pottedmusic:harperhug:pottedmusic:tryingtobealwaystrying:Gorbachev lying in a 2006 interview… again.
pottedmusic:harperhug:pottedmusic:tryingtobealwaystrying:Gorbachev lying in a 2006 interview… again. Shcherbytsky died in 1990. Also, conveniently, all footage of the May Day 1986 festivities have been deleted from Ukrainian national archives. Reblogged to drag the link out of the comments section, for all those who want to watch people dressed in their Sunday best get a glowing radiation tan: the footage does seem to exist, here are snippets on Youtube. (That’s definitely the 1986 parade because posters mention the 27th Congress of the Communist Party, which was held that spring.) It’s all too easy to imagine Shcherbytsky killing himself thinking he gave the order to continue the parade, that it’s his fault people were outside getting sick when it wasn’t even remotely his fault.Yeeaaaah, let’s not cast Shcherbytsky as a sympathetic character, he was an A-grade Soviet jackass directly responsible for several major purges of the intelligentsia. On the orders of this fucker, many Ukrainian poets and human rights activists were being killed or ~just~ imprisoned in the camps for 10 years or more in the 1970s-1980s. (I mean, there are definitely links enough for every word in that sentence and plenty to spare, I just got very upset and angry by about link 7. People know about the Great Terror of the 1930s, but often pretend that everything was well and good afterwards. It wasn’t. People were being killed in the camps up till the very collapse of the USSR, if on a smaller scale.) To recapitulate, Shcherbytsky = not a good guy by any objective metric.If he did indeed commit suicide (there are conflicting accounts, but he did leave a note telling his wife what to do with his possessions, so I’m leaning towards the suicide version), it’s not because he felt guilty, it’s because he feared punishment: he killed himself before parliamentary hearings regarding the (mis)handling of the Chernobyl disaster, including the damn parade, were about to begin. He told his brother that there’s no way in hell he’d go to the hearing, without explaining how he’d avoid it. This is how. So yeah, I don’t think Shcherbytsky should feature in the long list of people we could feel sorry for over this :-/ -- source link
#chernobyl