How Much of a Red Blotted Credential Do You Want?

The Soviet authorities did everything in their power to keep information about the conditions in the Soviet Union from being made known internationally other than things that would make them look good. So you can't claim that like, oh, we didn't know how bad it was. We only found out later after Khrushchev kind of liberalized, they knew from the start and they didn't give a damn about what was being done to these people. Right. Well, that calls to mind this is much, much later, but in the early 1990s that now deceased historian Eugene Genovese wrote an essay called The Question. And no, his conclusion was we all knew and we knew from the beginning.