Recently there was a talk show on St.-Petersburg TV channel 5. The theme of discussion was "Is J.Stalin the Father of Peoples or a Soulless Tyrant?".
Here is the show, JFYI:
I am not going to translate the full duration of 40+ minutes. Frankly speaking, I am not going to translate it at all, as there was nothing new, just a traditional heavily biased idea that Stalin was a blood-thirsty tyrant responsible for mass killing of his own people and for each and every bad thing in the history of the USSR.
My point is an invited expert, Ronald Suny, an American Sovietologist who earned his Ph.D. back in 1968. At the talk show he was announced as a professor of the Michigan Univesity and author of a book about Stalin. I have listened to all his words very attentively.
What am I to say, strongly corresponds to my own, personal experience of communication with Americans, especially those 50+ years of age.
His Russian is not perfect, though pretty fluent. However, his knowledge of the Russian language is way better than his knowledge of the Russian history. Shame on you, Mr. Professor! It looks like you have studied Stalin amd his time using ill-famed "The Gulag Archipelago" as your textbook. Yet in no case it is a factbook; the author himself sub-titled the book as "an experiment of research by means of art". That is, there are author's fantasies, fiction based upon rumours. By the way, no surprise at all: Solzhenitsyn had no access to state archives and documents.
At least, those Americans I talked to did not pretend being scholars. They did not know anything (really truthful) about the Soviet Union, they had just deep fear of evil communism and Russians, whose only wish was to conquer and destroy God-blessed good America, rape its women and make communists of its children. Fear, carefully fed up in decades by the full power of state propaganda machine of the USA, that came out of the WW2 as the strongest economy in the world.
Am I to say this bullshit has and had nothing to do with the real state of things? If we suppose that the school of 'Sovietology' was created for better understanding of the Soviet Union, we have to admit it was a huge loss of money, because it totally failed. Though, if we suppose it was just a part of anti-Soviet (and, on a deeper level, russophobic) propaganda, it was a success.
Anyhow, we Russians (or Soviet people, for the matter) were never afraid of Americans. We just felt pity for the great American people, our good ally during the War (namely, WW2, which for us was the Great Patriotic War indeed), who later became fooled up by those war hawks of Washington conducting worldwide their big stick policy.
PS: Just for your information, Mr. Suny; 'донос' (donos) is just information, e.g. a report to police of something (or somebody) suspicious in your neighbourhood, of any illegal or criminal activity or act. I am sure you have practiced it many times, as a good citizen of your country, state and community. So there was nothing to laugh at in the words of Dmitry Puchkov.
Here is the show, JFYI:
I am not going to translate the full duration of 40+ minutes. Frankly speaking, I am not going to translate it at all, as there was nothing new, just a traditional heavily biased idea that Stalin was a blood-thirsty tyrant responsible for mass killing of his own people and for each and every bad thing in the history of the USSR.
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| Ronald Grigor Suny in a St. Petersburg TV-5 studio; a screenshot of the live talk show about Stalin (December 18). |
What am I to say, strongly corresponds to my own, personal experience of communication with Americans, especially those 50+ years of age.
His Russian is not perfect, though pretty fluent. However, his knowledge of the Russian language is way better than his knowledge of the Russian history. Shame on you, Mr. Professor! It looks like you have studied Stalin amd his time using ill-famed "The Gulag Archipelago" as your textbook. Yet in no case it is a factbook; the author himself sub-titled the book as "an experiment of research by means of art". That is, there are author's fantasies, fiction based upon rumours. By the way, no surprise at all: Solzhenitsyn had no access to state archives and documents.
At least, those Americans I talked to did not pretend being scholars. They did not know anything (really truthful) about the Soviet Union, they had just deep fear of evil communism and Russians, whose only wish was to conquer and destroy God-blessed good America, rape its women and make communists of its children. Fear, carefully fed up in decades by the full power of state propaganda machine of the USA, that came out of the WW2 as the strongest economy in the world.
Am I to say this bullshit has and had nothing to do with the real state of things? If we suppose that the school of 'Sovietology' was created for better understanding of the Soviet Union, we have to admit it was a huge loss of money, because it totally failed. Though, if we suppose it was just a part of anti-Soviet (and, on a deeper level, russophobic) propaganda, it was a success.
Anyhow, we Russians (or Soviet people, for the matter) were never afraid of Americans. We just felt pity for the great American people, our good ally during the War (namely, WW2, which for us was the Great Patriotic War indeed), who later became fooled up by those war hawks of Washington conducting worldwide their big stick policy.
PS: Just for your information, Mr. Suny; 'донос' (donos) is just information, e.g. a report to police of something (or somebody) suspicious in your neighbourhood, of any illegal or criminal activity or act. I am sure you have practiced it many times, as a good citizen of your country, state and community. So there was nothing to laugh at in the words of Dmitry Puchkov.
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