Sebag Montefiore Simon & Santa: Simon Montefiore is a British “”“historian”“”, television presenter, and author of pop-“”“history”“” books and novels. Ghislaine attended the launch of Montefiore’s book, “The Court of the Red Tsar” (https://deepclips.com/clip/3225/exclusive-i-fear-i-saw-virginia-roberts-inside-jeffrey-epstein-s-creepy-new-mexico-ranch-contractor-claims). Santa is his wife and sister of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, who died of an ulcer in 2017. The Palmer-Tomkinson family is so close with the Royal Family that King Charles II was named Tara’s godfather. As such, Simon and Santa are good friends of King Charles II and Queen Camilla (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4721868/The-lit-girl.html). Simon’s great-great-uncle was an international financier who worked for the Rothschilds in the 1800s. Simon and his family are still close to the Rothschilds to this day (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/01/montefiore200801).
If you go to the Stalin or Beria pages on Wikipedia, nearly half of the most outrageous claims come from Montefiore. He alleges that Russia gave him access to the “Soviet archives” in the early 2000’s for his book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, despite the fact that Russia denies it and they’ve never let anyone do it since.
He’s a huge Zionist “historian” who regularly denies genocide (https://www.thefp.com/p/the-intifada-comes-to-britain) and believes that all problems in the Middle East are caused by the existence of Palestinians (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/decolonization-narrative-dangerous-and-false/675799/).
Beria being a sexpest is only backed by that one source? huh I never really looked into it closely and I’ve never seen it challenged in communist spaces(people just denounce and move on)
Guess its yet another reminder to interrogate every ‘accepted fact’
Berias bad reputation seems to come mostly fromt he fact that hist politcal faction lost to Cornboy + the west taking all of cornboys slander as gospel because it delivered mountains of material. Thus Beria essentially got slandered from the east and the west.
I can’t believe that all those claims about Stalin and Beria were one big
/sWould you create a prolewiki page for him with all this info? users can create and edit wiki pages without an account.
This would be really useful as I see a lot of people still push talking points related to Beria.
I can only encourage everyone with an idea for a page they see is missing to try their hand at creating it. To maximize chances of the edit being approved however I recommend smaller edits (few paragraphs at a time), and add in the changelog you plan on editing more later. We can only binarily accept or reject a proposed edit.
every accusation is a confession.
He alleges that Russia gave him access to the “Soviet archives” in the early 2000’s for his book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, despite the fact that Russia denies it and they’ve never let anyone do it since.
Aren’t the Soviet archives open? Wasn’t that the whole point of glasnost?
Beria’s in particular is closed and has never been opened to scholars afaik, unlike all the other stalin era leaders
??? Russia is still releasing Soviet archives from 1940’s to this very day.
okay based on my further reading it seems that they were “opened” in 91 but even then a lot of records remained closed, and getting a permit to search them yourself in the current geopolitical climate is apparently very difficult if you’re from a western country.
iirc they were but have been partially closed again in recent years, they were opened in 1991 after the ‘August coup’ but prior to the dissolution
Glasnost was more about transparency in contemporary(rather than historical) government action and decision making, but I guess since they technically were opened before the fall you could group it in
I guess when the archives turned up nothing scandalous, he had to extrapolate from his own lived experience.
Beria is a blackhole in regards to the truth around the accusations levied against him as the archives on him are more sealed than the Stalin archives due to his position of spy master.
Of course his wife and son have differing opinions to popular knowledge but it turns into hearsay when there’s no solid evidence to lay down
Beria is a blackhole in regards to the truth around the accusations levied against him as the archives on him are more sealed than the Stalin archives due to his position of spy master.
It’s because there’s likely nothing outrageous inside. Beria’s been smeared back and forth by Khrushchev and western anticommunists as a indirect attack on Stalin and if there was anything juicy there it would be used long ago. Same happened with literally all other USSR archives, anticommunists loudly promised all the dirty secrets revealed, but there was no dirty secrets inside, even “proof” for Katyń had to be manufactured by Yeltsin’s clique.
I will not say in any direction on Beria regardless. I am not going to come to his defense beyond saying his file is still on lockdown and we know nothing beyond what a single unreliable pseudo-hisystorian had written. I lightly looked into him in the past and have discussed the nuances around his history in regards to people surrounding him during life such as a short interview with his wife or have on my list of to-read a copy of his son’s interpretation of his father’s life and have assembled passages that put beria’s existence and actions into context of the people and events he was present in and lastly a conversation I remember having with a user here four or five years back where we bickering over this issue and I was informed that beria was most likely a right-opportunist who may have possibly lead to the liquidation of the Warsaw pact at an earlier date than what historically occured. Sadly that user, h3doublehockeysticks I think, deleted their account and took those comments into the void. I kinda wish I saved those to a log.
But anyways. Just because there is a very likely possibility that Beria was smeared to clear the way for Khrushchev’s coup doesn’t mean he was a better candidate than Khrushchev himself. I’ve always maintained that Molotov or Kaganovich would’ve been superior candidates instead of Malenkov, Khrushchev, or Beria. Not mentioning other candidates that could’ve fill out the central committee with bolshevik loyalists - instead of the right-opportunist snakes that showed their true colors after Stalin’s death - that died too early, or were were pushed out or murdered by the post-stalin troika, such as the members of the Zhdanovites section namely Voznesensky, Kuznetsov, and Kosygin.
Agree, i have my own doubt about Beria’s liberalism (and 100% agree about Molotov or Kaganovich), but it ultimately didn’t happened*.
I’m just saying that the “broad consensus” of western communist opinion have been yet again shaped by Khrushchev and even worse, by a vile bag of semen montefiore. And while i’m not even really blaming you or me or anyone, since it’s something that even academicians of the calibre of Domenico Losurdo fallen victim to, it’s really time to stop, since it was proven hundreds of times on every topic that anticommunists just brazenly lie.
Additional fact is that Khrushchev purged opposing factions so hard (something that he accused Stalin and Beria of) that he could deliver his secret speech full of lies straight into faces of people knowing those were lies, sometimes being eyewitnesses of the events cornman lied about, but nobody really protested.
*I don’t know much about Zhdanovite faction, but Zhdanov himself was, in retrospect of 80 years, probably the most correct of them all.
Simon Sleazebag Monetfiore
I legit don’t like the NKVD during Stalin’s time. They were not just anti-Stalin, but genuinely were a menace to Soviet society.
Depends, under Beria they rooted out fifth colums to a large degree and did great work rooting out spy networks. Was is glamorous work? Fuck no, but it massively hindered the Axis advance and consolidation in occupied territory. Their work was not to be liked, but to root out traitors before they could act.
NKVD also helped to organize, coordinate, and arm the partisans in occupied territories.
That was fine, but imprisoning communists wasn’t.
It would be better if it had happened under someone else.
I mean during that time there were several groups planning to coup the government. And NKVD leadership was compromised. That’s why I said “after Beria took over”, because one of the first things he did was reopen every sentencing the previous leadership made and overturn a lot of them.
I think he should not have been the one to do it.
You know what is worse than imprisoning communists? Not imprisoning nazi spies and collaborators. Don’t get me wrong it sucks for the falsely accused individuals but when it comes to war and counter revolution it is better to err on the side of security.
Its easy to criticize in hindsight. Mistakes are inevitable. If they hadn’t been successful in defeating nazi intelligence you’d be saying that they were too soft and should have detained more people.
Mistakes can be avoided and learnt from.
