Atlas do Oriente Medio (sem Israel): Stalin baixou na Editora Harper Collins

Quando o Stalin não gostava de alguém, algum aliado antigo caido em desgraça, mesmo que fosse membro distinguido do partido bolchevique, ele não tinha nenhuma hesitação: mandava reescrever a história da gloriosa revolução de outubro, na edição oficial do PCUS, e ordenava aos assessores que simplesmente retirassem das antigas fotografias da revolução de 1917 a cara do desgraçado, se por acaso ele ali estivesse, ao lado de Lênin, por exemplo. Foi o que ocorreu com Trotsky. numa foto famosa de Petrogrado, onde Lênin aparece num palanque, e Trotsky bem ao lado da plataforma de madeira. Stalin não teve pruridos: mandou apagar o corpo inteiro do inimigo pessoal.

Pois foi mais ou menos o que fez essa distinguida editora ocidental, ao produzir um Atlas para "clientes do Oriente Médio". Simplesmente apagou Israel do mapa.

Não é simples resolver todas as coisas assim?

Pois eu tenho algumas sugestões aqui mesmo no Brasil: para apagar certos personagens que estão incomodando, roubando demais, por exemplo, ou contando mentiras de forma reincidente.

Alguma sugestão da parte do distinto público?

(PS.: Cuidado com os stalinistas que andam por aí: eles podem querem apagar vocês de verdade).

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Le Monde, 3 janvier 2015

L’Etat d’Israël rayé d’un atlas sur le Moyen-Orient

Carte extraite de l'ouvrage "Atlas : apprendre avec les cartes" de Harper Collins.

Proposer une lecture claire et « en profondeur » des enjeux du Moyen-Orient. Telle était l'ambition affichée d'un atlas publié par le géant de l'édition Harper Collins, raconte The Washington Post. Développé spécialement pour les écoles de la région, l'ouvrage souhaitait offrir aux enfants la possibilité de « comprendre la dynamique entre l'environnement physique et social, les défis de la région [et] son développement socio-économique ». Des objectifs on ne peut plus louables. Seulement voilà, si la Jordanie est mentionnée, de même que Gaza ou encore la Syrie, le livre omet un acteur majeur dans la dynamique de la zone : Israël. Comme l'explique la publication catholique The Tablet, qui a révélé l'information, l'atlas a été depuis retiré de la vente.
Harper Collins a également présenté ses excuses sur sa page Facebook pour une « omission » susceptible d'avoir offensé plusieurs personnes. Plus inquiétante est la justification donnée par Collins Bartholomew, une de ses filiales chargée de la cartographie : faire apparaître Israël aurait été « inacceptable » pour leurs clients. En d'autres termes, la non-mention de l'Etat hébreu relève donc d'un souci de « préférences locales ».
Alors que l'autorité palestinienne se bat pour la reconnaissance d'un Etat palestinien et que les tensions sont ravivées dans la région, cet « oubli volontaire » de la part d'une maison d’édition aussi installée, semble encore moins compréhensible...  Interrogée par The Tablet, Jane Clements, directrice d’une organisation britannique œuvrant pour le dialogue entre catholiques et juifs, rappelle à juste titre que « les cartes peuvent être un outil très puissant ».

On this Day in History: Roosevelt, Churchill e Stalin se encontram em Teheran (NYT)

ON THIS DAY (The New York Yimes)

On Nov. 28, 1943, President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin met in Tehran during World War II.

ROOSEVELT, STALIN, CHURCHILL AGREE ON PLANS FOR WAR ON GERMANY IN TALKS AT TEHERAN; 1,500 MORE TONS OF BOMBS DROPPED ON BERLIN

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DECISIONS VARIED

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Moscow Radio Asserts Political Problems Were Settled

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PARLEY NOW IS OVER

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Axis Reports Predict an Appeal to Germans to Quit Hitler

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By JAMES B. RESTON

Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES

RELATED HEADLINES 1,000 Big Bombers, 7,789 Other Planes Built in November: Record Productions Achieved at Pace of One Every Five Minutes Around Clock: New Peaks in Navy Yards: 250,000 - Ton Output Is Largely of Combat ships, Among Them Many Aircraft Carriers Air Battles Sharp: Nazi Fighters and Guns Down 41 of RAF's Attacking Planes: South Berlin Hit: New Factory Area the Target in Fifth Heavy Blow in 15 Nights 8th Army Drives 6 MIles Up Coast Toward San Vito: Town 15 Miles From Key to Road to Rome Is Reported Taken -- Inland, Montgomery Wins Castelfrentano -- 5th Army Gains OTHER HEADLINES Soldier-Vote Bill Shifted by Senate to Let States Rule: Republicans Join With Southern Democrats in Scrapping the Plan for Federal Control: Congress Only to Advise: Opponents Will Charge Substitute Will Make Balloting Impossible for Forces Abroad Walker Opposes Postal Rate Rises: Tells Senators Department Is Studying Issue -- Swope Fights Racing Levy Olive Oil Imports Are Banned by U.S.: Importers Here Say Bumper Crop in Mediterranean Area May Go Begging Australians Peril Another Huon Base: Close in on Wareo, Japanese Stronghold in New Guinea - New Britain Is Battered Longo, Hague Foe, Is Imprisoned; Edison Joins U.S. Inquiry Plea RAF's Twin-Target Tactics Show Poser in Month's Blows at Reich

London, Saturday, Dec. 4--The Moscow radio announced early this morning that President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Stalin had met in Teheran, Iran, "a few days ago" to discuss questions relating to the war and the post-war period.
"A few days ago," the Moscow radio said shortly after midnight, "a conference of the leaders of the three Allied nations--President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Stalin--took place at Teheran.
"Military and diplomatic representatives also took part. The questions discussed at the conference related to the war against Germany and also to a range of political questions. Decisions were taken which will be published later."
[An Associated Press dispatch from London quoted the Soviet monitor as saying that full details of the conference might be announced between noon and 2 P.M. Eastern war time today, basing this prediction on the usual routine of the Moscow radio when announcing future broadcasts.]
The radio announcement, which came as a surprise to official quarters in London, said nothing about the present location of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill, who held a five- day meeting with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek last week and made plans for the defeat of the Japanese and the dismemberment of their empire.
Details Are Awaited
Early this morning the Moscow radio had not indicated the nature of political and military discussions that took place in the Iranian capital, but it was generally assumed they dealt with the coordination of military plans for the final assault on Hitlerite Germany and with the unification of political plans for making peace with Germany on the basis of "unconditional surrender."
Official information that has come back to London since the Prime Minister left the capital has been extremely limited and indeed until the Moscow radio made its announcement the German radio was the main source of reports on the movements of the three leaders. It was, however, generally expected in London that the three leaders would in the course of their discussions decide to appeal to the German people over the heads of their Government to surrender or take the consequences of the air war in the west and an invasion of Russian armies from the east.
Stalin Crosses Own Border
While Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt had had seven previous conferences on the war, this was the first among the three leaders, and so far as is known it marked the first time that Mr. Stalin had left the Soviet Union since the revolution in 1917. The meeting was foreshadowed after the Quebec conference when Mr. Churchill told the House of Commons he "hoped" to meet with Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Stalin before the first of the year.
The Prime Minister had met Premier Stalin once before in the autumn of 1942, when he journeyed to Moscow to explain to him why it was impossible for the United States and Britain to invade the continent of Europe from the west that year.
Previous to that conference the United States and Britain had undertaken to concern themselves with the "urgent tasks" of creating a second front in 1942, and it is now known that the first Stalin-Churchill meeting was unsatisfactory to Mr. Stalin for military reasons. There are reasons for believing, however, that in Teheran very little if anything remained to be settled on the question of the second front except perhaps that of coordination of attacks on Germany from the east and west.
In addition to the coordination of military plans for a decisive phase of the war in Europe, it is generally believed by observers in London that the Teheran agenda covered a variety of questions that were either discussed briefly or shelved entirely by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and Foreign Commissar Vyachesalaff M. Molotoff when they met in Moscow last month.
Among the first of these questions was the status of the Polish Government, with which Premier Stalin broke diplomatic relations early this year. Since Britain went to war with Germany under the terms of the treaty alliance with Poland and since the Russian armies in their great westward sweep are now approaching the former Russo-Polish frontier, the Governments of both the United States and Britain have been hopeful that the Russo- Polish breach might be repaired.
Premier Stalin has already stated in a letter to The New York Times that he wished to see a "strong, independent Poland," and efforts have been made by London to try to get Mr. Stalin not only to renew diplomatic relations with Poland but, it is believed, to make Poland a party to the Russo-Czech twenty-year treaty alliance that will be signed within a few days.
It is assumed that this long-range question of the future Germany also was on the Teheran agenda for discussion and the question naturally arises as to whether the principle of "punishing" the aggressor would be applied to Germany as severely as it was applied to Japan in the Cairo declaration.
Whatever else the Allies may have agreed to coordinate at Teheran they did not coordinate their announcements about the fact that meetings were being held. The fact that the meetings were imminent was reported first in American newspapers. The fact that the North African conference with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had ended was reported prematurely by a Reuter correspondent in Lisbon. Senator Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, shared with the German radio the honor of "breaking" prematurely the fact that Mr. Stalin, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill were in session and now this morning the Moscow radio, without pre- arrangement with London and Washington, announced that the conference had ended. Thus everybody "scooped" everybody else, which makes everybody even, although it makes nobody happy.
Axis Voices Concern
Before the Moscow broadcast today Axis sources continued to voice apprehension over the results of the parley.
Typical of their laborious attempts to anticipate the official announcements of the conference was the following comment in the Angriff:
"It seems that we are again to be asked to capitulate as a favor to the enemy. But we will again turn a deaf ear to this friendly invitation. The war criminals could have saved themselves a long trip."
The German telegraph service, picking up this same theme, which is general in the German press and radio, said "the [Allied] discussions are expected to result in a kind of ultimatum for the capitulation of the German people and its allies. The German people, however, know that their enemies try to hide their own weakness and difficulties behind every new propaganda bluff. This war of nerves is the enemy's last resort.
"The Russian drive has failed, the Allies have been unable to produce more than a slow- motion offensive in Italy, and the bombing in the west has failed to undermine either German morale or German production."
Elsewhere in the German press, however, correspondents do not support this official bravado. A remarkable article in Wednesday's Voelkisher Beobachter, for example, complains bitterly:
"Those people who spoke with deep sympathy about the people of bombed London have nothing else to say about bombed Berlin except, 'Well, you started it. Remember Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and Coventry? What you are now getting is only what you deserve.'"
Similarly Axis satellites are not either dismissing the "Big Three" conference lightly or attempting to speak like Germans of "the trumpets of Jericho which will leave the walls unmoved." They are admitting openly that the conference will have "great significance" no matter what it does.

Livro: o pacto diabolico entre os dois maiores assassinos do seculo XX: Hitler-Stalin

Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact With Stalin, 1939–1941

The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact With Stalin, 1939–1941

By Roger Moorhouse

Reviewed by Robert Legvold

From our November/December 2014 Issue

A cartoon that appeared in London’s Evening Standard in September 1939 shows Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin tipping their hats and bowing to each other. “The scum of the Earth, I believe?” says Hitler. “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?” Stalin replies. A month earlier, the two leaders had concluded a pact promising not to interfere in each other’s aggressive military campaigns and devised a secret plan to divvy up the lands between their countries. Moorhouse captures the essence of the wretched deal better than anyone has before. As they ripped Europe apart, Berlin and Moscow danced an awkward ballet, straining to preserve their compact while mutual mistrust mounted and their armies deported large segments of the local populations in captured territories. Moorhouse concludes by tracing with new detail the stages by which Hitler ultimately decided to invade the Soviet Union and, on the other side, Stalin’s bewildered efforts to both deny and prepare for the double-cross.

Council on Foreign Relations

Books Reviewed

The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

By Roger Moorhouse

2014

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Amazon

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1814 or 1914? The Fateful Choice in 2014 - Martin Sieff (The Globalist)

Não acredito em ciclos, seja econômicos, seja históricos, mas acredito na capacidade humana de cometer os mesmos erros, e dos homens políticos de perpetrar as mesmas bobagens que seus predecessores de maneira geral. Quanto aos militares, é conhecida sua proverbial tendência de estudar as guerras passadas para tirar lições sobre as que aparecem pelo caminho, e provavelmente de cometer outros tantos erros quantos seus congêneres da vida civil.
Enfim, como disse alguém, ninguém, em qualquer época, jamais perdeu dinheiro apostando na estupidez humana.
Ou como disse Einstein: existem duas coisas infinitas e incomensuráveis: o universo e a estupidez humana, e ele não tinha muita certeza quanto ao primeiro...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

1814 or 1914? The Fateful Choice in 2014

The surprising way in which historical choices present themselves in cycles that are 100 years apart.

By Martin Sieff
The Globalist, July 4, 2014

Is 2014 another 1914 or 1814? The fate — and even survival — of the world depends on the answer.

This summer, the world remembers the start of World War I. This catastrophe shattered the global civilization of Europe to a degree that in terms of prosperity, security, demography and basic optimism about life and the future took more than 40 years to recover from — and then only after even greater catastrophes.

But any which way one turns historic responsibilities, all the unprecedented and previously unimaginable cataclysms of the first half of the 20th century across Eurasia flowed from that one, fundamental cause — the start of full-scale international war between the Great Powers in the summer of 1914.

The Russian Revolution, the killer famines that swept the infant Soviet Union, the Ukrainian genocide of up to 10 million people,Stalin’s Great Terror, the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi conquest of Europe, the Holocaust and the hecatombs of dead in World War II (80 million people, including 27 million Soviet citizens) all stemmed from that original catastrophe in 1914.

Craving full-scale European war

For generations thereafter, Germany in general and Kaiser Wilhelm II in particular were demonized across the Western world.

A slew of excellent new histories by Sean McMeekin (July 1914), Margaret MacMillan (The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914) and Christopher Clark (The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914) make clear that the outbreak of these events was by no means Germany’s fault alone.

The Russian General Staff in St. Petersburg and the long-overlooked, truly sinister figure of Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré in Paris were the ones who actively plotted and craved full-scale European war. The Kaiser, while certainly hysterical and amazingly inept, did not. He actually wanted to avoid it.

Recent research also brings out the pivotal role of Winston Churchill, civilian head of Britain’s Royal Navy, as second only to the abysmal Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, as being the key movers to drag Britain into the conflict when the country could otherwise easily have stayed out.

Churchill’s shaping of events converted what otherwise would have been a six-month to one-year victory of Germany against Russia and France with high casualties and lasting changes into something infinitely worse — a four-year death struggle to the ultimate mutual destruction of all.

1914, therefore, set off a chain reaction succession of pathological conflagrations that reduced the civilization of Europe, both material and moral, to a smoking ruin by 1945.

What a difference a century makes

By contrast, precisely a century earlier, the years of 1814-15 ended a quarter century cycle of continent-spanning destruction that had started with the French Revolution in 1789. (Though even that event, properly understood, was set off by the 1786 Free Trade Treaty which France signed with England to its own ruin).

The leaders of the restored great monarchies of Europe started in 1814 their herculean task of restoring political and social stability. That was essential in a Europe that had been ravaged and ruined by a quarter century of war.

At first, this endeavor looked hopeless. When exiled French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte returned to mainland France on March 20, 1815, the regime that had been set up to succeed him under the Bourbon dynasty of King Louis XVIII quickly collapsed.

Yet, 200 years ago the leaders of the great powers stayed cool. They gathered their military forces, worked in close cooperation and decisively defeated the resurgent Napoleon once and for all at the battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815.

The crucial military partnership that saved Europe from the maelstrom of catastrophe was between the British Army commanded by Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and the Prussian Army led by Field Marshal Gebhard von Blücher.

What a difference another century makes

That pivotal collaboration was all the more significant if one recalls that, a century later, it was the breakdown in trust and communication between Britain and Germany that led to the catastrophic mauling of both great nations and the eventual destruction of both their empires in the early 20th century.

Today, the omens for truly broad and bold international cooperation in Iraq are not good. They are fearful. Just as was the case with Napoleon quickly seizing the reins of France after his return from exile, so it is now in Iraq.

The army of supposedly democratic Iraq is now crumbling before a new wave of Islamist jihadis, who are vastly inferior to the U.S.-trained and equipped regular Iraqi army in number and equipment.

It does not help the overall situation that Europe is exhausted economically and the United States is exhausted militarily.

The importance of constructive compromise

Both Brussels and Washington are furious at Russia over its role in the continuing Ukraine crisis. Meanwhile, China is actively probing about advancing its interests in the South China Sea at the expense of its neighbors, much as Tsarist Russia and Austria-Hungary plotted in the Balkans before and during 1914.

To escape the truly terrible danger of another 1914, the leaders of the G-8 and China today should first heed and fear the dreadful lessons of 1914. Then they should reach back another century before that to learn the crucial lessons of Anglo-German collaboration to defeat Napoleon in 1814.

For this reason, the United States and the European Union need to make the effort to reach out in a new and serious partnership effort with China and Russia, paying attention for once to the grievances and interests of these great nations.

The great victory of Waterloo did not come easily — 100,000 men, about half divided between the British and the French — died there.

And it would still all have been in vain if the leaders of the great powers had not put aside their many differences of politics, ideology, religious faith and culture to meet at the Congress of Vienna starting in September 1814 where they forged a serious peace that lasted for a full century.

The future of the human race today hinges on whether the leaders of our 21st century world choose to follow the examples of the despised and discredited petty men of 1914, or whether they go back to the truly visionary and wise cooperative globalists of 1814-15.

About Martin Sieff

Martin Sieff is Chief Global Analyst at The Globalist Research Center and Editor-at-Large at The Globalist.

Takeaways

• Is 2014 another 1914 or 1814? The fate — and even survival — of the world depends on the answer.
  
• The future of our 21st century world depends on not following the example of the despised and petty men of 1914.
  
• Our best hope in 2014 is for another wave of smart diplomats, like the visionary and cooperative globalists of 1814.
  
• Superpowers that are traditional rivals need to compromise and work together against extremist threats to all.
  
• Britain and Germany need to cooperate with Russia to ensure a European peace, as they did in 1814, but not in 1914.
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Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko: obituario por Anne Applebaum (WP)

Recomendo a leitura do livro desta historiadora sobre o Gulag, já traduzido e publicado no Brasil, para os que ainda se pretendem simpáticos ao socialismo soviético.
Segundo esse extraordinário autor, o stalinismo foi "gangsterism enthroned." Nada mais correto.
Conhecemos um pouco do gangasterismo no poder, também por aqui...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, historian and survivor of Stalin’s gulag, dies at 93

By Anne Applebaum

The Washington Post, July 13, 2013

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, a Soviet historian and dissident who survived the gulag under Stalin and in later decades brought new attention to the scope of the regime’s barbarism, died July 9 in Moscow. He was 93.
The cause was a stroke, said Russian scholar Stephen F. Cohen, who played a crucial role in the English-language publication in 1981 of Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s best-known work, “The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny.”
“Anton was one of a handful of Soviets who were able and brave enough and resourceful enough to break the silence about the real history of the Soviet Union, which was completely falsified under Stalin,” said Cohen, a professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton University. “He told the truth as he knew it, the uncensored truth of the Stalin era.”
Anton Vladimirovich Antonov-Ovseyenko led a life that might be said to mirror the fate of his country.
He was born in Moscow on Feb. 23, 1920, just after the Russian revolution, into a prominent Bolshevik family. His father, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, was a military commander who in 1917 led the revolutionary assault on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and, together with Leon Trotsky, helped create the Red Army.
A founding member of the Soviet state, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko later served as adviser and arms supplier to the anti-fascists during the Spanish Civil War.
In the 1930s, the Antonov-Ovseyenko family fell victim to Stalin’s purge of the Soviet Communist Party and in particular to his persecution of “Old Bolsheviks” — who might challenge his claim to power — and their relatives.
Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko was 16 when his mother committed suicide in prison and 18 when his father was executed.
In 1940, when he was 20 years old, Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko was himself arrested after he refused to denounce his father as an “enemy of the people.” He spent most of the subsequent 13 years imprisoned in Soviet jails and concentration camps, including Butyrka, one of the most notorious Moscow prisons, and Vorkuta, a mining camp above the Arctic Circle, where he suffered from illnesses caused by malnutrition.
In a 2011 interview with the Public Radio International program “The World,” Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko said criminal gangs were common in the gulag, but they treated him better than other prisoners because of his ability to recite stories and poems.
“And I was expected to do this after a while,” he said. “So I always enjoyed this special status. But of course thieves are thieves. They can still steal from you even if they like your stories.”
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko was released. He sought obscurity and settled in what was then the Soviet republic of Georgia. But despite poor vision — his eyes were ruined in the labor camps, and he needed special assistance to read and write — he began to chronicle the fate of his father’s generation, and of his own.
Thanks to family and friends who had old Communist Party connections, he eventually gained access to documents and records that were not at that time available to historians, let alone to the general public.
His father’s status as an “Old Bolshevik” gave him access to people and witnesses who would not have trusted others. Among other things, he had access to material produced by Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, who conducted a secret inquiry into Stalin’s life and reign in 1954.
Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s first book, published under a pseudonym during the short-lived political “thaw” after Stalin’s death, was a sympathetic biography of his father. But his best-remembered work, “The Time of Stalin,” written in the 1960s and ’70s, was never officially published in the Soviet Union.
Instead, it was smuggled out of Moscow by Cohen, whose biography of Nikolai Bukharin, a founding father of the Soviet state, won him trust among an inner circle of anti-Stalin, post-gulag intellectuals that included Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko.
In an interview, Cohen recalled first meeting him: “He was like something out of Dostoyevsky — half-blind, wiry, lean and embattled. He challenged me to chin-ups equal to my age. I did 1, and he did 82.”
Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s book about Stalin first appeared in Russian in 1980 and then in English. Writing in the New York Times, journalist Harrison E. Salisbury called it “an extraordinary endeavor” and “a milestone toward the understanding of three-quarters of a century of Russian trauma.”
“The Time of Stalin” is best described as a biography of Stalin combined with an extended polemic against Stalinism, a political system Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko defined as “an entire historical epoch during which the vilest and bloodiest kind of evildoing flourished upon this earth. It was gangsterism enthroned.”
The book was one of the first to number the victims of Stalin in the millions, rather than the hundreds or thousands, and it contained many insiders’ stories of life inside Stalin’s Kremlin.
Not every detail of the book has held up to archival research, and the book is very much a product of its era. It shies away from criticizing Vladimir Lenin, for example, who launched the first reign of terror in the Soviet Union.
The book was remarkable — and remarkably brave — for its time, because the author criticized not only Stalin, who was dead, but also his “apologists,” who were very much alive. “I have striven for truthfulness,” he wrote, “there are no fabrications in this book. What would be the need? The truth is horrendous enough.”
The book made Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko into a political dissident. Upon hearing of its publication, Soviet authorities ordered a day-long search of his Moscow apartment, and he was kept well away from mainstream historians. Russian versions of the book were subsequently smuggled back into the Soviet Union, where they found an avid clandestine readership.
Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s bravery and dedication to truth-telling made him a singular figure during the Soviet era. In his later years, his obstinacy shaded into fanaticism. He quarreled with other historians and fell out with other groups of survivors and activists who also were trying to chronicle the history of Stalinism. Foreign royalties from sales of his book abroad made him relatively well-off, however, which enabled him to function independently.
Survivors include his wife, Yelena Solovarova, and a son, Anton.
In 2001, he founded, almost entirely on his own, the State Museum of the History of the Gulag in Moscow. The project, which opened in 2004, once featured a replica of a barrack from the gulag, kept purposefully chilly, and near it was an interrogators’ room.
The museum received mixed reviews from other survivors and scholars in the former Soviet Union. The museum is poorly funded, not least because Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko did not cooperate with others in its construction.
Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko remained committed to the remembrance of Stalin’s crimes until the end of his life. At the age of 87, he attended a ceremony at Bukovo, a vast killing field outside Moscow where his father was murdered along with more than 20,000 other people. In 2010 he told a Radio Liberty interviewer that Russia should have removed the Lenin mausoleum as well as Stalin’s tomb from Red Square long ago.
These were “monuments to a great betrayal,” he said, and should be destroyed.

Applebaum is a columnist and historian whose 2003 book, “Gulag: A History,” won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

O Stalin verdadeiro e seu historiador: morte de Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko

Anton Antonov Ovseyenko, Who Exposed Stalin Terror, Dies at 93

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

The New York Times: July 10, 2013

It is the duty of every honest person to write the truth about Stalin,” Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, a Soviet historian and dissident, wrote in the preface of his seminal book “The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny,” published illegally in 1981.

State Museum of the History of Gulag

Perhaps his most influential work  was “The Time of Stalin,” which was smuggled out of Moscow and published in New York in 1981.

A survivor of the gulag whose parents died in Stalin’s purges, Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko spent a lifetime in almost fanatical devotion to that duty, working until his death on Tuesday in Moscow at 93 to expose the darkest truths of the Soviet era.

His books cracked through the shell of Soviet censorship that surrounded much of the Stalin-era brutality, offering readers at home and in the West a vivid portrait of tyranny and violence.

Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s death comes as attitudes toward Stalin in Russia have grown increasingly ambivalent. Russian leaders these days, while praising his leadership during World War II, often cite the tens of millions killed during his rule.

Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko founded the State Museum of the History of the Gulag in Moscow in 2001 as a repository of artifacts from the Stalin era. Although it is rarely visited, Roman Romanov, his protégé and the current museum director, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko worked there until the end, spending two full days a week at the museum and helping with a planned expansion into a new and larger space.

Anton Vladimirovich Antonov-Ovseyenko was born in Moscow on Feb. 23, 1920, to a family with an impeccable revolutionary pedigree. His father, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, was a famous Soviet military commander who led the assault on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (it was then Petrograd) in November 1917, helping to usher in more than 70 years of Soviet rule.

Stalin’s rise to power at the end of the 1920s upended the family’s fortunes and set Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko on the path to becoming a dissident. He parents were accused of being counterrevolutionaries and arrested. His mother, Rozalia, committed suicide in prison in 1936. His father was executed in 1938.

As the son of convicted state enemies, Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko was himself arrested in 1940. He spent the next 13 years in and out of the Soviet gulag, an experience that made him a lifelong opponent of the Soviet government.

In a 2011 interview with the Public Radio International program “The Word,” he recounted being forced by a prison guard at gunpoint to read a speech by Stalin over the prison radio.

“I had to read the words of the person who was my enemy, and I was an enemy of the state,” he said.

He was released after Stalin’s death in 1953. Though almost completely blind, he began working in the Soviet archives in Russia. His first book, published under a pseudonym, was a biography of his father, who had been rehabilitated during the political thaw under Nikita S. Khrushchev. He went on to write several other books, most of them about Stalin and his associates.

Perhaps his most influential work was “The Time of Stalin,” the first book published under his own name, which was smuggled out of Moscow and published in New York in 1981. Copies were then smuggled back in and disseminated among the underground dissident salons of Moscow.

“The Time of Stalin” was among the first books to unmask the horror of the Stalin era, putting the death count through years of civil war, famine, purges and World War II in the tens of millions. Harrison E. Salisbury, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Moscow for The New York Times in the 1950s, called the book “a milestone toward the understanding of three-quarters of a century of Russian trauma.”

Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko died of a stroke, the Gulag museum announced. He is survived by his wife, Yelena Solovarova, and his son, Anton.

The Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, a longtime friend who smuggled “The Time of Stalin” to New York, said Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko preferred the solitude of his books and archives to the protests favored by many other dissidents.

But he was also bold, Mr. Cohen said, often calling up known K.G.B. agents and threatening to denounce them in writing. “He was an embattled personality and fearless,” Mr. Cohen said.

Josip Stalin-Hugo Chavez: RIP; solidarios na morte?

Parece que é mais uma dessas ironias da história, essa matreira, astuta e imprevisível mestra de todas as ciências (e crendices também): sessenta anos depois da morte de um dos maiores tiranos da humanidade, superior a Gengis Khan e Atila reunidos, mais mortífero que Hitler (embora com outros métodos e intenções), Stalin, desaparece também Hugo Chavez, um pálido aprendiz das técnicas de repressão do ditador soviético e do déspota chinês, mas um grande praticante das mesmas técnicas de manipulação das massas pela propaganda política mistificadora.
OK, Hugo Chávez não dispunha de Gulag, como seus (talvez admirados) predecessores "socialistas", mas também fez o possível para eliminar qualquer oposição ao seu governo.
O "Gulag" de Chávez era ter de assistir suas arengas de 10 horas em rede de televisão, o que, convenhamos, deve ser insuportável para quem quer apenas passar o domingo com programas de auditório e em concursos de "quem ganha mais?".
Assistir televisão, em certos países, se tornou um gulag similar...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
PS.: Agradeço ao meu amigo Vinicius o envio desta matéria, que teria passado despercebida, mesmo eu recebendo os boletins do Le Monde todos os dias (mas não consigo ler tudo...). 

Soixante ans de la mort de Staline : un fantôme omniprésent

LE MONDE | 05.03.2013 à 11h25 • Mis à jour le 05.03.2013 à 16h59 Par Editorial du "Monde"

En 1991, au moment de l'effondrement de l'URSS, il ne se trouvait plus que 12 % des Russes pour faire de Staline une grande figure historique. Aujourd'hui, la moitié d'entre eux font du "Petit Père des peuples" le champion incontesté des héros nationaux, loin devant Lénine ou Pierre le Grand. Soixante ans après la mort de l'homme qui régna sur l'URSS durant trois décennies et envoya à la mort entre 10 et 20 millions d'individus (sans compter les victimes de la guerre), tel est le résultat d'un sondage de la Fondation Carnegie publié le 1^er mars.

Avec l'arrivée au Kremlin de Vladimir Poutine, Staline est redevenu un personnage mythique, victorieux du nazisme en 1945 et bâtisseur "de la société la plus juste au monde (...) et d'une grande puissance industrielle", selon l'un des principaux manuels scolaires. Rien ou très peu n'est dit des massacres perpétrés par une police politique dont le président russe est si fier d'être issu.
Pour les soixante ans de sa mort (le 5 mars 1953), c'est aux victimes de Staline que Le Monde consacre un supplément, plus particulièrement à celles de la Grande Terreur de 1937-1938, lorsque 1.600 personnes étaient exécutées chaque jour. Ces documents exceptionnels, les Russes n'y ont pas accès. Les archives du KGB sont hermétiques et ceux qui s'y intéressent sont soupçonnés de trahison.
Staline est désormais fantomatique mais omniprésent, jamais loué explicitement par le pouvoir, jamais critiqué non plus. Sa mémoire fleurit sans qu'une seule rue ne porte son nom. Les manifestations de cette présence sont rares : un slogan restauré en lettres d'or à la station de métro Kourskaïa de Moscou et quelques portraits sur les autobus au moment des grandes fêtes commémoratives de la victoire contre le nazisme – jours durant lesquels, c'est officiel depuis février 2013, la ville de Volgograd reprendra son nom de Stalingrad.
Les Russes n'ont jamais été aussi libres de surfer sur Internet, de voyager et de consommer, à condition de ne pas faire de politique. Les opposants qui ont osé élever la voix contre la "démocratie dirigée" à l'hiver 2011-2012 sont harcelés. Depuis le retour de M. Poutine au Kremlin pour un troisième mandat, on se croirait revenu à l'époque des campagnes contre le "cosmopolitisme".
Deux mémoires se chevauchent. Staline le bâtisseur de l'empire soviétique fait oublier le tyran sanguinaire. C'est comme si la Russie tout entière était frappée de schizophrénie. L'élite politico-militaire au pouvoir achète des propriétés en Floride ou sur la Riviera tout en fustigeant les "agents étrangers". L'homme de la rue, lui, révère Staline mais ne voudrait à aucun prix se retrouver dans l'URSS des années 1930. En jouant sur la psychologie de l'Homo sovieticus – la peur, le paternalisme, la forteresse assiégée –, Vladimir Poutine prive le pays de son devoir d'inventaire. Difficile de moderniser la Russie avec un tel héritage.

Editorial du "Monde"

Yalta: From the pages of History - Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin (NYT)

ON THIS DAY

On This Day: February 11

Updated February 10, 2012, 1:28 PM

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On Feb. 11, 1945, President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin signed the Yalta Agreement during World War II.
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On Feb. 11, 1847, Thomas Alva Edison, the prolific inventor whose more than 1,000 patents included the light bulb and the gramophone, was born. Following his death on Oct. 18, 1931, his obituary appeared in The Times.

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Big 3 Doom Nazism and Reich Militarism; Agree on Freed Lands and Oaks Voting; Convoke United Nations in U.S. April 25

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YALTA PARLEY ENDS

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Unified Blows at Reich, Policing Spheres and Reparations Shaped

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FRANCE TO GET ROLE

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Broader Polish, Yugoslav Regimes Guaranteed -- Curzon Line Adopted

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By Lansing Warren

Special to The New York Times

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Washington, Feb. 12 -- Allied decisions sealing the doom of Nazi Germany and German militarism, coordinating military plans for Germany's occupation and control and maintaining order and establishing popular governments in liberated countries were signed yesterday by President Roosevelt, Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill near Yalta in the Crimea, the White House announced today.

The conference, held in the summer palace of former Czar Nicholas II on the black Sea shore, also called for a United Nations security conference in San Francisco on April 25.

The parleys, hitherto shrouded in secrecy except for a brief outline of the agenda issued Feb. 7, were held day and night from Feb. 4 until the final signatures were affixed. The announcement did not refer to President Roosevelt's future movements except that he had left the Crimea.

Main Points of Accord

Major decisions of the conference include:

(1) Plans for new blows at the heart of Germany from the east, west, north and south.

(2) Agreement for occupation by the three Allies, each of a separate zone, as Germany is invaded, and an invitation to France to take over a zone and participate as a fourth member of the Control Commission.

(3) Reparations in kind to be paid by Germany for damages, to be set by an Allied commission. The reparations commission, which will establish the type and amount of payments by Germany, will have its headquarters in Moscow. [Secretary of State Stettinius and Ambassador Harriman arrived in Moscow Monday.]

(4) Settlement of questions left undecided at the conference at Dumbarton Oaks and decision to call a United Nations conference at San Francisco April 25 to prepare the charter for a general international organization to maintain peace and security.

(5) Specific agreements to widen the scope of the present Governments in Poland and Yugoslavia and an understanding to keep order and establish Governments in liberated countries conforming to the popular will and the principles of the Atlantic Charter.

(6) A general declaration of determination to maintain Allied unity for peace.

German People Apart

The statement announced common policies for enforcing unconditional surrender and imposing Nazi Germany's doom. The document draws a distinction between the Nazi system, laws and institutions, the German General Staff and its militarism, which will be relentlessly wiped out, and the German people.

"It is not our purpose," it declared," to destroy the people of Germany, but only when nazism and militarism have been extirpated will there be hope for a decent life for Germans, and a place for them in the community of nations."

Until this conference the Allies had laid down no iron-clad program for the control and complete reorganization of Germany. Military plans will be made known only "as we execute them," said the statement, and the surrender terms "not until the final defeat has been accomplished."

Coordinated administration and control has been provided in a central Control Commission, which will be established with headquarters in Berlin. Part of its work will be to insist on the destruction of all German military equipment, elimination or control of all German industry that could be used for military production, the punishment of war criminals and the wiping out of all Nazi institutions from the German economic and cultural life.

The document mentioned no discussion of plans in the Far eastern theatre of the war or any understanding with the Soviet Union for entry into the war against Japan, but the fact that the date for the United Nations conference, April 25, comes one day after the date determining of a renewal of the Russo-Japanese agreement was remarked as significant.

That San Francisco had been chosen as the site for the next security conference of the United Nations, along with the date, aroused considerable interest here because of the city's remoteness from the European theatre of war and its position nearer the Far Eastern theatre.

New Cabinet Indicated

Special dispositions with regard to Poland include the widening of the present Provisional Government to include other democratic leaders in Poland and abroad.

The agreement sets the Polish eastern boundary, with a few alterations in favor of Poland, along the Curzon Line and recognizes that Poland must acquire substantial territory in the north and west but leaves these decisions to the peace conference. This is the first official mention to confirm the Allies' contemplation of a general peace conference.

With regard to the conflict for power in Yugoslavia the Allies have agreed that Marshal Tito and Dr. Ivan Subasitch shall set up the Government they have proposed but to include former members of the Parliament who did not collaborate with the enemy.

These Governments, it is provided, will be succeeded by those formed in conformity with desires expressed in popular elections and in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter. The statement does not deal specifically with the situation in Greece or other countries but declares that the conference also made a general review of other Balkan questions.

Fascism to Be Uprooted

In a declaration on the liberated areas, the Allies announced the intention of consulting in the interests of the liberated peoples and to cooperate in rebuilding the national economic life in these countries. Vestiges of nazism and fascism are to be destroyed, and the Allies will cooperate to establish internal peace, carry relief and form interim governments broadly representative in the Axis satellite states as well as in liberated Allied countries.

An important feature of the international security discussions was contained in the announcements that the three powers had reached agreement on the disputed question of voting procedure, which prevented completion of the work at Dumbarton Oaks. No indication of the solution was given.

The three Chiefs of State were assisted by their Foreign Ministers, chiefs of military staffs and numerous other experts, as was the case in the previous three-power meetings. Besides Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., President Roosevelt was accompanied by Harry L. Hopkins, his special assistant, and Justice James F. Byrnes, Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.

Other United States delegates included W. Averell Harriman, Ambassador to the Soviet Union; H. Freeman Matthews, the State Department's Director of European Affairs; Alger Hiss, Deputy Director of Special Political Affairs, and Charles E. Bohlen, assistant to the Secretary of State.

Throughout the Conference President Roosevelt occupied apartments in the former palace of the Czars. Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill were housed in separate establishments near by.

Three women were with the delegations. Though they did not participate in the discussions, they were received as conference guests. They were Mrs. Anna Boettiger, daughter of President and Mrs. Roosevelt; Mrs. Sarah Oliver, daughter of Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman, daughter of the Ambassador to Moscow.

President Roosevelt's party also included Edward J. Flynn of New York, who did not attend conference meetings but was invited as a personal friend when Mr. Roosevelt learned that he was planning a visit to Moscow.

Leahy Also in Party

Others in the President's personal party were Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to the President; Mr. Byrnes, Vice Admirals Ross T. McIntyre and Wilson Brown, Maj. Gen. Edwin M. Watson and Stephen Early, the President's secretary.

President Roosevelt, whose movements have been obscured by censorship for more than three weeks, left Washington for the Crimea conference almost immediately after his inauguration ceremonies on Jan. 20. The details of the voyage were not made public, but it was revealed that the President met Prime Minister Churchill on the island of Malta, which the British and American delegations reached Feb. 2. President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill made a prolonged exchange of views and there were formal discussions between the British and United States Military chiefs of staff.

President Roosevelt left Malta the night of Feb. 2, going by air direct to Yalta, where he was met by Foreign Commissar Vyacheslaff M. Molotoff, who extended greetings for Marshal Stalin.

The Presidential party proceeded along the Black Sea shore two miles southwest to Livadia, where stands the magnificent Summer Palace.

Meetings began the next day on the arrival of Marshal Stalin, who flew from his headquarters on the Russian front, where the Silesian Offensive was just getting under way. The delegates met either in committees or as a group. Besides daily meetings of the three heads of Governments and the Foreign Secretaries, separate meetings of the Foreign Secretaries and their advisers were held daily.

The Foreign Secretaries arranged for regular conferences every three of four months. The meetings will be held in rotation in the three capitals, the first to be called in London after the San Francisco meeting.

At the close of the conference President Roosevelt presented to Marshal Stalin a number of decorations awarded by the United States to military men in the Red Army. Those to be decorated will receive the rank of commander in the Legion of Merit. They include Marshal Alexander M. Vasilevsky, Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army; Air Chief Marshal Alexander A. Novikoff, commanding general of the Red Air Forces; Gen. A. K. Repin, Chief of the Soviet Military Mission to the United States; Lieutenant General Brendal, Lieutenant Colonel Krolenko, Major General Levanovich, Major General Slavin, Deputy Chief of the Red Army Staff, and Colonel Byaz.

The decorations were given in recognition of distinguished services in connection with their cooperation in American Air Force shuttle-bombing operations in Germany.

The first news of the historic consultation at Yalta was issued at the White House by Jonathan Daniels, administrative assistant to the President, who opened his announcement to the impatient correspondents with the statement: "This is it."

Announcement of the Allied report on the conference made in the Senate was greeted with cheers, which continued while the upper house adjourned.

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