The Rewriting of History

By Ilya Magid
Editor Steven C Siegel
I want to tell our teacher Amanda one story about life in the Soviet Union. For former Soviet Union people that was not so interesting. The Soviet Union was a dictatorship, there was a censorship.

Once, we (my wife and I) vacationed for the holidays in 'Burevestnik', (translated into English 'Mallemuk') in a settlement called Repino (close to Leningrad). The Soviet Union seized that place from Finland in the winter war of 1940. In Finland it was named Kookolo. The great home of Repin was located there. Repin was a famous Russian painter.

From our lodging, we took a bus trip with a guide to a place called 'Rasliv', (translated into English 'Flood'), a historic place for the Soviet people.
Nearby in the forest was the hovel where Lenin went into hiding from the Czar's government (1917). On the stump of a tree, Lenin wrote an article about how to begin the revolution and sent it to the communist newspaper 'Pravda' translated as 'Truth'. There we saw a pavilion inside of which there was the historic hovel. Somebody from the excursion asked the guide, "With whom did Lenin live there?" She answered, "Alone". He said, "He lived with Zinovev", a known revolutionary. That was the period of 'Glastnost', the end of the 1980's. In Stalin's time ('30s) Zinovev was killed as a counterrevolutionary.

The guides were instructed by a member of the ideological division CPSU from Moscow about what they had to tell us about that event. In Stalin's time that person who spoke about Zinovev could have been arrested and jailed for 8-10 years according to article 58 on 'anti-Soviet propaganda'.
The Soviet Union existed for 70 years. During that time there were big courts of justices: at the end of the 20's, in 1937, etc. At the time of Khrushchev, he criticized Stalin, at the time of Brezhnev, he criticized Khrushchev, and etc.

During that time the government rewrote history: cleaned libraries (all libraries were government), tore out pages from encyclopedias, obliterated needed texts, etc.

At that time, they did not have computers, so they had to find the names of 'famous' people in articles and books. That was a very hard job.
Right now in America I know the real history of the Soviet Union.

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