Great Terror
Dissecting Kirov’s Murder
By Sean at 15 December, 2009, 11:02 am
Two weeks ago, I did a post on 75 years since the Kirov law. I was happy to find that the New Times published an interview with Matthew Lenoe whose forthcoming book, Kirov’s Murder and Soviet History, is a hefty reexamination of the famous assassination. Below is a translation I did of the interview.
The Kirov Law at 75
By Sean at 2 December, 2009, 2:07 am
Yesterday, December 1, was 75 years since the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad Party Organization, and Stalin ally. It was on the night of December 1, 1934 that a certain Leonid Nikolaev, a disgruntled party worker, shot Kirov in the secretary’s third floor office. Nikolaev was immediately caught and interrogated [...]
Read More >>Memorial’s “Winchesters” Returned
By Sean at 7 May, 2009, 1:38 pm
It appears that some of Medvedev’s liberal posturing is producing concrete results. Or at least someone is getting the signals. Finally, fi-nal-ly Memorial has gotten its materials back from the St. Petersburg prosecutor. Twelve computer hard disks, or “Winchesters” as one report calls them, about 1000 business cards belonging to A. D. Margolis (the general [...]
Read More >>Bifurcated Memory
By Sean at 5 April, 2009, 1:53 pm
Thinking Allowed’s Laurie Taylor has an interesting discussion with Mikhail Ryklin about the historical memory of Stalinism. Ryklin’s most recent work looks at Communist ideology as a “substitute” or “political” religion which “gave millions of people all over the globe an ultimate meaning.” Indeed, Marxism, with its eschatological narrative based on the fall and rise [...]
Read More >>Internal Terror
By Sean at 17 March, 2009, 9:24 am
Cynthia Hooper gave a fascinating talk titled “Terror from Within: Brotherhood and Betrayal in the NKVD” at UCLA in February. The Center for European and Eurasian Studies has kindly uploaded the podcast. I offer it here for readers’ intellectual enjoyment.
Read More >>(Un)documenting Stalinism?
By Sean at 8 December, 2008, 10:36 am
There isn’t much by way of new information about the raid on Memorial. Why the human rights organization was raided still remains a mystery. Work has renewed at the organization’s office but day to day activities remain disturbed. After all, the police did confiscate a laundry list of materials. According to a statement issued by [...]
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