Reading Gogun’s major historical study, I kept recalling our family chronicles. The author tells how, in 1946–1947, during preparations for a new world war, army authorities, while freely demobilizing high-ranking officers, sought at the same time to retain combat officers of the lower or middle ranks — with the main emphasis, first and foremost, on field artillery. So it was with my father as well. In 1937, when he was a 14-year-old boy, he was sent off to the camps. Five years later, having miraculously survived, he volunteered for the front and spent the entire war on the front line, commanding an anti-tank 45-mm gun. He was wounded three times. A decorated veteran. In 1947, after a decade of state-imposed captivity, he tried in vain to be demobilized — but they would not release him: «We need officers with front-line experience». He was let go only after, in one of his countless applications, he dared to mention his sentence under Article 58 of the Criminal Code for «counterrevolutionary activity», which he had concealed in army forms («At the time I considered it necessary to keep that hidden»).

#YeiintheUSSR #ideology #historyoftheUSSR #bookclub #communism #worldrevolution #repressionsintheUSSR #review #Stalin #WorldWarIII

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In the place of the closed GULAG Museum in Moscow, a «Museum of the Genocide of the Soviet People» is being created. If we didn't know what a kingdom of crooked mirrors Russia is today, this could even be welcomed — after all, there really was genocide in the USSR. However, it was not at all the kind that the Russian authorities mean today.

#WorldWarII #genocide #Hitler #Twoleggedbelt #industrialization #historicalmemory #historicalmyths #collectivization #leftandright #propaganda #repressionsintheUSSR #Russia #Stalin #statistics #Trotsky #theeconomyisalmost #essay

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Exactly 60 years ago, the USSR began the trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, which marked the beginning of the Soviet dissident movement. One of the prosecution witnesses at this trial was the Orientalist Sergei Khmelnitsky — the father of historian of Soviet secret services and «Most» columnist Dmitry Khmelnitsky. Dmitry himself was 12 years old at the time. A couple of years later, Dmitry learned that his father had been a secret NKVD informant, whose denunciation in the late 1940s led to the arrest and imprisonment of two of his friends. After being released during the Khrushchev Thaw, they publicly exposed Sergei Khmelnitsky, and all his close friends turned away from him. Among them was Andrei Sinyavsky. However, few people know that the famous writer himself was recruited by the NKVD at the same time as Khmelnitsky and continued to cooperate with the KGB. Dmitry tells how it all happened in his forthcoming book «Khmelnitsky, Sinyavsky, and the KGB.»

#dissidents #denunciations #interview #historicalmemory #kgb #personalexperience #thaw #SinyavskyandDaniel #repressionsintheUSSR #parentsandchildren #specialservices #France #Emigration

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