Soviet Memorial Insults the Victims of Atrocities

I read the Feb. 20 commentary, “A Soviet Memorial Etched by Ambiguity,” with particular interest and have a few suggestions. When the citizens of West Hollywood erect their Soviet memorial, may I suggest that a memorial also be erected to the millions of victims of Soviet terror who were slaughtered with the help and complicity of the Red Army. Perhaps West Hollywood could erect a memorial to the Polish Katyn Forest victims, shot in the back of the head and dumped in a ditch in the woods. How about a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Poles, Ukrainians and many other ethnic groups who were rounded up in the middle of the night by Soviet soldiers, crammed into unheated cattle cars and driven for weeks into the Godforsaken tundra or taiga to work or starve to death?

Could there be a reference to the fact that the Soviet Union is estimated to have been perhaps the greatest killing machine in history? Could there be a reference to the fact that, although the terrible Nazi occupation lasted in many instances from 1939 to 1945, in many countries the equally horrible Soviet occupation lasted until 1991?

Richard J. Widerynski

Long Beach

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The idea of the monument for the Soviet soldiers is an insult to the survivors of gulags and Siberian deportees. I am one of them and I protest.

Dezyderiusz Lachocki

Wayne, N.J.