The New York Times has a long history of historical revisionism when it comes to the crimes of Communism. This is yet another entry in the ugly record of the old gray lady.
"Lenin's Eco Warriors," is the title. The Times strives to convince its readers that the USSR was really the Sierra Club.
Lenin signed legislation ordering that “significant areas of nature” across the continent be protected. Within three decades, some 30 million acres (equal in area to about 40 states of Rhode Island) from the European peaks of the Caucasus to the Pacific volcanoes of Kamchatka were set aside in a system of 128 reserves.
Meanwhile here's the reality.
The USSR killed 338,000 whales. Its relentless illegal whaling fleets drove the blue whale into extinction in the North Pacific and caused population crashes in a number of other species.
Some have labeled it the worst environmental crime of the century, but it was really just a slow day for the USSR whose other contributions to the environment included destroying one of the four largest lakes in the world (“One of the worst environmental disasters of the world”: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon) and multiple nuclear disasters culminating in Chernobyl (the world’s worst nuclear disaster).
The USSR was determined to show that communism could defeat capitalism and while it couldn’t beat the United States in industrial production, it took home the gold medal for environmental disasters. By the end, 75 percent of its surface water was polluted and its air was among the dirtiest in the world.
But the USSR wasn’t completely neglectful of the environment. It also tried to use nuclear bombs to create holes for storing toxic waste.
Eco-warriors indeed.
Next up maybe the Times can run "Castro's Gay Friendly Policies" and "Mao's Educational Reforms".
The Western left exists in an echo chamber of lies. It is utterly uninterested in the truth. Instead it spends all its time manufacturing propaganda in support of its ideology while refusing to recognize its own disasters. Inconvenient history gets rewritten. And suddenly we get bizarre Soviet propaganda about Lenin the environmentalist.