Why Doesn’t Anyone Care About The Unread Soviet Archives?
Sound of Trumpet
Claire Berlinski
A Hidden History of Evil
Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
Though Mikhail Gorbachev is lionized in the West, the untranslated
archives suggest a much darker figure.
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous
with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—
nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer
principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly
as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere
on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-
labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was
responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the
twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and
uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.
For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet
archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his
computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin
documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them
in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been
worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism
and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone
to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their
translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in
them at all.
Then there’s Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who once spent 12
years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas—political
psychiatric hospitals—after being convicted of copying anti-Soviet
literature. He, too, possesses a massive collection of stolen and
smuggled papers from the archives of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party, which, as he writes, “contain the beginnings and the
ends of all the tragedies of our bloodstained century.” These
documents are available online at bukovsky-archives.net, but most are
not translated. They are unorganized; there are no summaries; there is
no search or index function. “I offer them free of charge to the most
influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to
print them,” Bukovsky writes. “Editors shrug indifferently: So what?
Who cares?”
The originals of most of Stroilov’s documents remain in the Kremlin
archives, where, like most of the Soviet Union’s top-secret documents
from the post-Stalin era, they remain classified. They include,
Stroilov says, transcripts of nearly every conversation between
Gorbachev and his foreign counterparts—hundreds of them, a near-
complete diplomatic record of the era, available nowhere else. There
are notes from the Politburo taken by Georgy Shakhnazarov, an aide of
Gorbachev’s, and by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev. There is the
diary of Anatoly Chernyaev—Gorbachev’s principal aide and deputy chief
of the body formerly known as the Comintern—which dates from 1972 to
the collapse of the regime. There are reports, dating from the 1960s,
by Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the Central Committee’s
International Department until 1987 and then Gorbachev’s advisor until
1991. Zagladin was both envoy and spy, charged with gathering secrets,
spreading disinformation, and advancing Soviet influence.
When Gorbachev and his aides were ousted from the Kremlin, they took
unauthorized copies of these documents with them. The documents were
scanned and stored in the archives of the Gorbachev Foundation, one of
the first independent think tanks in modern Russia, where a handful of
friendly and vetted researchers were given limited access to them.
Then, in 1999, the foundation opened a small part of the archive to
independent researchers, including Stroilov. The key parts of the
collection remained restricted; documents could be copied only with
the written permission of the author, and Gorbachev refused to
authorize any copies whatsoever. But there was a flaw in the
foundation’s security, Stroilov explained to me. When things went
wrong with the computers, as often they did, he was able to watch the
network administrator typing the password that gave access to the
foundation’s network. Slowly and secretly, Stroilov copied the archive
and sent it to secure locations around the world.
When I first heard about Stroilov’s documents, I wondered if they were
forgeries. But in 2006, having assessed the documents with the
cooperation of prominent Soviet dissidents and Cold War spies, British
judges concluded that Stroilov was credible and granted his asylum
request. The Gorbachev Foundation itself has since acknowledged the
documents’ authenticity.
Bukovsky’s story is similar. In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin’s
government invited him to testify at the Constitutional Court of
Russia in a case concerning the constitutionality of the Communist
Party. The Russian State Archives granted Bukovsky access to its
documents to prepare his testimony. Using a handheld scanner, he
copied thousands of documents and smuggled them to the West.
The Russian state cannot sue Stroilov or Bukovsky for breach of
copyright, since the material was created by the Communist Party and
the Soviet Union, neither of which now exists. Had he remained in
Russia, however, Stroilov believes that he could have been prosecuted
for disclosure of state secrets or treason. The military historian
Igor Sutyagin is now serving 15 years in a hard-labor camp for the
crime of collecting newspaper clippings and other open-source
materials and sending them to a British consulting firm. The danger
that Stroilov and Bukovsky faced was real and grave; they both
assumed, one imagines, that the world would take notice of what they
had risked so much to acquire.
Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about
the end of the Cold War. The ‘commonly accepted’ version of history of
that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are
capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I
don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few
that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be
taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But
the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen
curiosity.
For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than
the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs
with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight
007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world
very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo
meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen
Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend
themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel,
the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev
defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful
protesters in Tbilisi.
Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s
discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest
interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends
in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation
reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on
April 28, 1990:
H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get
closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with
Israel. . . .
M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .
H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic
religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to
Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.
M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!
H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.
One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions
might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy
in a region of some enduring strategic significance.
There are other ways in which the story that Stroilov’s and Bukovsky’s
papers tell isn’t over. They suggest, for example, that the architects
of the European integration project, as well as many of today’s senior
leaders in the European Union, were far too close to the USSR for
comfort. This raises important questions about the nature of
contemporary Europe—questions that might be asked when Americans
consider Europe as a model for social policy, or when they seek
European diplomatic cooperation on key issues of national security.
According to Zagladin’s reports, for example, Kenneth Coates, who from
1989 to 1998 was a British member of the European Parliament,
approached Zagladin on January 9, 1990, to discuss what amounted to a
gradual merger of the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet.
Coates, says Zagladin, explained that “creating an infrastructure of
cooperation between the two parliament[s] would help . . . to isolate
the rightists in the European Parliament (and in Europe), those who
are interested in the USSR’s collapse.” Coates served as chair of the
European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights from 1992 to 1994.
How did it come to pass that Europe was taking advice about human
rights from a man who had apparently wished to “isolate” those
interested in the USSR’s collapse and sought to extend Soviet
influence in Europe?
Or consider a report on Francisco Fernández Ordónez, who led Spain’s
integration into the European Community as its foreign minister. On
March 3, 1989, according to these documents, he explained to Gorbachev
that “the success of perestroika means only one thing—the success of
the socialist revolution in contemporary conditions. And that is
exactly what the reactionaries don’t accept.” Eighteen months later,
Ordónez told Gorbachev: “I feel intellectual disgust when I have to
read, for example, passages in the documents of ‘G7’ where the
problems of democracy, freedom of human personality and ideology of
market economy are set on the same level. As a socialist, I cannot
accept such an equation.” Perhaps most shockingly, the Eastern
European press has reported that Stroilov’s documents suggest that
François Mitterrand was maneuvering with Gorbachev to ensure that
Germany would unite as a neutral, socialist entity under a Franco-
Soviet condominium.
Zagladin’s records also note that the former leader of the British
Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, approached Gorbachev—unauthorized, while
Kinnock was leader of the opposition—through a secret envoy to discuss
the possibility of halting the United Kingdom’s Trident nuclear-
missile program. The minutes of the meeting between Gorbachev and the
envoy, MP Stuart Holland, read as follows:
In [Holland’s] opinion, Soviet Union should be very interested in
liquidation of “Tridents” because, apart from other things, the West—
meaning the US, Britain and France—would have a serious advantage over
the Soviet Union after the completion of START treaty. That advantage
will need to be eliminated. . . . At the same time Holland noted that,
of course, we can seriously think about realisation of that idea only
if the Labour comes to power. He said Thatcher . . . would never agree
to any reduction of nuclear armaments.
Kinnock was vice president of the European Commission from 1999 to
2004, and his wife, Glenys, is now Britain’s minister for Europe.
Gerard Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, has noted the
significance of the episode. “If the report given to Mr. Gorbachev is
true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain’s enemies
in order to seek approval regarding his party’s defense policy and,
had he been elected, Britain’s defense policy,” Batten said to the
European Parliament in 2009. “If this report is true, then Lord
Kinnock would be guilty of treason.”
Similarly, Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s
foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this
organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in
the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of
the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs,
Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of
gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common
European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic
states and then of Ukraine.
Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you to read that prominent European
politicians held these views. But why doesn’t it? It is impossible to
imagine that figures who had enjoyed such close ties to the Nazi Party—
or, for that matter, to the Ku Klux Klan or to South Africa’s
apartheid regime—would enjoy top positions in Europe today. The rules
are different, apparently, for Communist fellow travelers. “We now
have the EU unelected socialist party running Europe,” Stroilov said
to me. “Bet the KGB can’t believe it.”
And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own
current vice president in 1979?
Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar
said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with
having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the
American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other
words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a
kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most
so-called dissidents.
Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet
archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and
Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage
on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered
the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents
didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can,
what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a
Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice
president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
Bukovsky’s book about the story that these documents tell, Jugement a
Moscou, has been published in French, Russian, and a few other Slavic
languages, but not in English. Random House bought the manuscript and,
in Bukovsky’s words, tried “to force me to rewrite the whole book from
the liberal left political perspective.” Bukovsky replied that “due to
certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political
censorship.” The contract was canceled, the book was never published
in English, and no other publisher has shown interest in it. Neither
has anyone wanted to publish EUSSR, a pamphlet by Stroilov and
Bukovsky about the Soviet roots of European integration. In 2004, a
very small British publisher did print an abbreviated version of the
pamphlet; it, too, passed unnoticed.
Stroilov has a long list of complaints about journalists who have
initially shown interest in the documents, only to tell him later that
their editors have declared the story insignificant. In advance of
Gorbachev’s visit to Germany for the celebration of the 20th
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stroilov says, he offered
the German press the documents depicting Gorbachev unflatteringly.
There were no takers. In France, news about the documents showing
Mitterrand’s and Gorbachev’s plans to turn Germany into a dependent
socialist state prompted a few murmurs of curiosity, nothing more.
Bukovsky’s vast collection about Soviet sponsorship of terrorism,
Palestinian and otherwise, remains largely unpublished.
Stroilov says that he and Bukovsky approached Jonathan Brent of Yale
University Press, which is leading a publishing project on the history
of the Cold War. He claims that initially Brent was enthusiastic and
asked him to write a book, based on the documents, about the first
Gulf War. Stroilov says that he wrote the first six chapters, sent
them off, and never heard from Brent again, despite sending him e-mail
after e-mail. “I can only speculate what so much frightened him in
that book,” Stroilov wrote to me.
I’ve also asked Brent and received no reply. This doesn’t mean
anything; people are busy. I am less inclined to believe in complex
attempts to suppress the truth than I am in indifference and
preoccupation with other things. Stroilov sees in these events “a kind
of a taboo, the vague common understanding in the Establishment that
it is better to let sleeping dogs lie, not to throw stones in a house
of glass, and not to mention a rope in the house of a hanged man.” I
suspect it is something even more disturbing: no one much cares.
“I know the time will come,” Stroilov says, “when the world has to
look at those documents very carefully. We just cannot escape this. We
have no way forward until we face the truth about what happened to us
in the twentieth century. Even now, no matter how hard we try to
ignore history, all these questions come back to us time and again.”
The questions come back time and again, it is true, but few remember
that they have been asked before, and few remember what the answer
looked like. No one talks much about the victims of Communism. No one
erects memorials to the throngs of people murdered by the Soviet
state. (In his widely ignored book, A Century of Violence in Soviet
Russia, Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of perestroika under
Gorbachev, puts the number at 30 to 35 million.)
Indeed, many still subscribe to the essential tenets of Communist
ideology. Politicians, academics, students, even the occasional
autodidact taxi driver still stand opposed to private property. Many
remain enthralled by schemes for central economic planning. Stalin,
according to polls, is one of Russia’s most popular historical
figures. No small number of young people in Istanbul, where I live,
proudly describe themselves as Communists; I have met such people
around the world, from Seattle to Calcutta.
We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate
those who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology. But the world
exhibits a perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of
Communism. These documents should be translated. They should be housed
in a reputable library, properly cataloged, and carefully assessed by
scholars. Above all, they should be well-known to a public that seems
to have forgotten what the Soviet Union was really about. If they
contain what Stroilov and Bukovsky say—and all the evidence I’ve seen
suggests that they do—this is the obligation of anyone who gives a
damn about history, foreign policy, and the scores of millions dead.
Claire Berlinski, a contributing editor of City Journal, is an
American journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There
Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.
martin
> Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
Probably because no-one has got around to reading it yet.
Duh!
Paul J Gans
>http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_soviet-archives.html
>Claire Berlinski
>A Hidden History of Evil
>Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
Because they don't go back as far as the Middle Ages?
--
---- Paul J. Gans
Dorothy J Heydt
I used to work for a lady who was absolutely gleeful when some of
the Soviet archives got released -- the ones pertaining to labor
unions in the decades before the revolution. That was her field
of study, and she got two books out of these papers while I was
working for her. (I got quite good at typing transliterated
Russian without understand it.)
--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Should you wish to email me, you'd better use the gmail edress.
Kithrup's all spammy and hotmail's been hacked.
William Black
I'd be prepared to bet the secret police papers do.
The British ones go back to Elizabeth...
--
William Black
These are the gilded popinjays and murderous assassins of Perfidious
Albion and they are about their Queen's business. Any man who impedes
their passage does so at his own peril.
raven1
<soundof...@dcemail.com> wrote:
>Claire Berlinski
>
>A Hidden History of Evil
>
>Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
I'm certain the CIA and various other Western Intelligence Agencies
care quite a bit about them. The public in general, not so much, as
our governments substituted the bogeyman of Islamic terrorism for the
Soviet bogeyman quite a while ago.
art...@yahoo.com
Not even Tim Powers?
Next you will tell me that Declare was made up.
J Antero
"Sound of Trumpet" <soundof...@dcemail.com> wrote in message
news:32517306-668f-41c9...@x21g2000yqa.googlegroups.com...
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_soviet-archives.html
====Claire Berlinski
A Hidden History of Evil
Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
Though Mikhail Gorbachev is lionized in the West, the untranslated
archives suggest a much darker figure.=====
Your post points to some interesting information that if true, would have
significant historical value.
However, the Sov. Union is gone and and as a matter of priority, the probing
and discovery of information about other malignant entities might be even
more revealing and important.
Afterall, it's been widely accepted that the Sov. Union was a seriously bad
thing in human history and the info your pointing to just emphasizes that
view.
But I can think of another organization with a much longer history, still
extant, that is widely claimed to be good and to even have supernatural
powers at its disposal - its workings past and present might be of even
more interest and importance in bringing into he light....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/10429296.stm
Vatican taken by surprise over Belgium police raids
Page last updated at 19:32 GMT, Sunday, 27 June 2010 20:32 UK
By David Willey
BBC News, Rome
The police raid in Belgium last week which broke up a meeting of the
country's Catholic Bishops - who were discussing how to deal with the
paedophile priest crisis - took the Vatican by complete surprise.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state and Pope
Benedict's number two, was furious when he heard how the police prevented
the bishops from leaving the building where they had been meeting for nine
hours.
The police took away their mobile telephones to prevent them communicating
with their staff, or with the Vatican.
They also seized files from the headquarters of the Catholic church in
Brussels including a laptop belonging to the former head of the church in
Belgium, Cardinal Godefried Daneels.
They allegedly profaned the tomb of at least one former Belgian cardinal at
the cathedral in Mechelen during what seems to have been a frenetic search
for possible incriminating documents.
Cardinal Bertone angrily told reporters during a conference he was attending
at a Catholic university in Rome that not even communist states dared to
treat church authorities and church property in this way.
He summoned the Belgian ambassador to the Vatican and handed him a formal
protest note.
Pope Benedict's own reaction in a letter to the head of the Belgian church
was more measured.
While deploring the way in which the Belgian police had conducted their
search for evidence of possible crimes of paedophilia committed by Belgian
clergy, he said he was happy to let justice take its course provided the
rights of all parties - victims of alleged paedophilia and accused priests -
were respected.
This marked a definite change of tone in Vatican reaction to the clerical
sexual abuse crisis which has hit the Catholic church in Europe and the
Americas in recent years.
Some high-ranking Vatican officials have habitually dismissed media coverage
of predator priests as "idle gossip".
Belgium, like many other countries in Europe, may have a strong Catholic
history, but is also subject to strong secular influences. Although the
Vatican claims 75% of the population are members of the Catholic church,
regular Sunday mass attendances have dwindled dramatically in recent years
to about 5%.
Last year the Belgian parliament made a formal diplomatic protest to the
Vatican over the Pope's remarks about the use of condoms to combat Aids.
The Pope was on his way to Africa - the continent most seriously affected by
the Aids - and his remarks aroused a storm of protests.
Critics included the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet.
'Cloud of ambiguity'
The Vatican rejected the Belgian protest as an "attempt to silence the
Pope's moral teaching".
Official relations between the Vatican and Belgium are clouded with a
certain ambiguity.
No concordat or treaty governs relations with the Holy See.
Belgium was part of France between 1795 and 1815 and the Napoleonic
concordat between France and the Vatican signed at the beginning of the 19th
century lapsed after Belgium became an independent state and separated from
the Netherlands.
But the practical effects of the Napoleonic concordat were profound.
Its recognition of the Catholic religion paved the way later for full state
subsidies for other "recognised religions".
The Belgian state pays salaries for teachers of religion in state schools,
stipends and pensions for Catholic clergy and for the renovation of church
buildings.
Last week Pope Benedict appointed a new Bishop of Bruges to replace Roger
Vangheluwe, the longest serving bishop in the country who resigned in April
after admitting that he had been sexually abusing a boy for years.
.
martin
fact these were unread. If you believe otherwise take it up with the OP
am...@hotmail.com
> On 27/06/10 20:50, Paul J Gans wrote:
>
> >>http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_soviet-archives.html
>
> >> Claire Berlinski
>
> >> A Hidden History of Evil
>
> >> Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
>
> > Because they don't go back as far as the Middle Ages?
>
> I'd be prepared to bet the secret police papers do.
I would not bet on it. Documents related to Oprichnina most probably
were destroyed during the fire in Alexandrovskaya Sloboda (providing
they were not intentionally destroyed by the order of Ivan) and, even
if they survived this fire, there was a Time of Troubles afterwards.
Plus, I suspect that too many contemporaries _were_ interested in
their destruction.
Probably more chance for the more recent documents but even a greater
chance that they were intentionally destroyed more than once (AFAIK,
documents related to Peter I had been 'filtered' as early as during
the reign of Catherine II). And, on the top of it, the commies took a
special care of destroying police archives when they came to power
(one may make an educated guess why :-) ).
ScienceWins
>A Hidden History of Evil
>Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
Few care about the United States' equally evil history.
---
Does belief in astrology cause insanity? http://www.skeptictank.org/edm.htm
William Black
And, on the top of it, the commies took a
> special care of destroying police archives when they came to power
> (one may make an educated guess why :-) ).
>
I have been told informally (so it may just be a good story) that this
one was deliberate misdirection by the Chekists, and by Beria in
particular, and all the old records were kept.
am...@hotmail.com
wrote:
> On 28/06/10 15:02, a...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> And, on the top of it, the commies took a
>
> > special care of destroying police archives when they came to power
> > (one may make an educated guess why :-) ).
>
> I have been told informally (so it may just be a good story) that this
> one was deliberate misdirection by the Chekists, and by Beria in
> particular, and all the old records were kept.
>
AFAIK, these archives had been destroyed destroying practically
immediately after the Bolsheviks' coup (or even after February
Revolution), which means that (a) there were no (yet) Chekists (Cheka
was created in December 1917) and (b) that Beria had nothing to do
with it (except for a remote possibility that he did something of the
kind in Baku where, AFAIK, none of the top level survivors had any
roots). Chances that some incriminated documents survived until 1938
when Beria became head of NKVD are, shall we say, slim but, of course,
not zero. OTOH, a popular myth that Lavrentiy had been storing
compromising material on #1 does not make sense even if Stalin was
cooperating with the Tzarist police. What Beria (or anybody else)
could do with these documents? Publish them abroad? Who would know or
care? Cause political embarassment _inside_ the SU? Who would publish
them?
The rest did not really matter because Stalin did not need any
_documented_ excuse to deal with any of them and the Soviet show trial
system of this period had been heavily relying on the 'voluntary
confessions'.
J Antero
"ScienceWins" <Scien...@Apikoros.Org> wrote in message
news:gOKdnTeIUupuL7XR...@posted.sonicnet...
> "J Antero" <a...@xyz.com> wrote:
>
>>A Hidden History of Evil
>>Why doesn't anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
>
> Few care about the United States' equally evil history.
Sure.
Why don't you tells what "evil" you are talking about.
D.F. Manno
<32517306-668f-41c9...@x21g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>,
Sound of Trumpet <soundof...@dcemail.com> wrote:
> Why doesnšt anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
If they're unread, then you haven't read them. Why don't _you_ care
about the unread Soviet archives?
--
D.F. Manno
dfm...@mail.com
"I want my country forward." (Bill Maher)
M.C. Pee Pants
> On 27/06/2010 19:18, Sound of Trumpet wrote:
>
>
> Probably because no-one has got around to reading it yet.
>
> Duh!
The archives need to be translated into English, but nobody seems
interested in funding the project.
William December Starr
martin <use...@etiqa.co.uk> said:
> art...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> Not even Tim Powers?
>> Next you will tell me that Declare was made up.
>
> I have no idea what you're talking about.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declare>:
Declare (2001) is a supernatural spy novel by Tim Powers. It
presents a secret history of the Cold War in which an agent for
a secret British spy organization learns the true nature of
several beings living on Mount Ararat. In this he is opposed by
real-life communist traitor Kim Philby, who did travel
extensively in the region. Philby's father, St. John Philby,
was a noted Arabist whose book The Empty Quarter (on the Rub'
al Khali) was extensively used as source material for the
novel.
(Bear in mind that one of the newsgroups that the Turing Test
failure that calls itself "Sound of Trumpet" constantly blats
to is rec.arts.sf.written.)
-- wds
captain!
i'd like access to certain specific sections of them to begin translating
into english.
"Sound of Trumpet" <soundof...@dcemail.com> wrote in message
news:32517306-668f-41c9...@x21g2000yqa.googlegroups.com...
Ostap Bender
> i care about them. i seriously do.
>
> i'd like access to certain specific sections of them to begin translating
> into english.
So, you are planning to go to Russia and/or Ukraine for a few months
to work in their archives? When are you planning your trip for? I
recommend going now, before the very unpleasant Russian winters set
in.
captain!
"Ostap Bender" <ostap_be...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:29c0bd28-f3e5-4575...@z15g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
////////////
the st.pete archives actually. the trip is planned for whenever i have
enough money saved up to stop working for a while. time of year does not
concern me, considering that it's a city.