Robert Conquest is a better historian than poet, but he can string words together a bit:
Get Lost, Gulag Archipelago!
"The present Soviet generation is not obsessed with the errors of the past. It looks to the future..."
For years those dreary old complaints
That we'd unfairly snuffed the lives
(We've never claimed we're plaster saints)
Of husbands, brothers, sisters, wives.
Thank God for the present lot!
They won't act up like those others.
After all, we only shot
Their fathers, uncles aunts and mothers.
(From the collection Forays.)
Couldn't find that on the web so I actually had to type it in instead of my usual lazy copy-and-paste routine. What's the world coming to? More pertinently, why am I still so keen to refight the Cold War nowadays? By training I'm a historian. We're not really interested in any events until everyone's dead, as it's only then that one can come to even a tentative judgement. But that means one distrusts contemporary assessments. What Klio remembers is unlikely to be what journalists think important at the time. Lincoln and Roosevelt were vilified as widely as Bush. George Orwell worried about something called 18b - what was that? (Short answer: the 1941 equivalent of the Patriot Act.) My point is fairly banal: newspapers may be the first draft of history, but most first drafts are not worth reading.