Politically Correct Racism

While most US academics strongly deny that racial discrimination against anybody other than Jews ever existed as an official policy in the USSR it is hard to reconcile that opinion with empirical data. During the Great Terror the Communist Party Secretary of Krasnoyarsk Kray, Sobolev had the following eloquent words to say about people who really were victims of racial discrimination in the USSR.

Stop playing internationalism, all these Poles, Koreans, Latvians, Germans, etc. should be beaten, these are all mercenary nations, subject to termination...all nationals should be caught, forced to their knees, and exterminated like mad dogs. (1)

Claiming that Poles, Koreans, Latvians, and Germans are not racialized groups in this context is pure sophistry. American academics would never accept similar excuses for the persecution of minorities in the US or Germany. So why does the USSR under Stalin still get a free pass in the US today?

(1) Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 (Stanford, CA, 2002) , 60.