A woman holds a candle near the monument Solovetsky Stone on the eve of the remembrance day for the victims of political repression in central Moscow, Russia, October 29, 2015. The stone from the Solovetsky Camp, one of the Gulag labour camps which operated in the early years of the Soviet Union, was installed as a memorial to the victims of political repression near a building of former NKVD secret service in 1990. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov
WNU Editor: The AP report is here .... Victims of Soviet repressions remembered in memorial (AP).
Every Russian has a family member, a friend, an acquaintance, .... who can repeat a story of someone who suffered during this time. I know in my case I have dozens. And while there are still some survivors .... I know that they are not going to live long enough to see justice. But I also know that there will be an accounting one day .... as well as a suitable memorial to the tens of millions who died .... but that is not going to happen today.
Update: I completely disagree with the following Guardian commentary .... Russia's Gulag camps cast in forgiving light of Putin nationalism (Shaun Walker, The Guardian). Russians are not "casting a forgiving light" of the Gulags .... it is like Americans forgiving slavery because of the current state of American nationalism .... logic and common sense dictates otherwise. The dark part of our pasts are separate issues from today's current events, and they should be remembered and treated as such.
1 comment:
WNU,
There never is a tidy way to resolve such things. The French Revolution is an excellent example of that. "The dark part of our pasts are separate issues from today's current events, and they should be remembered and treated as such." That's the only sane way to deal with it. At some point it is the past and any justice or retribution merely becomes an exercise of "attainment of blood" which only brings more misery and injustice.
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