Daily Archives: February 19, 2006

Next Friday will mark the 50 years since Nikita Khrushchev made his famous “secret speech” at the 20th Communist Party Congress. The speech, which can be found here, denounced the Stalin’s “cult of personality,” his use of mass repression, ethnic deportations, and bungling during the War. Among the many detailed examples Khrushchev used to disclose Stalin’s crimes, he said:

Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint and the correctness of his position was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation. This was especially true during the period following the 17th Party Congress, when many prominent party leaders and rank-and-file party workers, honest and dedicated to the cause of Communism, fell victim to Stalin’s despotism.

The history of ..read more

The offices of Komsomolskaya Pravda were destroyed by fire on Tuesday. The building was a prime Soviet symbol. A classic 1930s constructivist structure, the building once housed Pravda, the main organ of the Communist Party. For several years it has been home to Komsomolskaya pravda, the former main organ of the Communist Youth League, or Komsomol, Parlamentskaya Gazeta, Tribuna and Sovetskaya Rossia. According to reports, there was one death: one Yelena Karpova, who worked on the sixth floor in the newspaper’s stolovia. But according to an article in the London Telegraph the loss goes beyond that of human life and avant-garde architecture. It seems that much of KomPrav’s archives have been lost.

“Perhaps the most important casualty of the blaze,” the Telegraph article reads, “believed to have been caused by an electrical fault, was a library that housed literature banned by the Soviet regime as ..read more