Analysis
Stalin’s Great Terror wasn’t so bad, Russia’s central television suggests
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The evolution in official Russian treatment of Joseph Stalin continues. He is no longer a tyrant, nor is he an effective manager who may have occasionally exceeded the bounds of the acceptable. Now, the late Soviet dictator is being refashioned into a great leader without modification who is unjustly attacked by the opponents of Russia. An indication of this latest shift came on March 24 during Roman Babayan’s talk show on Russian central television, which was broadcast under the title “1927: Remembering Everything” (youtube.com/watch?v=SfYUwaABXhU and reviewed by Irina Pavlova at ivpavlova.blogspot.com/2017/03/1937.html#more). As the U.S.-based Russian historian points out, the Moscow television program was timed to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the February-March 1937 plenum of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee, an event which “is typically considered as the beginning of the Great Terror.”
Mr. Babayan’s show was “shocking,” Ms. Pavlova continues, because it shows that, despite all the available documentation about what happened in the late 1930s, Russians “know practically nothing about it” and are prepared to accept the line, offered by “liberal historian” Yury Pivovarov that 1937 was simply “a quarrel among the ruling group.”
Unfortunately, she continues, there is nothing surprising in the fact that “these people even today do not understand what took place, do not see in the arrests of governors, siloviki and entrepreneurs signs of the very same Great Terror that occurred in 1937 and do not include in this picture the arrests of ordinary Russian citizens and dissidents.”
And when one individual in the audience, Yan Rachinsky of Memorial, attempted to raise these issues, he was told by the host to shut up because the human rights activist supposedly was only going to present what foreign governments that have given his organization money want him to say.