Well put, Jone. Stalin is being rehabilitated in Russia, unfortunately.
Last week Mrs M and I were the guests of a Russian Army Colonel who allowed me to be the first American journalist to enter the cemetery (his description, not mine) of political prisoners in медное город (Mednoy = means "copper" which is the main industry there). медное is about 28 km west of Tver and lies along the Tvesta river not far from the old city of Torzhok.
There are some 6300 Polish intelligentsia buried there. The Poles have been allowed to establish a memorial, paid for with Polish funding, and each person who died and was buried there is accurately detailed. The estimated total of Polish deaths by NKVD means is over 22,000.
Each small square contains a name and dates of the 6,000+ Polish citizens buried in this series of mass graves:
What is disturbing is that these Polish deaths came not during the Great Patriotic War/WWII, but from the Russian invasion of Poland in 1939 when Hitler invaded from the West and Hitlers' ally, Stalin and the CCCP, invaded from the East. Thousands of Poles were loaded onto trains and transported to places like this to be executed.
At the same time, the NKVD (Stalin's secret police) was killing thousands of Russians too. For several years it was thought that only Poles were buried here but today the government has admitted that perhaps 6,000 or more Russian citizens are also buried there. Also interesting is that while the Soviets kept detailed records of arrests, trails, imprisonments and executions, somehow the current government refuses to disclose the names of those buried at медное.
In a further pathetic act, Stalin allowed the NKVD upper officers to build summer dacha homes on the land after the bodies were buried underneath.
Today the land is cleared and the Russian government has declined to disclose the names of those buried here, although the records do exist. Russian families are doing painstaking research to document their loved ones who were executed and buried at this place. When one is found, the Russian family posts the photo and name on trees that line the mass graves.
There was nothing benevolent about Stalin. He was a personification of Satan, an inhumane and insane being, not even deserving to be labeled as an animal. May he continue to roam the earth without a home, rejected by both heaven and hell for eternity.
(Photos copyrighted by the Mendeleyev Journal.)
