Secret Speech
Victor Grayevsky has died.
No, I'd never heard of him either. Michael Ledeen wants him to be "the man of the century", which is maybe a bit of an over-reaction to the death of a 'middleman'. Mind you, the process he 'middled' was that of obtaining and relaying to the world the text of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the one that revealed to the incredulous ears of the oppressive bourgeois world the joy of the new life under Stalin. He was also a double agent and won the Lenin Medal.
So hardly an uneventful life. But man of the century? Wasn't that Stalin?
2 comments:
They are getting carried away - as if the World did not know about Stalin's crimes! THey all knew about 1937. Khruschev' "Secret" speach of 1956 was hardly a secret in the Soviet Union - by that time samizdat reached far and wide, it was the biggest shock to the Soviet system before the Perestroika. Poetess Anna Akhmatova said that "after 1956 there were two Russias: one fresh out of gulag and the other staying put. And they had to look each other in the eye". My grandfather got out then - a broken man and died shortly after. 20 million or so got out of gulags between 1953 and 1956!
That speech was important in the West because it was the Soviet regime saying it (as opposed to the imperialists and their capitalist running dogs [what does that mean?]). It meant all the Western apologists (Satre and his ilk) had to either face up to facts, or (the preferred option) get very creative with their justifications.
20 million? Unimaginable. I'd love to ask you about your grandfather, but perhaps this is not the forum.
Post a Comment