This is the correct way to represent history, with the participation of people who actually witnessed and went through the torment. The ones with a true story to tell. It is so welcoming to see museums like this, dealing with real facts and representing the truth. I have personally visited this one and can recommend it. There are a lot of Russophobic crackpots outside Russia, with alternative, false versions of history carfted by many who have never even visited or spent time in Russia to find out the real facts. There are true stories to tell, many horrific stories, they are individual and collective tales of grief, to appreciate them fully and in context, you need witness them with your very own eyes and ears, you must put them into true world context. If you visit here, with a search for the truth and an understanding of the worlds history and suffering, then you will come away supporting humanity with a staff so strong, it will never break or let you fall.

TO: Count Chocula - Josef Stalin would be so proud of you. There was a book, A History of Russia, 1900-1945 that was used as a teaching guide in Russian schools. It says, "Stalin acted entirely rationally -as the guardian of a system, as a consistent support of reshaping the country into an industrialized state." ( Don't forget that about 20 million people died under Stalin's rule.) Please check this book out, it's an interesting read for such a great educated historian like yourself.

You countless Counts, do not forget that if todays Russian government were in early XX century they would do the same

Russia's dismembered souls will haunt it until they are recognized in the Kremlin and published in a free press. Unfortunately it will be a long time. Perhaps after the color revolution which will undoubtedly come.

“C” comment is mean-spirited. Speaking open-minded, what is wrong in Count Cash’s inner drive to face the facts? It is the value per se and remains Russian asset even after Stalin’s consolidated accounting. As the value it can’t be annihilated by C’s offering someone else’s book, he stays locked on infantile gallery. Why the book did not arrive in time and stopped Stalin? Should Russians stay mesmerized by the history and read books? Or walk the history and meditate own expression? Count Cash adds to the colloquial tone language to R T.

Seems to me the Russians are more open about their past mistakes than the West is willing to give credit for. Modern Russia does not deny the dark aspects of its history, but neither do they beat themselves up about it. In this regard, they are no different from Western nations. Do the Americans agonise about the murder of 1/4 million Japanese civilians in Nagasaki & Hiroshima? Or the deliberate fire bombing of Tokyo residential districts, killing another 1/4 mill in April 45 alone? Or the extermination of the North American Indians? How about 1 MILLION dead in Iraq, killed in the bloodbath unleashed following Bushs' illegal and unjustified invasion? These outrages are not on the US radar screen, and no-one seems to care. There will always be Western critics who will use Russia's history as a cudgel against her, and for these sorts of Russophobes, no amount of contrition will ever be adequate. Routine condemnation of Russias' attitude to its past is not a result of any real concern for those who suffered, but is a geo-political ploy intended to discomfort the Russian leadership and assert the moral high ground. Russia could indulge in soul-searching and navel-gazing for the next 50 years, and her critics would still not be satisifed. In fact, any concerted effort Russia makes to placate her critics will only encourage them to increase their demands. Germany has wallowed in the shame of Nazi actions for over 60 years, yet the arm-twisting continues. The Russians have a better understanding of their own history than any ignornat flag-waving US or British politician (or petty Eastern Europen nationalist fruitcake) and they will deal with their shame in their own way. If the West is unsatisifed with the Russian approach, maybe they can engage in their own long-overdue public act of contrition and show the poor stupid backwards Russians how civilised nations behave....

tony, "Perhaps after the color revolution which will undoubtedly come" Hilarious! You cannot really beleive this tired sad old rhetoric??? Putin & Medvedev have poll ratings that US/UK politocos can only dream of. The country has a functioning and open democracy, and free press, and an educated public that understands the issues. Colour revolution? I'm splitting my sides with laughter!! Who do you think will assume power once P&M are overthrown in your fevered imagination? Zyuganov and his Communists? Zhirinovsky and his ultra-nationalists? Maybe the chess-playing Armenian Jew (Kasparov) that the US seems to love and the Russina public despise? How about the Far Right nutbags that spend more energy bashing ethnic minorities than actually formulating policy? Pathetic western wishful thinking. P&M are very strongly supported by the Russian public and these men (and their appointed successors) will rule for a long time. Not because they are dictators in a totalitarian police state, but because they are moral and competant statesmen and have the genuine support of their publics in a democratic and pluralistic society.

It is ironic that for twenty years now the whole world has become a boundless horror-show…

To CountCash: yes museums are a good way to represent history. But why do you take the view that the one and only legitimate and all-correct angle on history that there is, is the Russian one? Why do you assume that everyone who acknowledges their experience of national and personal experiences under the Soviet regime that veers from Moscow’s version, past and present must, of necessity be a “crackpot”? Isn’t this the grotesque tactic that Soviet organs of repression themselves used in regard to so many people who disagreed with Soviet received truths – they were considered mad, and locked up in insane asylums. The comments you make draw from that same sad wellspring. You write, “There are true stories to tell, many horrific stories, they are individual and collective tales of grief, to appreciate them fully and in context you need to witness them with your very own eyes and ears…then you will come away supporting humanity with a staff so strong it will never break or let you fall.” Believe me, CountCash, Soviet Russia’s victims in the Baltics and elsewhere also have many horrific individual and collective tales of grief to tell, which they lived with their own bodies and souls. Yet when they tell these, you reject it out of hand, and call them crackpots and worse if their stories do not match your selective and narrow Soviet-inspired template with which you seem to view Soviet history. The staff which their stories bring to you is not one that you use to support humanity, but one that you use to beat humanity over the head. There are museums to occupation in each of the Baltic capitals. Follow your own excellent advice, CountCash, and visit them. The Baltics don’t have all the truth. But you think they have none of the truth.

To Gazza: I’m sorry to disagree with you. Modern Russia does deny the dark aspects of its history. There is very little acknowledgement of the specifics of Russian crimes against Russians, and a downright denial of Russian crimes against neighbouring countries. And no one has ever had to answer for a one of those internal or external crimes. Many Russians do not, in fact, have an understanding of their own history. Such history was never taught during the Soviet era – sheer fantasy was taught in its place. And since then, too many people of influence have a vested interest to ensure that their guilt, and the guilt of the institutions they served, remains covered – so covered it remains. Your allegation that Eastern European countries don’t have “any real concern for those who suffered but (their criticism) is a geo-political ploy intended to discomfort Russian leadership and assert the moral high ground” is frankly ignorant. And your comparison of the Western-caused war-time casualties, although tragic and brutal, with the Soviet’s cold-blooded peace-time murder of millions upon millions of innocent civilians on the basis of ideological bigotry and paranoia, is morally bankrupt. As for your dismissal of those who disagree with Soviet interpretations as “petty nationalist fruitcakes,” Stalin and his successors thought so too, and locked many Soviet critics in mental institutions – those whom they did not kill outright, that is. I’m not aware of anyone who thinks that Russians are “poor”, “stupid”, “backward” or “uncivilized.” Certainly I don’t think so. But many people think that Russia has been so catastrophically damaged by nearly 70 years of terror-enforced Soviet poison that it is not possible for the damage that this caused to be healed overnight. The enigma facing Russia’s neighbours and the wider world is, that neither can the kind of behaviour and attitudes which this lingering damage causes in Russia be always condoned or accepted.

Throughout history there has been evil manifested upon people by others. The most important thing about history is to remember it, otherwise you will be condemned to relive it, that is the well known saying. History is not a weapon, not a club, historians are not weapon systems designers. History is the representation of facts in the past, leaving people to ponder and draw conclusions. Museums form a vital tool allowing people to touch with the past. I would welcome more and more museums, I don't see one in London dedicated to the 30 million Indians murdered by British attrocities, I don't see one dedicated to 12 Million slaves brutally transported to support industrialisation, I don't see one dedicated to the Irish attrocities the British commited, I don't see one dedicated to the British Gulag camps in Kenya, I don't see one dedicated to the western set up of the Soviet shakles that tortured Russia, I don't see US ones set up dedicated to the Red indian genocide, to the Atomic bomibings......... the list is truly endless. They exist in volumes and volumes. What I want is museums for all these things, with the facts on the table, because history is about learning, about facts, it isn't a weapon, for extremists. The extremists are easy to locate, they continually use and abuse history, with their selective falshoods, they are always on a narrow channel, like a Gold digger working a vein. History is a an experience to build thoughts from, to remind people, to provoke thought, it isn't a mafia score sheet of family feuds as used by the extremists. The crime, is to try to perpetuate fighting based on history as a weapon. This is the thing that our global village needs to shun. This is the approach of the west, to create trouble and strife using historical imbalance and falsification, to political advantage. Their modus opperandi is well known. By world pressure they can be forced to change, and create the museums like in Russia that demontstrate the facts.

CountCash writes that “History is not a weapon, not a club, historians are not weapons systems designers.” Absolutely right. But unfortunately, propagandists often are weapons systems designers. Typically, propagandists skim off a few superficial facts (eg, some Estonians fought in German uniform in WW2) and carefully isolate these from their context (why did they fight in German uniform, what where they fighting for or against, what happened to their own national military, did they even have a side in WW2 at all?). Then they add other facts which do not pertain to the subject at all to provide guilt by association (eg, Nazi crimes which were never an Estonian national policy and which only a very Estonians had anything to do with). Then they add to the mix outright lies that have no factual basis whatever (Estonians were Nazis in the past and Nazi sympathisers today; and that Estonia freely, democratically and legally entered the Soviet Union). And the weapon they have crafted is complete. It is a weapon with which to demonize the whole country and attack it. It is also useful for discrediting that country’s factual assertions of Soviet aggression against it, so as to shield Russians from from having to acknowledge their Soviet-era crimes. It is used as a weapon to try to separate Estonia from its friends in Europe, and as a weapon with which to try to hinder Estonia from healing its internal damage that its Soviet occupation had caused. All in all, CountCash, it is a very ugly weapon, and unfortunately Russia uses it, or an adaptation of it, against many of its neighbours. Its use also distorts the perceptions of Russians themselves, causing them to imagine that those who simply state what really happened to them are “rewriting” history, those who honour the victims of Soviet abuse of their country are “extremists”, and that those who find profound unease, anxiety and offense at contemporary Russia’s use of that weapon against them are enemies.

I don't quite know why we are back to Estonia again, but Estonia is one of the biggest proponents of propaganda today, institutionalised at government level. They not only openly engage in propaganda but they also try to falsify history. A museum in Estonia dedicated to showing the attrocities of the Whole Estonian people in WW2 would be definitely a museum that would do a service to truth in the world. It is an Estonian propaganda myth that the Estonians were not Nazis. The Estonians were fully complicit Nazis in their actions as a nation, the Germans were able to move so quickly and efficienttly in Estonia because of the enthusiastic local population. Their facsist routes had been simmering for years through the fascist movement VAPS. indeed they had secured a successful referundum They wanted to abolish all the rights of national minorities (sound familiar to Estonia today). This was the evil roots that had been developed deeply in the Estonian population which vented itself in the end on Jews, Gypsies and Russian POWs. When Nazi germany kicked off, The Red army moved troops into Estonia under a signed pact. The Estonians, wanting to support the Nazis who represented their inner value system, they began agressive activities against the red army. They were supported directly by Nazi Germany and had direct contacts. As soon as the Nazis acted against the Soviet union, the Estonians started in celebration on their Nazi quest, joining in full the Nazis. In just a few months they had imprisoned some 40,000 jews, communist... and killed 8,000 on the spot. They managed to wipe out the jews so quickly that they could pronounce themselves Jew free and gain great applause from the German Nazis. There is little space here to describe the attrocities of the Estonian Nazi people who manged around 30 concentration camps and exterminated some 120,000 people. That is why we need a museum, so that the whole world can see the attrocities of the Estonian Nazis.

To CountCash: either unintentionally or deliberately, you are unable to distinguish between historical fact and Soviet propaganda distortions. Within the size limitations imposed by RT, I’ll highlight as many instances as I can. (1) Estonia performed no actions “as a nation” from 1940 to 1991, because it was not a sovereign nation over that period. There were only dictates of foreign occupants (Russian, German, then Russian again), and the actions of individuals as individuals. (2) There was no Nazi Party in Estonia, nor any equivalent. Nor was there any sympathy for Nazis. Ask any Estonian, do any historical research (I exclude Soviet propaganda from being historical research), and you will find this re-enforced again and again. (3) In 1941 the population indeed welcomed the arrival of German forces. This was because of the barbaric mass atrocities that Soviet Russia had worked against its population in 1940-41. The people desperately sought refuge from that Soviet savagery, and this is why the Germans were welcomed as some kind of saviours. However, while not as savage against Estonians as Russians had been (and would be again), the Germans were themselves also brutal totalitarian occupants who were certainly not going to restore Estonian freedom, and with whose political, much less racial, aims Estonians had no affinity. (4) The VAPS were a right-wing (though neither fascist nor Nazi) political movement of war veterans who at no time achieved political power in Estonia. (5) Inter-war Estonia was a haven for national minorities, including for Russian and Jewish national minorities. During that period Pechory was part of the territory of Estonia, and while Stalin was destroying Orthodox monasteries and churches throughout Russia, Estonia preserved the significant Pechory monastery, and thus saved that part of the history of the Russian people from destruction by themselves. I have more to say, so I will continue in the next post.

This is a continuation of my preceding post. (6) Contrary to CountCash’s claims, pre-war Estonia has a strong tradition of tolerance for national minorities. It was the first country to provide all minority groups above a threshold size to establish their independent cultural governments. I can refer you to a letter of acknowledgement from the Jewish National Foundation to the Republic of Estonia for passing the Cultural Autonomy Act in 1925. The letter reads: “To the Republic of Estonia. In deep gratitude for the historic deed – the first in the history of Jewish people – of giving national-cultural autonomy to the Jewish minority in Estonia.” (7) The Red Army indeed moved troops into Estonia under a signed pact, but it then hugely exceeded permitted numbers of troops until they approximated 10 percent of the entire population of the country, and then used these to overthrow Estonia’s government and impose occupation on the country. No signed pact authorised that. (8) Nazi crimes in Nazi-occupied Estonia were committed almost exclusively by Germans, with minimal involvement by Estonians. Estonians did not manage German concentration camps, but a few were involved in guard duties. Post-1991 Estonia has apologised many times for this. CountCash’s attitude towards Estonia is as antagonistic and poisonous as is Russia’s own. It draws on contemporary Russian propaganda which, in turn, draws from unrevised Stalinist Soviet propaganda, and does not differentiate between historical fact and Soviet fantasy. One wonders why such hostility for a small, progressive neighbour that understands Russia, that has shared many of the same sufferings that Russians themselves have endured, that even has a certain fondness for Russia derived from Tsarist times, that has always given Russians within its borders a higher standard of living than is available in Russia itself, and that would like to live in peace, co-operation and in mutual respect with its large neighbour.

And yet we see more of the continual attempts at falsification of history by Estonian extremists, the approach has become institutionalized within the Nazi Estonia. An Estonia that is glorifying Nazism still today in direct contravention of the principles of the Nurenberg trials. They continually attempt to distort history and try to obfuscate the truth of the past. They are quite simply historical liars who are still supporting and glorifying Nazism. Nazi Germany admitted that Estonia was the most suitable place for Exterminations, because the local population supported them with great zeal. It was Nazis Estonians who did the killing, all dressed up in their nice uniforms. The Germans trusted Estonian Nazis so much, that often they just had one senior commanding officer, because the Estonian units could go about their Nazi deeds with relish in an autonomous fashion. It is yet another Estonian fictional creation that the German Nazis did the crimes. The truth is that the Nazi Estonian nation did them, it is as simple as that. The Estonian Nazis didn't just operate in their own country. They were in Belarus, Poland, Ukraine..., they even to further the Nazi cause fought against the Soviet union in Stalingrad, They were complicit Nazis as a nation, their extra-Estonian escapades, demonstrate it admirably. They didn't just stop at the Soviet union, they rounded up anglophiles and issued orders to kill any allied paratroopers. This include British, American, Free Poles. The Estonian Nazis were at war with the Allies. They were part of the Axis powers. Attempts to rewrite history by Estonia are not going to work, they always sound like a broken record. the facts will always defeat Estonia's attempts at this. Estonia needs to face the facts in their history, they need to dismantle the mechanisms they are creating, both to glorify Nazism now and to continue the abuse of local national minorities. The best way to achieve this is a museum of Estonian atrocities.

If CountCash believes that one or another aspect of history is falsified, perhaps he could detail and verify what makes it false, rather simply offer offensive insults to individuals and nations alike. CountCash makes a lot of lurid allegations, but offers zero evidence for them. He writes, “The Estonian Nazis didn't just operate in their own country. They were in Belarus, Poland, Ukraine... they even to further the Nazi cause fought against the Soviet Union in Stalingrad.” There were no Estonian Nazis that I know of from any historical account: none were members of the Nazi Party or had any particular sympathy with it its causes, and no one has claimed otherwise. Estonian units within the German military even refused to swear allegiance to Hitler. Estonians did fight against the Soviet Union in many places, including probably at Stalingrad for the most justified of all reasons: the Soviet Union had invaded, occupied and committed mass atrocities against Estonia and its people. Just because an Estonian (or a German, for that matter) fought in the German military does not mean he was a Nazi; similarly, wearing a Red Army uniform does not automatically mean that the wearer was a Communist. I have explained before why some Estonians fought within the German military, and some within the Red Army. That explanation can be verified by any accepted historical source the world over. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with Estonians being either Nazis, Communists – or liars.

I don't believe the Soviet Union, or even Marxists for that matter are communists. The Soviet regime was a dictatorship, and operated very similarly to Nazi Germany and even Fascist Italy. Hell Joseph Stalin even believed the Russians to be superior, he opposed the creation of the USSR and wanted to operate the Georgians, Ukrainians, and such under the RSFSR. I'm sure if he had, Ukraine, the Baltics, and the like would not be independent because I'm sure Russification would have been more thurough if it weren't for Lenin's influence on Stalin. But again, I'm more likely to believe Bakunin's Socialism and Anarchism to be closer to any sort of "Communism". But thats just what I think ;)