Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email. To the Editor: More than forty years have passed since the last repetition of the canard concerning the nationalization of women in Russia with the coming of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Kharchev, and Mr. Pawel, accept the quoted document at its face value. Yet how could the book have appeared in Russia? In recalling the polemics of that periodβin particular between Karl Kautsky and Leon Trotskyβwe are reminded that Kautsky, too, made use of a forgery in his attacks on the Bolshevik revolution.
Trotsky had a thorough investigation made which showed that no such town existed,. Other forgeries appeared at that period in the world press, all with the obvious purpose of discrediting the revolution. Now we have an entirely new forgery. It is utterly unthinkable, however, that such a document would not have come to the attention of the authorities in Moscow, and that it would have remained suppressed all these years.
It would be interesting to know where the document used by Kharchev was obtained. It does not seem to occur to those who accept such a document as genuine, what the reaction would have been among Russian women of that day. The early ideals of the revolution were not fulfilled. Things degenerated under Thermidor and Stalinist counter-revolution.
But that does not mean that one must accept malicious, downright forgeries about what occurred in the early days. Canard it may well beβnot the only one ever to appear in Pravda , cited as the source.
