Oh, and then there are the Turkic Gagauzians with their autonomous region, which in the early nineties had separated altogether and had Gagauzians, I understand, raiding the surrounding lands. Like I said, a wasps' nest ;-).

Well, you perhaps knew all that already, anyway, but there's not a lot of folk out here who are that interested in Moldova ;-)

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Eastern Europe's communists did have a terrible record on Roma, by the way, almost across the board.

The totalitarian repression and everpresent (secret) police may have made the kind of spontaneous anti-Roma progroms and skinhead violence that we have seen often since 1989 impossible. But on the flipside the institutionalised discrimination was near-total.

In many countries, Roma children were (and still are) almost automatically sent to schools for retarded children, for example. And the most brutal example of all is the practice, in Czechoslovakia and other countries, to forcibly sterilize Roma women - against their will or against their knowledge. Thousands of women fell victim to that.

In fact, according to an (admittably controversial) human rights report released one or two years ago, the practice still continues in Slovakia.

On the other hand - thought-provokingly (especially in re: to Sofia's main thesis here), a 2002 UNDP poll showed that only 8% of Roma in Central and Eastern Europe think they are better off now than during Communism.

A full 70% thought "it was better before".

Considering how bad it was then, that's a thoroughly depressing thought.

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Nimh wrote

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Well, you perhaps knew all that already, anyway, but there's not a lot of folk out here who are that interested in Moldova ;-)

Not only in Moldavia - seems, even Sofia isn't interested in her thread any more :wink:

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Sofia's not on A2K so very much anymore, period - she's got other things on her mind. It doesnt mean she's not interested.

What is true, sadly, is that many posters here are only interested in far-off countries or peoples if it's somehow to do with the US. More specifically: if it can somehow be related to "America" - or Bush, Clinton, Reagan - having been good or bad or wrong or right. And that kinda sucks.

Still, I got my neglected threads, too ... one on Syria, for example, never went back there. Sofia's also got an interesting thread on Georgia, by the way, but it was just me and one other poster reacting ... Thaz the way it is, I guess.

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Sorry to start a conversation and be unable to respond.
Some fascinating stuff here! Nimh and Walter, thanks for the links. I plan to go through them soon. Russia is a point of interest for my daughter--we are investigating.

I was aware that gypsies--or if that is considered an ethnic slur (learn something every day) the Roma--were included in Hitler's camps. I had no idea they were set aside for a Hell hotter than what most Soviets endured under Communist rule.

Walter--and anyone else interested,
I didn't begin this topic so much with Reagan's "Evil Empire" statement alone in mind. I really don't have a point to make--

Reagan and Bush's "Evil Empire" quotes were criticised by a segment of the population. I was just opening a dialogue about the term "Evil Empire"--why it bothers some, when it can be appropriately used, ... Just interested in different opinions.

Again, I apologize for the absence, and I appreciate the activity. I'll be reading these links. Very Happy

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Very interesting and informative material here. Thanks to you all.

On the, perhaps peripheral subject of the "evil empire" label - While it is true that by the time Reagan made the remark (1983), the Soviet Union had become perhaps less awful in various particulars than several other nations in the world, it is also true that in terms of its history and of the degree to which it had systematically suppressed and wasted a broad range of human, economic, and cultural potentials - and was then still doing so - it was truly an evil empire. What perhaps is more remarkable is that until Reagan no western leader had the wit, wisdom, and courage to emphatically say it or in any way to point out the obvious truth.

On the contrary, many of the media, political, and intellectual elites of western Europe and the United States had for decades been actively or passively preserving the fiction of a communist/socialist paradise in the making. Their usual practice was to contrast the illusions and fictions of the socialist future with the realities of the underside of capitalist reality. While in the main this may have been merely the habit of them 'politically correct' behavior, it also involved many instances of knowing, conscious deception. Perhaps the most illustrative case is that of the prominent New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for a journalistic series he wrote on the glories and success of agrarian collectivization in Ukraine during the 1930s. Subsequent review of his papers and sources has revealed that this was a knowing deception on his part - that the reality was the opposite. mass starvation - but neither the Pulitzer Board nor the New York Times has seen fit to either apologize or rescind the prize award.

Reagan boldly pointed out the simple truth that the emperor had no clothes. That remark and other aspects of Reagan's firm stance contributed significantly to his rapid fall. Nitpicking about the particulars misses the obvious point and adds nothing to understanding.

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georgeob1 wrote:

On the contrary, many of the media, political, and intellectual elites of western Europe and the United States had for decades been actively or passively preserving the fiction of a communist/socialist paradise in the making. Their usual practice was to contrast the illusions and fictions of the socialist future with the realities of the underside of capitalist reality.

What era or countries were you talking of, exactly?

While there have been enough socialists here, always, who did indeed tend to "contrast the illusions and fictions of the socialist future with the realities of the underside of capitalist reality" - this in itself is nothing particularly strange or wrong. Libertarians, for example, contrast imperfect reality with an illusional utopia of a harmonioous and prosperous society free of all unnecessary government intervention ... it's what you do, if you believe in something. There's nothing inherently wrong with holding up reality to the standards of your ideals to expose where reality could be bettered.

Anyway, thats not where the problem lies, imho. The perfidious part - I agree with you on this one - is where intellectuals applied "the fiction of a communist/socialist paradise in the making" to the real existing Soviet Union and Eastern Block. Their propaganda for the Soviet Union was wrong, and they have gotten off much too easily for it.

Still. From the way you describe it, one would think that the idealisation of the Soviets was all-pervasive. Thats why I'm asking what era and countries you're talking about. France in 1949 - yeh, I can see your point, perhaps. But 1983, really? Hell, by that time, even most of the communist parties had distanced themselves from the Soviet Union.

From what you write, one would never have guessed that throughout the fifties and sixties, the main left-wing party in countries like Germany and Holland were staunchly anti-communist. That throughout most of the postwar time, one could not appeal to those ideals of a "socialist future" without quickly adding that, "of course, I am against what is done in Eastern Europe". That communists were, in most all European countries, barred from government participation and, wherever possible, politically isolated. The trade union that communists established here after the war was quickly chased empty, for one.

Its not that I dont share your disdain for the many shameful instances where writers and intellectuals did engage in fellow-traveller-ship. But you sketch a Europe dominated by collaborationist elites. That is at best a caricature. Socialdemocratic parties featured many a strident anti-communist thinker and politician in prominent places. Even some of the small parties further left (like the Pacifist Socialists here) consistently condemned Soviet communism or, in the case of the real extremists, adopted Trotskyite condemnations of Sovietism as "state capitalism". And all of those together, from socialdemocrats leftward, were mere minorities in most countries.

The outright fellow-travellers of the NYTimes reporter kind you mention were always a small minority, even within the left - barring perhaps France and Italy, maybe Greece or Finland. Thats why it's always such a scandal when fellow-travellership is uncovered, like with Wehner in Germany. One Labour Party feminist who made the gaffe of belittling East Germany's dictatorship quickly lost stature after that and still is mostly mentioned with derision.

I do think the (erstwhile) communists have gotten off too easily. The main documentary prize here is still named after Joris Ivens, who made nothing but agitprop. But the reason they have been let off is cause they're seen as rebels, idealist rebels against the dominant order in society. Ergo, that dominate order was anything but communist-minded.

georgeob1 wrote:

it was truly an evil empire. What perhaps is more remarkable is that until Reagan no western leader had the wit, wisdom, and courage to emphatically say it or in any way to point out the obvious truth.

There have been no lack of western leaders condemning the Soviet Union. To say they never did seems (wilful) ignorance masquerading as moral indignation. But what about the choice of words in "evil empire"? The Americans have always, it is true, been better in one-liners. But do you really think this really was the "obvious" label? I mean - <thinks> ...

... yeh, its the same problem I have with this use of "Holocaust" to describe whichever ethnic persecution nowadays. It ends up belittling the real Holocaust. What do you call Stalin's state or Hitler's state (or even Pol Pot's or Saddam Hussein's state), if you already call Chernenko's 1983 Soviet Union "the evil empire"? Plus, "evil" is not just some label, it means something, too. Evil people do bad things just for doing bad things, because they're evil. The logical conlusion is that the only way one can ever interact with them is by squashing them, fighting them to the death. For Hitler, this held, obviously. We're talking Lord of the Rings style battle for the survival of the world, there. But for Andropov? Brezhnev? The Soviet Union was, is my belief, way beyond ideological zealotism and maniacal tyranny - there was a fair degree of pragmatism there, muddling through, holding on to the reins of power and privilege just enough to get by.

What if we just save those terms for the real empires of the night, filled with camps of extermination and trains of deportation?

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nimh wrote:

In fact, according to an (admittably controversial) human rights report released one or two years ago, the practice still continues in Slovakia.

Can I point out the report went on to say ".... because race statistics are not published in Slovakia, it is not clear if doctors are performing Cesarean deliveries or subsequent sterilizations more on Roma women than non-Roma women"it is not clear if doctors are performing Cesarean deliveries or subsequent sterilizations more on Roma women than non-Roma women"

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Yeh, the report is a bit ... unsure. The forced sterilisations in communist times are beyond doubt. But that report about how it was still done now caused a big fracas. Even a lot of human rights organisations fell over the authors. Unclear.

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