During the Soviet era Communist tyrants murdered from 20 to 60 million Russians. The official total may never be known. Under Stalin 800,000 were executed and 1.7 million perished in the gulags.
But, the far left New York Times praised the Communist leadership this week. At least they were conservationists!
Fred Strebeigh at The New York Times reported:
“[How did Russia] become a global pioneer in conservation? Much of the answer begins with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In 1919, a young agronomist named Nikolai Podyapolski traveled north from the Volga River delta, where hunting had almost eliminated many species, to Moscow, where he met Lenin. Arriving at the Bolshevik leader’s office to seek approval for a new zapovednik, Podyapolski felt ‘worried,’ he said, ‘as before an exam in high school.’ But Lenin, a longtime enthusiast for hiking and camping, agreed that protecting nature had ‘urgent value.’ Two years later, Lenin signed legislation ordering that ‘significant areas of nature’ across the continent be protected…For now, at least, Lenin’s legacy is preserved and Russia remains the world leader, ahead of Brazil and Australia, in protecting the most land at the highest level. Russian naturalists continue to advance their not-yet-hopeless cause of keeping free a few vast landscapes on this planet where humans do not tread.”
Some things never change…
New York Times reporter Walter Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer prize in 1932 for his reporting on the Stalinist regime in Ukraine. It was later discovered that Duranty failed to report honestly on the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians at the time. Instead, Duranty praised the Soviet leadership in his glowing reports of the Communist regime.
