Since the end of the Cold War, an enormous amount of hitherto inaccessible source material (but by no means all of it) has come to light, mainly from Soviet archives, and has been carefully studied. As a result, some of the more extreme Communist theories have been dispelled—for instance, the idea that Washington provoked the outbreak of the Korean War. But there remains a wide discrepancy of interpretations about the causes and conclusion of the Cold War, and the great divide today is perhaps not so much between Western and Russian commentators but within the two camps themselves. This divide expresses itself even in the language the stakeholders use. Many Western historians are most reluctant to use the word “totalitarian” with regard to Stalin’s Russia; they believe is a loaded, even propagandistic, term—not to be used by serious, dispassionate analysts. Some Russian historians and commentators have no such compunction; even the president of Russia has not shied away from using this term on occasion. Here’s Dmitri Medvedev in an interview with Izvestia from May 6, 2010: “If we speak honestly, the regime that was built in the Soviet Union cannot be called anything other than totalitarian.”
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