This is a translation of Russian text found here: http://www.stihi.ru/2014/04/02/971
Hi, Rebecca!
I have read your article from the Literary Diary posted in the notes to your work "About the rains." Being short on time I will limit myself to brief comments on your thoughts.
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You wrote: "... should not shut down and prohibit any media for an opinion contrary to the official." This is arguable and toothless. Following your logic, Nazi ideology that in fact is contrary to the official view, cannot be banned from publishing. Of course I deliberately magnify your judgment.
When talking about besieged Leningrad you present yourself as a person with Russian mentality, although grown up in a Jewish family, and now living in America. I respond to that with a reminder of Vera Inber, a Jewish woman who wrote "Leningrad Diaries" about the blockade and a poem "Pulkovo Meridian" during the war. I advise you get acquainted with these works, as well as poetry of Olga Bergholz.
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The Anschluss? One of your reviewers stated correctly that if Hitler annexed Austria and stopped there nobody in the world would have flinched. The world’s motives at the time are a separate topic if you wish. It is Europe, alas.
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Secrets of Stalin regime’s tyranny were uncovered in 1956, at the Twentieth Party Summit. During “the perestroika years” and after the public was mostly told about the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact. Your realizations are too late, Rebecca.
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While frowning in disgust at the mention of the KGB, please remember that its track list includes projects that really provided security of the state up to the present day. I am not advocating the political aspects of its activities against the dissenting intellectuals, and calling to "not throw the baby out with the foam." That is if you are a lady with Russian mentality. Nobody usually questions the whole and entire structure of any state’s security service indiscriminately. It's not serious.
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Despite my aversion to "Comrade Stalin," I would argue that your comparison of him to Hitler is inappropriate. Because among the two only Nazism officially proclaimed division of humanity into biologically "pure" and "impure" and realized it’s "theoretical doctrine" – in the example of the victims among your respected people - in Majdanek, Dachau, and more. I have uncomfortable question for you, Rebecca: would the Germans have repented in their Nazi atrocities if it was them, and not the Big Three, to win the Second World War? Unfortunately "winners are not judged".
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Discussions about criminals and other things in the Ukraine I will not debate, simply because I remember how Western news coverage of shelling in Tskhinvali was referring to it as shelling of Georgian Gori. All experts vigorously searched warehouses in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and plunged that country into chaos, but found NOTHING. No media is completely, one hundred percent, truthful and reliable. Let the dust settles and we'll see.
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Here is one small comment in regards to media’s lack of complete objectivity. It has long been known that truth is not determined by majority vote. The fate of Socrates and Christ can be an illustration of this old wisdom. For that same reason the majority of the General Assembly does not convince me for a minute. I also do not believe that the President of Russia, chosen by the people, will handle those people’s destiny carelessly. Just as the U.S. President.
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Much is said about the progressive role of our intelligentsia. But tell me, please, why an artist who creates wonderful images on the stage or screen, would be equally convincing in politics? I'm not so sure that if two people named Lavrov – a diplomat and a movie actor – suddenly swapped places, each would do well in the other’s line of work.
Few years ago I wrote a small piece about the intellectuals of our past and present: http://stihi.ru/2009/12/29/1306 - “I do not congratulate these."
And I also posted Alexander Pushkin’s poems “To the Slanderers of Russia" in my Literary Diary.