(Nick) wrote in message m...
(Wlodzimierz Holsztynski) wrote in message . com...
(snipped)
If one wants to be critical of other's views one should
about the Western pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin intellectuals,
who were either stupid (Sartre) or corrupted or both.

"...I must be a Bolshevik
Before the Revolution, but I'll cease to be one quick
When Communism comes to rule the roost,
For real literature can exist only when it's produced
By madmen, hermits, heretics,
Dreamers, rebels, sceptics--
And such a door of utterance has been given to me."
--Hugh MacDiarmid

"For Stalin--by 1928 already Party General Secretary for six years--the
non-Russian nationalists, especially those who possessed no industrial
proletariat and had fought against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War,
were anathema, and he set out to destroy their societies and cultures
even more completely than those of the almost equally unfortunate Russians.
In the Buryat's case that meant eliminating their taishas, who still commanded
allegiance within their clans, dispensed justice and owned vast herds, and
their lamaseries, centres of the national faith and of learning. Stalin's
anti-Buryat campaign began in 1929 and peaked in the late 1930s, though
lamaseries were still being demolished in the 1940s and 1950s....

Until perestroika, all the above was a taboo subject. Soviet writers referred
to the execution, imprisonment, deportation or starvation of a sizeable
proportion of Buryatiya's population, as well as the demolition of nearly all
its historic buildings, as the 'forced reduction of Lamas' and 'liquidation of
kulaks as a class'. Western Communists--wittingly or unwittingly--went along
with the euphemisms. A travel book titled 'Dawn in Siberia', written by one
G.D.R. Philips and published in 1942, is a prime example....Thanks to Moscow's
vigilance, readers are assured, Buryatiya is now flourishing:

'...More and more of the things which make life broader and fuller, more
pleasant and more inspiring, become available to this little people in the
heart of Asia as they go on from Socialism towards the full Communism which
they still only dimly appreciate.'"

--Anna Reid (The Shaman's Coat: a Native History of Siberia, pp. 86-90)

Evidently, it was much easier for G.D.R. Philips to 'appreciate' Stalin's
ruthless policies toward the Buryat people since he did not have to live with
the consequences that they did.

'It is generous, nay, it is but just, to take the part of those who are absent,
if not flagrantly culpable.'
--Samuel Richardson (Sir Charles Grandison)

--Nick