Letters to the Editor

To the Editors:

I wanted to say thank you for the many wonderfully informative articles I’ve enjoyed in the recent months of my new subscription.  As a fan of figure skating, I particular enjoyed your article on Alexei Yagudin and Yevgeny Plushenko, leading up to the World Championships in Moscow in March [Ice Skating Wars, Jan/Feb 2005].  I was glad to see an update on those championships in your most recent issue, but found an error in the report.  You stated that Stephane Lambiel’s gold medal was “a first ever for Switzerland.”  I wanted to point out that Swiss skater Hans Gerschwiler won the title in 1947, and more recently, Denise Biellmann won the ladies’ title in 1981.

Lynda Kross

by email

To the Editors:

While I was reading your magazine [May/June 2005], I noted in the Fact & Figures section a paragraph on Russian orphan statistics.

While the U.S. did issue 5,865 immigrant visas to Russian orphans, there are approximately 780,000 children under 16 in the Russian orphanage system. Of these, only 130,000 are registered in the state database available for adoption.  Not all 780,00 children are available for adoption.

Thanks,

Debra Lankenau

Co-Chair, Families for

Russian and Ukrainian Adoption DFW Chapter

To the Editors:

Your P.S. on George Kennan in the May/June [2005] issue was a thoughtful and succinct tribute to a great Foreign Service Officer much admired by most of us “old Russian hands” who have served in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

I’m sure many readers will point out that his accomplishments stretched over a span of 101 years, not 95, as your lapse states.

Sincerely,

Dabney Chapman

FSO Retired

(Embassy, Moscow 1966-1967)

Mr. Chapman:

Actually, many may have remarked this to themselves (as we did, slapping our heads when we read the printed copy, having failed to catch the error during proofing), but you were the only one to write us about this. Thank you for holding us to account!

–The Editors

To the Editors:

What a great issue!

Your piece on George Kennan [May/June 2005] is the best portrait of him   I’ve seen.  I had a bone to pick with Kennan.  I guess it was somewhere around 1951-52. He was ambassador and I was editing America Illustrated.  He decided that the magazine was not being distributed and cut it out – a really stupid move big-picture-wise and one that I deeply resented.  The magazine was getting through to some of the Russian government elite and, perhaps more importantly, their kids.  But Kennan was “a man of principle” and, as House Speaker Tip O’Neill used to say, “When you’re dealing with a man of principle, you’ve got trouble.”  So I shifted over to the Voice of America to write political commentary.  Kennan was followed by Tommy Thompson,  whom  I was told by people who worked with him was a much better ambassador and a moderately good poker player, which helped.

Then, I think it was in 1956, America Illustrated got going again.  I used to see the editor of Soviet Life in Washington from time to time and we’d compare notes.  When I suggested to the editors in Moscow that it would do better with a little less heavy-handed Soviet propaganda, one of them told me, “You know that, and I know that, but my boss doesn’t know that.” One time, our picture editor was asked, during a visit to Moscow, to edit the pictures for an issue of Soviet Life. When he chucked too many pictures of Lenin, the Russians shook their heads and smiled. And put them back. It was a wonderfully entertaining and satisfying job, doing America Illustrated.

  I must say you are doing an outstanding job with your magazine. But what is this business of no captions on a lot of the pictures in the Reindeer Nation? That’s terrible! I want to know who those people are and what that meat is. Also I looked high and low to find a caption for cover with those marvelous old WWII vets. Is it there? Admittedly my eyesight is not great – but please tell me, (I’m a very literal-minded guy) who are those guys and what did they do? Good luck. Hope your sales are holding up.

  Sincerely,

John Jacobs

Mr. Jacobs:

Thank you for your very interesting and informative letter. The captions provided by the author for the Evenks story were quite general, and we felt the pictures fairly well spoke for themselves. The picture of the two Evenks with meat had the suggested caption, “Drying fish for winter.”

We are sorry to say we don’t know the story of the two men on our May/June 2005 cover (cover caption is always in the table of contents), other than that they are WWII heroes and the picture was taken during the 2004 Victory Day celebrations. Interestingly, another attentive reader saw a wire photo in a U.S. paper that appears to show these same two veterans riding a truck during this year’s parade.

– The Editors

To the Editors:

I enjoyed Constantine Pleshakov’s piece on Stalin’s Folly in the last issue of Russian Life. Pleshakov offers a historically accurate account, demonstrating that Josef Stalin was personally responsible for Soviet military unpreparedness on 22 June 1941, the day Hitler’s forces invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin was so blind to the possibility that Hitler would attack that, even after the massive invasion had begun, he refused to let his generals take defensive action, and he repeatedly blamed reports of the attack on German “provocation.”

But why would Stalin be afraid to respond to “provocation?” Pleshakov suggests that Stalin couldn’t believe that Hitler would risk “a war on Soviet soil before Britain had fallen.” I have a different suggestion. Stalin had a pact with Hitler (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), and he took this pact seriously, fulfilling all of its requirements to the letter. After the war, he used to say in his daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva’s presence, “Ech, together with the Germans we would have been invincible!” A few months after the Hitlerite invasion, he admitted to American emissary in Moscow Harry Hopkins, “Once we trusted this man.” Stalin actually trusted Hitler – saving his famous paranoia for imagined political enemies at home. In my book The Mind of Stalin (Ardis, 1988), I showed that Stalin, his position weakened by his own paranoid actions against the best and the brightest in the Soviet military, had essentially become hostage to Hitler before the war broke out. Stalin identified with Hitler in the same way hostages identify with their hostage-takers. In the literature on terrorism this is termed “Stockholm syndrome.” Hostages often identify with their hostage-takers, even to the extent of advocating the political views of the hostage-takers or falling in love with them (Patricia Hearst comes to mind). An example: during the Soviet-Finnish negotiations of 1939, Stalin responded to the Finnish delegate’s reluctance to cede the Hango Neck to the Soviet Union with the words, “It’s nothing, really. Look at Hitler. The Poznan frontier was too close to Berlin for him, and he took an extra three hundred kilometers.”

Stalin’s trusting identification with the aggressive Hitler is never mentioned in conventional histories of the Great Fatherland War, for psychology is regarded with suspicion by conventional historians. But, given the potentially catastrophic social and political consequences of psychological processes in the mind of a dictator, isn’t it time for historians to pay some attention to the academic discipline of psychology?

Sincerely,

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere

Emeritus Professor of Russian

University of California, Davis

To the Editors:

I have always appreciated your magazine, especially the latest [May/June 2005] issue.

I am 75 years old and followed the battles of WWII with my late father. I have read scores of books about the fighting on the Eastern Front.

Why has no one established what percentage of European Axis forces got killed on the Eastern Front? These figures obviously exist but have never been published. My own research and assessment is that 95% of the European Axis forces got killed on the Eastern Front. I would like to suggest and would be glad to make these facts known.

From the book, Marshall Zhukov’s Greatest Battles, the following was established: On the second front in France during the six weeks after D-Day, total German casualties were 140,000 men. During the single week from June 22 to June 29, 1944, in the single Vitebsk sector of the Byelorussian front, German casualties were 480,000 men. This translates to a 20 to 1 ratio.

The Battle of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk took place in 1941 through mid 1943.

In the biggest battle in North Africa (el Aleimane) the Germans lost 1000 killed and 7000 wounded and captured. Sgt. Pavlov and his squad of 16 men killed more Germans at Stalingrad, defending a building which the Germans never captured, than the Germans lost in capturing Paris.

With the Cold War over and Russophobia abating, why not give the Great Red Army it’s due honor? Millions of American lives were spared because of the fighting that the Red Army did.

Walt DuBlanica

Birdsboro, PA

Mr. DuBlanica:

There are many ways to segment and analyze the data. One of the most comprehensive sources we have found, comparing various death estimates during WWII is online at:

users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstats.htm

There, author Matthew White collates and offers for comparison the widely varying historical statistics on not just WWII, but all modern wars. It is a very sobering picture. For the record, his data seem to show that, during WWII, an estimated 3.5-4 million German soldiers were killed, of which 2.2-2.4 million died on the Eastern Front.

– The Editors