Khruschev recalled
NINA Khrushcheva (Opinion, 31 July) rather improbably praises her great-grandfather as "a symbol of today's new and uniting Europe"; and while she acknowledges his decision to rape Hungary in 1956, she ignores certain other facts.
Yes, Khrushchev's "secret speech" earlier in 1956 laid bare the monumentality of Stalin's crimes – but he and many of his Communist Party listeners had willingly participated in many of them, such as the 1930s Ukrainian famine. In 1956, Yuri Andropov (ironically Gorbachev's mentor, 25 years later) was not merely the Soviet ambassador in Budapest – he was their gauleiter who demanded that Moscow invade Hungary.
Finally, she talks of "the charnel house that the Nazis had wrought in Poland" – correct, if she includes the Soviet regime as Nazis, as it was both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany which jointly invaded and dismembered Poland in 1939.
JOHN BIRKETT
Horseleys Park
St Andrews, Fife
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Thursday 23 February 2012
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