Stalin's Ghost

From IBD: It is sad that after years of progress and the obvious superiority of free market capitalism at creating wealth around the world, socialists and communists are still hell bent on ruling the world through oppression of it's people. This is no different than the Islamo-fascists of the middle east, just a different religion.


Posted 5/4/2006

Russia: Dick Cheney charges Vladimir Putin with limiting freedom and intimidating former Soviet satellites. A sure sign he's right: Russia's last communist premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, cries "provocation."

The most dishonest news story of the 20th century was the cover-up of the Soviet Union's forced famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s by New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty. The Stalin sympathizer knew as many as 10 million Ukrainians died, yet he wrote that famine was not happening. Disgracefully, his Pulitzer Prize was never revoked and his photo still has a place of honor in the Times' offices.

In a reminder of that horrific past, Russia was starving the Ukraine of natural gas last winter. Speaking Thursday to the pro-democracy Vilnius Conference in Lithuania, Vice President Cheney said: "No legitimate interest is served when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail. . . . And no one can justify actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbor, or interfere with democratic movements."

Gazprom, a Russian state-owned monopoly, supplies Ukraine with 80% of its natural gas and Europe with about a quarter of its gas. In January, Gazprom cut off supplies to Ukraine in a pricing dispute in which the pro-Western Ukrainian government was asked to pay as much as four times what Moscow-friendly regimes in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Belarus pay. Gas supplies to Europe were affected by the cut-off.

Like the Ukrainian peasants who were starved for opposing Stalin's collectivization, 21st century Ukrainian voters are being punished for their own defiance of Moscow. Gorbachev's blast-from-the-past reaction that "Cheney's speech looks like a provocation and interference in Russia's internal affairs in terms of its content, form and place" betrays a Soviet-era mind-set: Ukraine hasn't been an "internal" Russian matter for 14 years.

President Putin's government seems more and more reminiscent of the Soviet Union. Its inexcusable assistance to Iran's nuclear program, for instance, reeks of the communist regime's determination in the 20th century to help U.S. enemies everywhere.

Domestically, Putin is also traveling backward. Cheney noted that "in many areas of civil society — from religion and the news media, to advocacy groups and political parties — the government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of her people."

Putin is encouraging separatist movements in Georgia, Moldova and Azerbaijan. And wine from the poor nations of Georgia and Moldova, cheaper than that of France, Italy and Spain, was banned in Russia under the false pretext of a health threat. Georgia and Moldova both have aspirations to join NATO and the European Union, as Lithuania did, and the wine ban is an obvious retaliation against their moving out from under Moscow's political umbrella.

But the vice president's harsh words were paired with an appeal. He promised that at this summer's G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, "We will make the case, clearly and confidently, that Russia has nothing to fear and everything to gain from having strong, stable democracies on its borders, and that by aligning with the West, Russia joins all of us on a course to prosperity and greatness."

Russia called Cheney's remarks "incomprehensible." Obviously, that promised greatness must await Putin's exorcism of the tyrannical, imperialistic ghost of Josef Stalin.