UNKNOWN, IGNORED, AND MISUNDERSTOOD

Continuing my analogy from the previous entry, I now have three underwater hostages to rescue. So, welcome to history, unknown, ignored, and misunderstood!

As far as my primary mission of the poet-historian goes, only the first of these three hostages, namely, the unknown history, is properly mine. The all-important stories of, say, the Atomic Espionage, or the story of Castro’s Communization of Cuba and of the Cuban Missile crisis having been subjected to gross historical falsification, definitely belong here. By the same token, Stalin’s game with the West and with Hitler, in the prelude to World War II, needs to be told here as well. These and many other such eye-opening revelations, thus constitute my proper quarry, history unknown.

But there are other types of important history stories that need to be told, not because they have never been told, but because, for different reasons, they have somehow become uncomfortable, and once they had been told, historians had conveniently made them “forgotten,” that is neglected and ignored. Such for instance, is the story of the late Academician Andrei Sakharov, the by now immortal symbol of Soviet dissent. The fact that he had been associated with many mysterious and inexplicable “accidents,” resulting in deaths of some genuine Soviet dissidents, had led Western reporters of that time to suspect Sakharov of collaborating with the KGB, and essentially serving as a sticky-paper Flycatcher (which is the title of my entry about him and about the whole Soviet dissident movement of that era). Such articles filled with bewildered suspicion had become a standard fare in Western reporting, and similar, but much stronger allegations of this nature were made by the Soviet dissidents themselves. As a matter of fact, the same goes for the most notorious case of Anatoly (Nathan) Shcharansky, the acknowledged inspirer of the George W. Bush Administration’s foreign policy. Shcharansky, too, was accused of serving as a KGB snitch, built up as a Soviet disinformation agent for the West, so accused not by the reporters, but by his own dissident buddies, who furthermore dared to furnish some pretty hard evidence in substantiation of their claims. All this was once open to the public, but later, when the persons at issue had been turned into propaganda symbols--- and thus sanctified--- these facts had become inconvenient, and were swept under the rug in the hope that by ignoring them, while raising the hallowed myths of official propaganda to the level of an infallible Scripture, they could set people’s minds in the right groove about all these new icons.

And, finally, history misunderstood covers all such cases, when the basic facts are generally known, but the interpretations of these facts have been so wide of the mark, either deliberately or fortuitously, that the truth of the facts themselves has become distorted beyond all recognition. Naturally, this category often overlaps with the history unknown set of tales. Thus, everybody over the age of forty knows about the Cuban missile crisis, being one of the staple cold war legends, but the truth of this whole matter has never been told, and I now doubt that it ever will. The same goes about the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939, and so on, and so forth.

Among the stories, not unknown, but definitely misunderstood, is Khrushchev’s famous warning to America “We shall bury you!” There is nothing much behind these words, except for their very biased interpretation, and I will try to rectify the situation--- not by revealing an unknown truth, but by simply providing my own interpretation, which will hopefully take some sting out of the Western bias. As we all know, interpretations are everything, but we just cannot allow them to substitute for facts themselves.