			Foreign Correspondent

		      Inside Track On World News
	    By International Syndicated Columnist & Broadcaster
		 Eric Margolis <emargolis@lglobal.com>

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`The Great Slaughterer'
by
Eric Margolis 25 Jan 1996

Last month, tiny Latvia did the right thing.  It sentenced
retired KGB Maj. Gen. Alfons Noviks, known as `the Great
Slaughterer,' to life in prison.

Unfortunatly, his punishment will be too short:  Noviks is
87. Other surviving members of Stalin's secret police are
equally aged.  These monsters still deserve the same
draconian punishment given  to elderly Nazis.  There must be
no statue of limitations on mass murder.

That's because this century's greatest killer has not been
war - but communist regimes.  Communist governments have
killed at least 65 million of their own citizens. Wars of
all kinds caused 35.5 million deaths. 

Noviks was a senior `Chekist,' or Soviet NKVD secret
policeman during the USSR's annexation of Latvia in 1940. He
supervised the mass deportation of 120,000 Latvians to
Stalin's Siberian death camps, as well as interrogation and
torture of thousands of victims.

The NKVD (later, KGB), also deported 160,000
Lithuanians and Estonians to concentration camps. Even
before Hitler invaded the USSR, about 3-4% of the total
population of the Baltic states was sent by the NKVD to the
gulag. The world did nothing. By some estimates, from 1940-
45, 8-10% of Latvians died icy deaths in Siberia, or were
shot by the NKVD.  

After the war, Latvian nationalists, backed by Britain's
Secret Intelligence Service ( MI6), fought a heroic, but
ultimately futile, struggle against Soviet occupation. 
Noviks helped penetrate and break the anti-communist
underground.

When Latvia finally regained its independence after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, Noviks was put on trial.  He
claimed he was `only following orders.'  The former Latvian
Communist Party boss, Alfred Rubiks, was jailed for eight
years for trying to mount a coup against the new, post-
communist government in 1991.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have enacted laws enabling
prosecutors to charge former NKVD/KGB agents and senior
communists accused of crimes against humanity.  This policy
is in sharp contrast to other post-communist states of East
Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, who have never made
the slightest effort to prosecute former Stalinists - whose
crimes far exceeded in numbers, if not ferocity, those of
Hitler's Germany.


Stalin's Soviet Union, it is conveniently forgotten,  was a
partner of Nazi Germany. They began World War II by jointly
invading Poland.  From 1930 to 1953, according to latest
estimates by Russian historians, Stalin's secret police
murdered 40 million people in the USSR alone - 40,000,000 -
either in execution cellars or Arctic death camps.  This is
more than three times the highest estimated number of
Hitler's victims. Most shockingly, the major portion of this
titanic slaughter occured before World War II. The world
chose not to see Stalin's crimes. We remember Auschwitz, but
not Vorkuta.

In Russia, old NKVD/KGB thugs who are still alive enjoy
quiet retirement and state pensions.  The party for which
they killed so diligently, creeps back into power.  No one
in the west seems much to object.  A few cretinish street
thugs in Germany, who call themselves Nazis, produce
international alarm, and howls of anguish in the media.  Yet
the members of Russia's resurgent communist party, who urge
a return to Stalinism, these  heirs of history's most
efficient, ruthless killing machine, are dismissed in the
west as harmless grumblers, or dotards.   

While Germany continues to atone for its crimes, and pursue
aged Nazis, Russia shrugs off its past horrors. Aleksander
Solzhenitsyn's lonely voice calls for confession of Russia's
sins, and punishment of surviving Soviet criminals. Few
listen.     

The Soviet Eichmann, Commissar Lazar Kaganovitch, one of
Stalin's favorite henchmen, who organized and directed the
murder of 10 million Ukrainian farmers, died peacefully in
Moscow not long ago. One of the century's greatest murderers
ended his long career feeding pigeons from a favored, sunlit
bench in Moscow's Gorky park.

Latvia, at least, has not forgotten.  Its courageous action
puts to shame the rest of East Europe. 

copyright   eric margolis 1996
****************************************************

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