Return of the Evil Empire?
December 31, 2002
International News Analysis Today Exclusive Report
By Toby Westerman
Copyright 2002 International News Analysis Today
www.inatoday.com
As America prepares for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and as North Korea grows into a nuclear threat, the United States faces the return of an even deadlier enemy.
Unreported by the U.S. press, America's "strategic ally," Russia, is again becoming an overtly communist state.
The unfolding events in Russia are particularly important to America, because Russia is considered a pivotal ally in the war on terror and an increasingly significant source of oil to the U.S.
Russia is also one of the main supporters of Iraq and North Korea.
The discovery of a "field of the dead," and the official Russian reaction to its discovery is the latest indication of Russia's slide back into official communism.
" We are only living under an illusion of change," declared Irene Frige, director of the St. Petersburg human rights group "Memorial", the group that discovered a mass grave of 30,000 Soviet-era political prisoners. The activities of Frige and her group carried by the Internet version of the highly respected French news daily, Le Figaro.
Frige condemned official hindrance, which her group encountered as it investigated reports of Soviet-era mass graves of executed political prisoners. Frige compared present day official obstruction by Russian officials of her group's work to earlier Soviet denials that mass burial sites ever existed.
Mass graves - with their location kept secret -- were used extensively from the 1917 communist revolution through the Stalinist era. For years rumors circulated of the existence of mass graves containing the bodies of political prisoners in Russia.
Frige's group has evidence of the existence of other mass graves, in addition to the "field of death" the group already located, but the FSB, a successor to the Soviet KGB, is taking steps to restrict any further research into the question of mass burial sites.
"For us, it is clear today that the [Soviet-era] lie continues," Frige told Le Figaro.
The subject of Soviet-era mass killings is a topic most Russians are eager to avoid.
The discovery of the mass graves has produced no reaction among the Russian people, a response which Le Figaro described as "indifference."
Russians give every evidence of being numb to past horrors
In the "new Russia," few memorials exist dedicated to those killed by Soviet tyranny, and seventy years of communist brutality followed by a decade of brutal "reform," have left the Russian people with a distaste to recall the past.
Ironically, the Russian people are as reluctant to commemorate their new- found liberty as they are to remember the Soviet-era slaughter. "There is not a single monument to freedom in Russia," Frige informed Le Figaro.
Untold numbers of dead across Russia - possibly in the many millions - will remain in historical oblivion. "A dozen years of tenacious struggle [with government officials]" passed before Frige's group was able to establish a monument in St. Petersburg to "the memory of the victims of the Gulag," reported Le Figaro.
Russia "free," "democratic" ?
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