Translator’s Note: Neo-Nazi Russia is putting a toe in the water to test the political mood of the country. In a supremely emetic move, it has been announced that . . .
Stalin’s Grandson Sues “Novaya Gazeta”
30 July 2009
Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel
Ekho Moskvy radio station has just broadcast the news that Stalin’s grandson, Yevgenii Dzhugashvili, has had a writ served on Novaya Gazeta, complaining about an article entitled “Beria Was the Guilty Party” published in that paper on 22 April this year. The writ is against the newspaper itself and the author of the article Anatoli Yablokov. The writ demands that the paper publish a retraction stating that Yablokov’s remarks about Stalin are baseless, untrue, and defamatory of Stalin’s honour and reputation. In particular, the plaintiff is concerned with the words: “Stalin and the Chekists are bound by great bloodshed and the worst of crimes, above all against their own people”. The plaintiff is demanding moral damages of 10 milllion roubles and also that a retraction be published. Yevgenii Dzhugashvili’s case has been accepted and will be heard by Moscow’s Basmanny District Court.
[This of course is the court whose name has become a byword for justice perverted by instructions from on high to its judges (or which simply has the most prejudiced and stupid judges in the world). The world laughs and weeps as Russia degradates.]
La Russophobe 
If a case like this was tried in the west the archives would be cracked open and used by the defense.
You’ve got to wonder how many Stalin documents have been shredded since Putin’s KGB took power.
They’ve sanitized Stalin in the kiddie’s textbooks so I’m sure this trial will be orchestrated to sanitize him on another public level using the courts.
You have to wonder if Stalin’s grandson wasn’t encourged to file this lawsuit.
And, of course, a big yawn from the Russian sheeple will follow the prescribed verdict. Nothing, but nothing, seems to repulse these people enough into any action to push back on Putin.
This is bizarre.
Stalin is dead, thank goodness.
He is the only person who would have standing (the legal right) to bring a lawsuit for libel or slander, in any normal, civilized legal system.
To put it differently, one can libel a dead person to one’s heart’s content.
So how is it that a descendant has any legal right whatsoever to bring a libel lawsuit on behalf of someone else?
In a twisted, schizoid country like roosha, I guess defending stalin is more important than anything else.
Even Kirill, the “chief” of the oily mother roosha orthodox church, spends his time defending stalin.
Which does not seem like a Christian thing to do.
Evgenii Dzhugashvili has already won one court case in his home city of Tbilisi, Georgia:
http://www.newsru.com/world/23nov2002/djugashv.html.
Evgenii Dzhugashvili is a retired colonel living in Tbilisi.
http://www.hrono.ru/biograf/bio_d/dzhuga_yeya.html.
Evgenii Dzhugashvili. In 1996 Evgenii was elected as a chairman of the newly created society “Stalin” in Tbilisi, a Georgian organisation dedicated to defending Stalin’s activities as a politician.
http://www.newsru.com/world/23nov2002/djugashv.html.
November 2002
Tbilisi court has ruled in favour of Evgenii Dzhugashvili, who asked for apologies from the new “Stalin” society chairman Grigola Oniani, who had falsely claimed that Evgenii was not Stalin’s grandson, but instead a Jewish impostor whose real name is “Rabinovitz”.
But now stalinists from the Georgian “Stalin” society are going international by taking a Russian newspaper to a Russian court over the “reputation” of Evgenii’s monstrous grandfather.
BTW, here is their photo “together”:
http://www.newsru.com/pict/big/490087.html
Phobophobe, 7 years have passed since your 2002 links and……???? Cherry picking old garbage unreflective of changes in the past 7 years in Georgia is meaningless. Fast forward 7 years, you fool, it’s Russia rehabilitating Stalin in textbooks and now in the courts.
Your links are lame and what is your point?
It’s Putin’s Russia and the moral degenerates there that badly wants the old mass murderer rehabilitated.
Stalin’s rehabilitation isn’t Georgia’s problem 7 years later.
Ooops, missed a tag after 7 years in the beginning. But, you get my point.
Come on, penni. It is not like this Evgenii guy is in a lot of news. I couldn’t find any news about his residence later than year 2002.
Stalin is neither Putin’s nor Saakashvili’s creation. Stalin-admirers can be found all over the place. These are people whose lives are worse today than they were in the USSR 30 years ago. Luckily, most of them are elderly and their numbers are shrinking with time.
penny, you are engaging on ad hominem attacks on phobophobe. Either that, or he just learned the word, and is using it regardless of relevancy.
Hey Felix, I knew you would come to my defence after reading that this antisemite Grigola Oniani gave Evgenii your last name. :-)
How unimaginative on his part: to use the only Jewish name he knows.
Phobophobe, shrinking numbers of Stalin admirers in Russia, not when he has been officially sanitized in school textbooks. He is presented to all Russian school kids as an “effective manager” now. That has consquences.
The topic is Russia and Stalin. Georgia and Stalin is a distraction.
> The topic is Russia and Stalin. Georgia and Stalin is a distraction.
That’s convenient. Georgian Stalin society and Stalin’s grandson, living in Georgia, bring a lawsuit against a Russian newspaper – and you blame Russia for their act? Who is the stalinist here – the stalinist Georgian grandson or the anti-stalinist Russian newspaper?
I still don’t understand how a third person, relative or not, would have any standing or right to sue for libel of someone else, be it stalin or hitler or Elvis Presley or anyone else who is dead.
One can’t libel a dead person.
Well, except maybe in the upside down, twisted court of roosha.
Perhaps, continental type of law recognizes standing by a closely related third person. Of course, in the U.S. such a lawsuit would be impossible, at least on the ground that a dead person cannot have damages.
But more importantly, you probably forgot what country’s “courts” are involved and you’re talking as if the law mattered there
Did you notice that the little girl, in the above picture, is Engelsina Markizova-Cheshkova?
The story revealed that the
seven-year-old girl happily being held in the arms of a beaming Stalin in
1936 in a much-reproduced propaganda photograph and sculpture was the
daughter of an agriculture official in Siberia. In 1938, the father was
executed (presumably on trumped-up charges, as the custom was then) as a
Japanese spy, Trotskyite, etc. The daughter, Engelsina Markizova, was
now obviously an embarrassment, so the identity of the kid in the photo
and statue was changed; she was now said to be Mamlakat Nakhangova, a
highly productive 13-year-old cotton-picker from the south of the Soviet
Union.
The Washington Post, March 10th, 1995:
She was a bored little girl, just 7 years old, and she had no idea she was about to become an icon of the Soviet state. Proud to be accompanying her father, a provincial official, Engelsina Markizova was admitted to see Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin one January day in 1936. She sat squirming through the solemn, gushing speeches of a Kremlin state ceremony. So she wandered unnoticed toward the front of the hall and came around behind Stalin with a big bouquet of flowers. “These flowers are for Comrade Stalin from the children of the Buryat-Mongol Republic,” she said. Startled but pleased, he ga…
Live interview with Engelsina Markizova [and stalin’s grandson] and original documentary video footage that this photo is based on @ 4:43
Well, the interesting thing is that Stalin is viewed positively by 50% of Russian youth, came 3rd in a national competiton for “Greatest Russian” and is now being rehabilitated by official text books.
Meanwhile, in Georgia’s “Greatest Georgian” TV show, he did not even survive the 1st round.
He is extremely unpopular with Georgian youth, and those of middle years.
The winner was a young Georgian philanthropist who in the early 20th century used his family fortune to return Georgian historical treasures to Georgia, many of which can be seen at the Tbilisi state museum.
He was thanked by Stalin by spending his last years under house arrest in Tbilisi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekvtime_Takaishvili
So, as a rule Russians love Stalin, Georgians don’t (with exceptions in both cases of course).
> came 3rd in a national competiton for “Greatest Russian
No, it was not a national competition. It was an international online voting poll, in which people from around the world voted. People were allowed to vote as many times as they pleased; it suffered from hacker attacks; and most of Stalin vote came from spam:
http://themoscowlife.ru/news/2009/01/08/6.html
According to my journalist friend at Izvestia, the spam votes for Stalin came from Georgia, and who knows, the rest of Stalin votes could have come from some lonely but persistent spammer named Andrew living in Georgia who is bent on making Rusdsia look bad.
Stalin’s popularity in Russia is nothing compared to Stephen Colbert’s popularity in USA and Hungary (although nobody in Hungary knows him):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colbert_Report
The Colbert Report is an American satirical late night television program. It stars political humorist Stephen Colbert. In March 2009, NASA ran an online contest to name the new node of the International Space Station. Colbert encouraged his viewers to write in his name. By the end, 230,539 “Colbert” votes were cast. This beat Serenity, the top NASA choice, by more than 40,000 votes.
In 2006, after Colbert encouraged viewers to vote online to name a Hungarian bridge after him, he won the first round of voting with 17,231,724 votes.
————————–
Yes, friend, 17 million votes for Colbert in tiny Hungary! And how many votes did Stalin get in the voting in huge Russia? Stalin got 519,071. Thus, per capita, Stephen Colbert is 300 times more popular in Hungary than Stalin is in Russia. :-)
> Meanwhile, in Georgia’s “Greatest Georgian” TV show
And a man just won an American TV show by eating 1000 ants in 1 minute. :-) How desperate you must be to resort to TV and on-line shows as “evidence”.
Here is something more serious:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-77397522.html
GEORGIA: GEORGIAN PUBLIC CHOOSES STALIN AS IDEAL LEADER – POLL.
The results of a poll taken in Georgia show that 44 percent of the 643 participants chose Joseph Stalin as the most popular leader, the Kavkasia Press (Tbilisi) report.
Now Phobophobe, you are a cretin.
The real attitiude of Russian youth to Stalin from a report by Reuters:
Russian youth: Stalin good, migrants must go: poll
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s youths admire Soviet dictator Josef Stalin — who presided over the deaths of millions of people — and want to kick immigrants out of Russia, according to a poll released on Wednesday.
The poll, carried out by the Yuri Levada Centre, was presented by two U.S. academics who called it “The Putin Generation: the political views of Russia’s youth”.
When asked if Stalin was a wise leader, half of the 1,802 respondents, aged from 16 to 19, agreed he was.
“Fifty-four percent agreed that Stalin did more good than bad,” said Theodore Gerber, a sociologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Forty-six percent disagreed with the statement that Stalin was a cruel tyrant.”
Stalin, who took over from Vladimir Lenin, built a system of terror and repression in which tens millions of people died or were killed. He died in 1953.
“What we find troubling is that there is a substantial proportion of young people in Russia today who hold positive or ambivalent views on Stalin and his legacy,” Gerber said.
“We think it would probably be more appropriate if there was more condemnation of the Stalin era.”
The poll showed 17 percent of the young people disagreed that Stalin was responsible for the imprisonment, torture and execution of millions of innocent people, while 40 percent thought his role in the repression had been exaggerated.
The majority of respondents thought the collapse of the Soviet Union was a tragedy and two thirds thought that America was a rival and enemy. Only a fifth viewed Iran as a potential rival or enemy.
Most young people also wanted immigrants kicked out of Russia: 62 percent said they agreed with the statement that the Russian government should evict most immigrants.
But 64 percent agreed with the idea that immigrants should be allowed to have Russian citizenship if they abided with Russian laws and customs.
The poll showed the biggest concern for the youth was the problem of drugs, followed by unemployment, poverty, corruption, education, crime, HIV/AIDS and ecology.
Stalin’s Comeback
By: Vasko Kohlmayer
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Many observers were shocked earlier this year when, in an online poll to name Russia’s greatest man, Joseph Stalin seized an early lead among Russians. The former mass murderer would have come out on top had not the poll’s administrators cut his votes in half after blaming cyberspace shenanigans. It is difficult to say whether or not their claim was true. But even with his share halved, Stalin still managed to take twelfth place. Stalin’s strong showing is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which is his direct culpability in the deaths and torture of millions of his country’s citizens during his long reign of terror.
The poll, however, is only a symptom of a larger troubling trend. In recent years, certain quarters of Russian society have been increasingly nostalgic about the Soviet era. In no small measure, the rise of such sentiments is due to the efforts of the Putin government, which seeks to actively rehabilitate various aspects of the country’s communist past.
In November of last year, Putin posthumously bestowed Russia’s highest honorary title, Hero of the Russian Federation, on George Koval. Although few have heard his name, many in the intelligence community view him as the most important Cold War spy. Born in 1913 in Iowa to parents from Belarus, Koval infiltrated the Manhattan Project and passed crucial information to Moscow concerning the atomic bomb. In the statement announcing the award, Vladimir Putin said that Koval’s work “helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”
Less than two weeks later, the Kremlin honored another Cold War spy, George Blake, with The Order of Friendship. Working for the British Secret Service in the 1950s, Blake changed sides to become a Soviet mole. Following his defection, Blake betrayed the identities of numerous Western agents, many of whom paid for his treachery with their lives. To celebrate the award, Russia’s present-day foreign intelligence service SVR issued a congratulatory statement that read in part: “It is thanks to Blake that the Soviet Union avoided very serious military and political damage which the United States and Great Britain could have inflicted on it.”
By awarding Russia’s highest honors to former Soviet spies, the Kremlin makes a startling insinuation: The Soviet Union was the good side in the Cold War. The implication not only glaringly contradicts historical reality; it is also an attempt to subvert national consciousness.
Fifteen years ago, there was an overwhelming consensus across Russian society that the Soviet Union was a tragic mistake. Understandably so, since at that time the evils and hardship of life in the Soviet Union were still fresh in people’s memory. There could have been no clearer evidence of the country’s near unanimous rejection of its communist past than the post-Soviet campaign of Mikhail Gorbachev for the Russian presidency. Running in 1996, less than five years after the dissolution of the USSR, the erstwhile Soviet dictator, a symbol of the former era, received less than one percent of the vote. This was a devastating indictment by the people of the system that had oppressed them for so long.
A decade later, the Kremlin is working hard to change the population’s negative perception of the Soviet past. Much of this effort is aimed at the nation’s youth. Last year, a government-sponsored manual for teachers described Joseph Stalin as an “effective manager” and “the most successful Soviet leader ever.” Titled A History of Russia, 1900-1945, the manual sought to justify Stalin’s murderous ruthlessness by describing it as a rational response to the circumstances of the time. The book nonchalantly asserted that Stalin unleashed the purges of the 1930s because he “did not know who would deal the next blow, and for that reason he attacked every known group and movement, as well as those who were not his allies or of his mindset.”
The push for the historical revisionism appears to be fuelled by none other than Vladimir Putin, who has claimed that the negative view of the Soviet era in post-Soviet textbooks is due to the fact that the writers were funded by foreign organizations. Calling for a more a patriotic approach to the study of history, Putin lamented that both teachers and society were “confused” about many aspects of Soviet history.
In June of last year, Putin hosted a teachers conference where he sought to excuse Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937 – in which more than 700,000 people were murdered and 1.5 million imprisoned – by saying that in “other countries even worse things happened.” According to Putin, the Soviet Union “had no other black pages, such as Nazism, for instance.” What he failed to mention was that even by conservative estimates, Stalin killed two times as may people in his own country as died in the Nazi Holocaust. While it is true that the USSR did not have Nazism, it is also true that it had something just as, if not far more, murderous — namely communism.
Not everyone accepts the Putin-propagated version of history and many are trying to sound the alarm about the indoctrination underway. Alexander Kamensky, head of the history department at the Russian State University, observed last year that the teaching of history in schools had become “an ideological instrument.” A leading Russian historian Roy Medvedev, was even blunter and called the manual “falsification.”
In an uncanny parallel, the same publishing house – Prosveshchenye (Enlightenment) – that was responsible for printing textbooks during the Soviet era, is the leading publisher of educational materials today. Founded in 1930 under Stalin’s tutelage, the publisher is now backed by Putin’s regime.
The government’s indoctrination program appears to be bearing fruit. A recent poll of young people yielded some startling results. The survey, titled The Putin Generation: the political views of Russia’s youth, posed a wide range of questions including several related to the country’s Soviet past.
To the question of whether Stalin was a wise leader, half of the respondents replied in the affirmative. More than half thought Stalin did more good than bad and only 46% disagreed with the proposition that Stalin was a cruel tyrant. 40% thought that Stalin’s part in the repressions has been exaggerated. The majority of the 1,802 respondents took the view that the disintegration of the communist Soviet Union was a tragedy.
Commenting on the findings, Theodore Gerber, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, “What we find troubling is that there is a substantial proportion of young people in Russia today who hold positive or ambivalent views on Stalin and his legacy.”
Although the results are troubling, they are by no means surprising. All of those young people were either not born during — or too young to realize — the evils of the system in which they lived. Given that the survey targeted youth between 16 and 19 years of age, their political consciousness has been formed and molded in recent years under the influence of Putin’s Soviet propagandists.
Putin’s desire to rehabilitate Russia’s Soviet past is only a natural outgrowth of his past. A former communist and a KGB agent, Putin was an intimate part of the Soviet regime and as such subjected to years of intense training and indoctrination. Earning the rank of lieutenant colonel at a relatively young age, he showed a marked dedication to the Soviet cause. That Putin’s outlook was profoundly influenced by those experiences can be seen from his style of governing which is increasingly reminiscent of the Soviet way of doing things. One party rule, suppression of opposition, crackdown on free speech, government control of the major media — these were all hallmarks of the Soviet system and increasingly also of Putin’s rule.
Given his background and personal history, it is small wonder that Putin encourages the ongoing rehabilitation of the Soviet Union, whose collapse he lamented as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” But the whole enterprise may also carry a uniquely personal dimension for Russia’s leader. Short and slight, it appears that Putin seeks to compensate for his lack of physical stature by projecting a larger-than-life image of strength. In keeping with this, he clearly feels at least an unconscious admiration for Joseph Stalin, history’s ultimate strongman. And there are numerous indications that suggest Putin likes to see himself as a kind of inheritor of Stalin’s iron mantle.
His underlings act on cue. The pro-Kremlin authors of the blatantly biased teachers’ manual assessed Stalin as a highly successful and effective ruler. So successful was he that, in their view, there was only one man in Russia’s modern history who has exceeded him.
If you guessed that that man is Vladimir Putin, you have guessed correctly.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=32967
But didn’t Stalin’s daughter call him a monster? Or am I mistaking the story? If Stalin’s daughter decried him, where did this grandson learn to love this sociopath?
He grew up in Russia.