'The Daily Show' is written by some of the smartest people in television. It’s a show I normally love. Which makes Monday night’s piece on Russian history puzzling. No, wait, puzzling isn’t the right word. More like simply infuriating.
For their piece, the Daily Show sent the usually hilarious Jason Jones to interview Russian citizens in Moscow and ask why their country is evil, as most Americans seem to believe. This was cute, and had a good point. Russia isn’t evil anymore. Hilariously corrupt, yes, but not really evil. However, they also interviewed Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Joseph Stalin’s right-hand man, Vyacheslav Molotov. There, it went from cute to disastrously misinforming, growing worse with every word uttered by Nikonov’s smiling face.
Among Nikonov’s claims was that the Soviet Union’s role in World War II is severely underplayed. That is fairly true, as the majority of German forces were stuck in a war of attrition with the Soviets as Eisenhower and company began to clean up France.
What Nikonov failed to mention is the other way the USSR’s role in the war is underplayed. His grandfather was the principal Soviet signatory in the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, a condition of which was Germany’s invasion of Poland. This treaty gave Hitler free reign to invade western Europe and was only broken when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa (this caused massive Soviet defections to the German side, which should tell you something about Stalin’s rule). Nikonov also neglects to mention the Soviet Union’s own abominations.
I’m talking about the Gulag. The set of secret Siberian labor camps the Soviet Union used to psychologically terrorize any hint of challenge to the government in its captured territories or at home. Labor camps that were mainly unknown to the Western world until Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s revolutionary book, the Gulag Archipelago. In this work, Solzhenitsyn alleges that the Gulag held as many as 50 million prisoners who were forced to work in some of the most brutal prison labor conditions in human history. They did this from 1918, the birth of the Soviet Union, to 1956, three years after Stalin’s death.
For nearly five decades, Stalin and company sent a group composed primarily of petty criminals and intellectuals to serve in Siberian labor camps.
I know this fact personally. My grandmother was one of those sentenced. Her crime? Being the daughter of a Polish intellectual—her mother was a doctor. She was a teenager, and she lived two years north of the Arctic circle in a state of constant starvation.
Want to go through more of Stalin’s funhouse of horrors? We could talk about Holodomor, the terror famine of Ukraine that’s estimated to have killed as many as 10 million people. Or the Katyn massacre, the execution of 22,000 Polish nationals. One of the Soviet officials who signed off on those executions? Vyacheslav Molotov.
The sheer gall it takes the Daily Show to show a grandson of Stalin’s right-hand man and let him tell their audience that Russia’s historic role as a bad guy in the minds of the American public is the simple result of propaganda, while neglecting to mention the millions of deaths caused by Stalin’s labor camps, famines and other nightmares, is appalling. Just absolutely appalling.
Even Russians might agree with that statement, considering the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Education and Science made the Gulag Archipelago mandatory reading for high school students.
The United States’ tactics in the Cold War were indeed dubious, as the Daily Show allowed Nikonov to make very clear. And it’s true, numerous actions perpetrated by the American government and more specifically, the Central Intelligence Agency, were at best ethically questionable and at worst morally bankrupt. But to let someone suggest that they even approached the horrors inside Soviet Russia is more asinine than any Fox News segment the show could take pleasure in mocking.
If you told me that the Daily Show was going to interview the grandson of one of history’s greatest war criminals, a man whose death count is in the literal millions, I would have expected the classic Daily Show mocking of a man who ignores the pain his family has caused. Instead, we got a tired poke at American education.
By not challenging Nikonov on these morbid details as he claimed the Soviets were no worse than the United States, The Daily Show not only embarrassed itself as a supposedly intelligent television show, it failed its audience. It failed the legion of Stalin victims and their descendants. It failed basic human decency.
Do you agree with Jack? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
