THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

STALIN'S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM | 2005-08-27

Stalin's 1936 Soviet Constitution guaranteed absolute freedom of speech. The Stalinist government also sent anyone to the Gulag for ten years, which was usually a death sentence, for saying anything anti-Semitic.

No one was ever acquitted.

In The First Circle Aleksander Solzhenitsyn recites from his own experience the case of a Jewish bureaucrat who used that law to his advantage. Anybody who said anything bad about him he denounced as anti-Semitic, and the police were at that person's door within a week.

This man's enemy was charged with anti-Semitism and, no one was every acquitted.

That's one of the reasons Stalin's Russia was such a model of freedom.

Many and many a liberal said so.

But for those of us who have our doubts that Stalin's Russia was a free country, the term Hate Laws is frightening.