Historian Tells the Truth-Not Putin the Liar

        So, we know that the Kremlin(aka Putin's Playroom) has shut down the Russyan organization known to the world as MEMORIAL. For those unfamiliar with this well known, homegrown organization, Memorial is a group of Russyan citizens who have made it their mission to chronicle the deprivations heaped upon the Rus people by that most depraved, corrupt, sinister, paranoid, epitome of evil, murderous, vindictive, power mad leader of the Soviet Regime for almost 30 years: Josep Stalin. The members carefully gathered information related to Stalin's crimes against the Russyan people, wherever they could not  hide.   Many were just eliminated by wholesale murder/extermination; many more were sent to labor camps-the Gulag- where they were worked to death, literally.  (the Kolyma gold mines come to mind).

       And now Mad Vlad is resurrecting an alternative historical narrative:  Stalin was good for Russya! Ha!  Can you imagine?  All those victims are now struggling to escape their tombs to speak out against this liar.   Much has been written that tells the hard truth: Stalin the leader? NO: Stalin the murderer.  Need support?  Pour on the fear in ever larger doses.  More fear, less opposition.   Opponents leave the Fatherland?  Murder squads go abroad to finish the deed.   We've seen it before; we are watching a reprise by Stalin's clone: Mad Vlad Putin.

       The writer historian Anne Appelbaum has written extensively about Russyan history during the 20th century.   Her research is a landmark of revelation of facts related to the bizarre history of a country lead by a mad man whose modus operandi was murder, ie. mass murder.  Ms. Appelbaum, among her topics, focused on the Gulag in one book, and on Ukraine in another.  Both underscore the cost of Stalin's repression of the peasants/farmers in Ukraine.  Stalin needed crops to feed other sections of the country; Ukraine was his bread basket and the unfortunate people who lived there paid a price that included their lives, their families, and their food.  The book, Red Famine, tells the grim, sad story of how it happened.  Page after page lists the steps employed by the Kremlin's death squads sent to Ukraine in search of more food for the Kremlin.  Nothing was left for the farmers; all was taken, and all locals starved to death, slowly but surely.  This is the truth that Putin wants us to forget, to hide, to alter into myth to stoke the 21st century with lies.

        So, today, European diplomats, along with their American colleagues, will sit with the perpetrators of these modern lies and attempt to negotiate an agreement that reflects the world's concerns with the buildup of Russyan armed forces on the eastern border of Ukraine in an attempt to prevent a shooting war between the two sides: one a powerful nation led by  Mad Vlad, the other led by a weak leader held under the sway of his aging predecessor.  Good luck, Ms. Sherman and Company.