(The Nationalist, 21 March 2003)
A few years ago I met an Estonian woman, now married to a Welshman and living in Britain, who had a tragic story to tell.
Estonia, together with Latvia and Lithuania were occupied by Stalin during the Second World War. This brought the new system of Stalinist communism to her country. At school she received ideological education in communism. She did well in her studies and, at the age of seven, was awarded a prize, a certificate bearing a picture of Stalin. Delighted with her award, she proudly showed it at home to her mother and grandmother. Their reaction was very different from what she had expected. Her grandmother angrily snatched the award from her and tore it up saying that Stalin was an evil man. Then she flushed the pieces down the toilet. The little girl was heart-broken and when she returned to school the next day told what had been done to her lovely award.
Shortly afterwards, her mother and grand-mother disappeared. She never saw them again. She was reared in a state orphanage, and has lived the rest of her life with the guilt of knowing that she probably, even if unwittingly, brought about the deaths of her mother and grandmother.
Her story came back to me in this month when we recall the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin’s death. It is one of those small stories which will never make it to the history books. But it is a story of tragedy for one human family, their lives blighted, or even destroyed, as part of one man’s preoccupation with ensuring the totality of his power. Stalin was neither mad nor stupid but he was evil.
Much of what he built up through his system has now disappeared: the Soviet Union no longer exists; neither does its military wing, the Warsaw Pact, nor its economic arm, Comecon. They are gone. The woman remains, still living with unanswered questions, still bearing a sense of guilt for what she did, even though it was done in innocence.
This story is a kind of parable of what happens when people try to build a society on a foundation other than that of respect for the person, when brute force and blind ideology take the place of a moral sense and open-minded dialogue. Those who do not learn the lessons of history repeat the mistakes of history.