THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Robert Tucker, whose Marx-Engels Reader and Lenin Anthology are dog-eared veterans on my shelf, has died at the age of ninety-two.

The Times Online is reporting that:

Secret documents detailing the Soviet leadership’s decision to murder 22,000 Polish officers at Katyn were released to the Russian public today on orders from President Medvedev.

In an unprecedented step, the Russian State Archive published documents showing how Soviet leader Joseph Stalin approved the World War Two massacre proposed by his secret police henchman Lavrenty Beria. Other prominent members of the ruling Soviet Politburo also signed off on the slaughter.

For the full story, go here.

Reuters has a story (picked up by Johnson’s Russia List and the New York Times) that Russian archivists have finally settled the question of who killed Kirov.

For those who don’t know much about Soviet history, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, party boss of Leningrad, was shot in his office on 1 December 1934. Stalin used this as his pretext for beginning the Great Purges–dismantling what protections existed against arbitrary arrest and execution.

The question then and since is whether Leonid Nikolaev, the man who ostensibly did the deed, actually did it, and if he was the one who did it, whether he did it at Stalin’s behest. As usual for these questions, the rumors in Russia run the gamut. My personal favorite is the one I was told over tea in one Moscow archive: Kirov, allegedly a notorious babnik (womanizer), had worked his charms on Nikolaev’s wife, and the assassination was payback.

In any event, the documents suggest that Nikolaev was the classic disgruntled loner, not part of any conspiracy, who shot Kirov out of a sense of personal affront. This certainly sounds plausible to me, though I’m under no illusions that it will settle the debate.

A few days back Helena Goscilo of the University of Pittsburgh posted a message to the SEELANGS listserv announcing the recent expansion of STALINKA — the “digital library of Staliniana” hosted by Pitt’s Digital Resource Library. The site now contains more than 500 images depicting the “Father of the Soviet Peoples” in photographs, cartoons, paintings, sculpture, etc.

As the portal to the searchable database notes, all of the images in the collections are protected by copyright — so don’t go trying to profit off of ‘em without first obtaining the permission of the original rights holders. (Good luck with that…)

Still, it’s a great resource for classroom and other educational use.