The Evil Empire and the Memory Hole

"Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?" asks Claire Berlinski — A Hidden History of Evil. She begins:

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

The author informs us that "Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, [who] has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War," "can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation."