Sergei Khrushchev’s obituary in The Telegraph

My comment on Sergei Khrushchev, son of Soviet leader Nikita who ended up swearing allegiance to America – obituary in The Telegraph, 22 June 2020.


Both Sergei Khrushchev and his father Nikita Khrushchev lived at the center of the Soviet dictatorship, built it and served it to the best of their ability. Millions of people were tortured, killed, imprisoned in concentrations camps, expropriated, resettled forcefully, exiled, and had their life destroyed in other ways. And yet: look, no victims!

Obituary suggests that it was the Khrushchev family who have become some kind of victims of Communists. What a ridiculous nonsense.

My grandparents Klemens Ostrowski and his wife Elżbieta had a farm near the village of Buczany in the Brasław county in the north-east corner of pre-WWII Poland. Post-WWII, the Soviet Union occupied eastern Polands with a little help from Churchill and Roosevelt, as a result of the illegal Yalta deal. They were stripped of their Polish citizenship, their farm confiscated by the Soviet criminal state. Even their barn was taken apart, transported several kilometres to the newly installed Soviet collective, and reassembled there. My grandparents and four of their children were imprisoned in Communist concentration camps in various parts of the Soviet Union. My mother was imprisoned from 1949 to 1956 in the area of Arkhangelsk. She met my father there. My father was imprisoned in 1945.

This obituary falsifies history. It repeats the Communist narrative, presenting the genocidal Communist regime not as gigantic criminal organisation, but as an alternative way to seek progress and happiness. Why then The Telegraph does not describe Nazism as an alternative pursuit of happiness and prosperity?

Quote:

But Khrushchev insisted that his father would have understood. “He was in the Communist Party because he believed it would be best for all of us.”

Who are “us”? A Nazi leader and Party member would also say “He was in the Nazi Party because he believed it would be best for all of us.”

Here “we” does not refer to all people of course. It refers only to the subset of the population supporting the totalitarian dictatorship. The rest was eliminated in various ways. Nikita Khrushchev has not changed this policy by one bit. Only methods were altered.

In Poland, there is a similar story. Adam Gierek is the son of the former First Secretary (1970-1980) of the Communist Party Edward Gierek. He studied in Moscow and had a successful academic career. More recently he has been a senator in Poland and a Member of European Parliament. His membership in the totalitarian Communist Party was not an obstacle. Quite the opposite.

Back to my family. My grandparents stayed in their family house after returning from the camps. The Soviet occupiers imposed strict administrative ban on renovating the house and refused to connect the house to the electric grid throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, forcing my youngest uncle, the only person remaining at the house after the death of my grandparents, to move out. This is the genocidal policy at work.

My parents managed to move from zone occupied by the Soviet Union to the Communist Polish People’s Republic in 1956. Here they continued to be harassed by the Communists. Being a son of survivors of Communist concentration camps I had practically no chance to obtain a PhD in Poland, I went to the US in 1987 and received my PhD in Physics from the University of Florida in 1995. I returned to Poland and began working at the A. Mickiewicz University in Poznań. No effort was spared to make my life at work maximally miserable, frustrating, and to force me to quit. The aim was to make my coming to work at the University most traumatic and humiliating. I had to bring my own personal computer to work, because the university would not provide me with one.

Later on an extremely vicious campaign was unleashed simultaneously against my pianist wife, me, and our daughter, who was in elementary school at the time. Communist methods in full swing.

We were both eventually fired in 2015. The authorities fabricated a fake medical statement, that my wife suffered from unspecified delusions and had to be fired from the State School of Music in Zielona Góra, where she was the most successful piano teacher. We demanded truth, honesty, adherence to officially declared law, respect for human dignity, and common sense. We let the top authorities know about this. We also provided hundreds of MPs with information and documents. The perpetrators were protected and promoted. The prosecutor office refused to act and falsified the case.

I was forced to look for work abroad. I am currently working at a greengrocer’s in West London. My wife is unemployed now.

This obituary is one of many texts falsifying both history and contemporary situation. People from the core of the murderous totalitarian power are presented as the good guys who wanted to do good things. This is truly ridiculous.

@LechSBorkowski

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