The books that never were, or will be

Good morning bookies!

As you all know this blog is all about books. A boy, his books and a bunch of words. However, today's blogette is about books that may never be written, because the author has been arrested. And what is the crime of this evil-doer? Trying to find out what happened to German prisoners of war during the Stalin Era in the USSR.

See, those in power in Russia don't think Stalin was such a bad guy. Sure, a few tens of millions of Soviet citizens were killed on his orders during his reign, but so what? Just a necessity, right? Those are the numbers generally put out but coming up with an accurate count is hard, the USSR wasn't exactly what you would call an open society.

So today we live in an era we can call Stalin's Rehabilitation, when Vlad Putin and his buddies want to present Stalin as more misunderstood than anything else. And along comes a researcher writing a book about the fate of Wehrmacht POWs and bingo! He's arrested. For what? Does it matter? His apartment is cleaned out, his research materials confiscated. And now those two books he was going to write that would, no doubt, have added tremendously to our understanding of WW2 in Russia, may never get written.

The new Russia sure looks an awful lot like the old Russia.