Soviet Union | Jane Takes On History

“The West likes him. The people of Russia, not so much.” That has been a theme in tributes to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former head of the Soviet Union, who died yesterday, August 30.

You may know more about Gorbachev than I did a few years ago when I wrote a paper about him for a class about modern European history. But perhaps sharing some of the history I learned will reveal why the West is grateful to him, even if the people of Russia are not.

Gorbachev never intended to break up the Soviet Union. He simply didn’t know that perestroika (restructuring the USSR’s economy) and glasnost (openness of speech) would result in cataclysmic change. Continue reading “Was Mikhail Gorbachev a Hero? Yes.”

It is now accepted that Joseph Stalin perpetrated mass murder in the Ukraine Soviet Republic in 1932 and 1933. A famine occurred throughout the Soviet Union but the most severe impact was in the vital wheat-growing Ukraine because Stalin wanted to wipe out Ukrainian resistance to the Soviets.

“Farms, villages, and whole towns in Ukraine were placed on blacklists and prevented from receiving food,” writes Anne Applebaum in Britannica. “Peasants were forbidden to leave the Ukrainian republic in search of food.” Apparatchiks even entered homes and stole food. (The Soviets could requisition as much food as they wanted from those who produced it.) Millions died.

Many Western observers visited the Soviet Union around that time, but few revealed the true conditions. Most famously, Walter Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for his generally positive stories from the Soviet Union in 1931; the worst horrors were going on a year later, but he did not report them.

Thomas D. Campbell wrote positively, too, about the collectivization process in his 1932 book Russia: Market or Menace? Continue reading “Was Thomas Campbell Duped?”