![]() | Blissful Blindness : Soviet Crimes under Western Eyes The most heinous Soviet crimes - the Red Terror, brutal collectivization, the Great Famine, the Gulag, Stalin's Great Terror, mass deportations, and other atrocities - were treated in the West as a controversial topic. With the Cold War dichotomy of Western democracy versus Soviet communism deeply imprinted in our minds, we are not always aware that these crimes were very often questioned, dismissed, denied, sometimes rationalized, and even outright glorified in the Western world. Facing a choice of whom to believe -the survivors or Soviet propaganda- many Western opinion leaders chose in favor of Soviet propaganda. Even those who did not believe it behaved sometimes as if they did. Dariusz Tołczyk is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Virginia. His books include See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience and Gułag w oczach Zachodu [The Gulag under Western eyes]. |
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