Ann Druyan
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Template:TOCnestleft Ann Druyan is the former wife of Carl Sagan.
Smuggled Copies of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR
In his book "The Demon-Haunted World," Carl Sagan described how he and his wife "would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR".[1]
- "1984 was not just an engaging political fantasy; it was based on the Stalinist Soviet Union, where the rewriting of history was institutionalized. Soon after Stalin took power, pictures of his rival, Leon Trotsky-- a monumental figure in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions--began to disappear. Heroic and wholly ahistoric paintings of Stalin and Lenin together directing the Bolshevik Revolution took their place, with Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army, nowhere in evidence. These images became icons of the state. You could see them in every office building, on outdoor advertising signs sometimes ten stories high, in museums, on postage stamps.
- "New generations grew up believing that was their history. Older generations began to feel that they remembered something of the sort, a kind of political false-memory syndrome. Those who made the accommodation between their real memories and what the leadership wished them to believe exercised what Orwell described as 'doublethink.' Those who did not, those old Bolsheviks who could recall the peripheral role of Stalin in the Revolution and the central role of Trotsky, were denounced as traitors or unreconstructed bourgeois or 'Trotskyites' or 'Trotsky-fascists,' and were imprisoned, tortured, made to confess their treason in public, and then executed."
- "But it's hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR--so our colleagues could know a little about their own political beginnings."
Communist "Manifestivity"
On October 30 and 31, 1998 the Brecht Forum presented the "Communist Manifestivity to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto" at Cooper Union's Great Hall, New York.
Individual endorsers of the event included Ann Druyan.[2]
Federation of American Scientists
In 2009 Ann Druyan served on the Board of Sponsors of the Federation of American Scientists.[3]