Poor Joseph Stalin. Sure, he personally signed orders to kill hundreds of thousands, but why can’t the media leave the poor guy alone? Efforts in Russia to rejuvenate his image have been creative… We had the RussiaToday advertisements talking about his poetry writing, they made a special cell phone theme bearing his likeness, his family members are even suing newspapers.
As the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact approaches, the Stalin defenders have gone overboard. It now appears that his arrangement with the Germans – that little piece of history which makes Poland so angry – was A-OK.
On August 17, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service issued a statement saying it had declassified documents showing that the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the Soviet Union’s “only available means of self-defense.”
The spy agency’s demarche was just the latest in a series of Russian government statements that critics say appear to defend Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and justify actions he took shortly before and during World War II.
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Paul Goble has an interesting link on the Russian refusal to examine Stalin’s role in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact:Vienna, August 20 – Unlike France or Britain where few people today are prepared to defend their countries’ 1938 Munich Accord with Hitler, most Russians, encouraged by their government, defend 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a reflection of their continuing tendency to view the world in “us-them” terms in which Russians are always right and others always wrong.Continued…..http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/08/window-on-eurasia-russia-needs-honest.html