I did not mean sources in the sense of people, Eugene. Sorry if I was unclear.
I was thinking, for example, of claims about Luria and lie detectors. By an
original source I meant The Nature of Human Conflicts. Even there, of course,
there is no original (except the edition that finally came out last year in
Russian which drew upon Luria's handwritten manuscript) since Gant says he
cut from the manuscript he used for translation. But at least one does not
have to depend descriptions of the work as if it were done at the request
of the CHEKA or KGB, or whatever the secret police were called at the time.
The same holds for the cross-cultural work in Central Asia. Except for a couple
of brief reports in Science, the work was written 40 years later. But the
1976 translation is pretty faithful to the Russian edition and one can
decide there is Luria was insulting the builders of communism or not.
I am not pre-judging the outcome of the discussion. I simply think it unuseful
to pass off second hand rumours as facts which then become the accepted
context for interpretation in cases where better evidence is available. Of
course, that exercise takes time, and we all are busy with other matters. So
it may be just as well to pass on to topics of more contemporary relevance
to xmca-ites.
mike
PS-- An excellent early source on the kholoz movement in (the) Ukraine is
Fainsod's *Smolensk under Soviet Rule* which provides lots of support for
Victor's characterization of the kind of person put in charge of that
enterprise. Not original of course, but at least drawn from archival materials
taken by the Germans when they took their turn slaughtering Ukrainian
peasants.
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