Seventy years ago, on June 1, 1949, an article by displaced person Nickolay Didenko that appeared in the June issue of Plain Talk detailed Soviet crimes and the killing of 15,000 people in scientific experiments via lethal agents. (Plain Talk was a monthly American anti-Communist magazine published in 1946-1950.)
Didenko, who had recently arrived in the U.S., asserted that he figured prominently in a trial in Ukraine of so-called railway wreckers and learned of the experiments during his confinement in 1936 and 1937 in the Alexandrovsk Prison for politicals in Siberia.
A fellow prisoner, Stepanenko (no first name provided), had informed Didenko that 10,000 persons died in underground “galleries” in the forest near the city of Chita, and that later 5,000 persons were asphyxiated in three underground shafts.
“It was an unhappy lot to be assigned to the leveling of the ground over fraternal graves, and to plant saplings instead of crosses over them,” Didenko quoted Stepanenko as saying.
Didenko’s experience was rare for its time, as he survived the purges of the 1930s by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and was able to live the remainder of his life in freedom in the U.S.A.
The experience of Soviet dissidents and the development of successful tactics used to combat disinformation during the Soviet era have become relevant once again as Russia applies its modernized information warfare methods, using social media, fake news and cyberattacks against the United States, Ukraine, the West and their European allies, in addition to conventional warfare. Although Russia has not officially published casualty figures related to its military and its Wagner-affiliated mercenaries in Ukraine, Syria, Africa and other locations, estimates run into the tens of thousands.
Source: “Say Reds exterminated 15,000,” The Ukrainian Weekly, June 6, 1949.