Soviet Union Template‑class

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Much of this template relies on Vassiliev's notebooks, which are, basically, controversial. They are notes he took at Soviet KGB archives. 1. Soviet documents are unreliable, especially during Stalin's reign. 2. nobody has been able to confirm that the notes Vassiliev took were accurate. The main support claimed for him is that he confirms what was in the Venona decrypts. Venona is fascinating, but a lot of it is also admitted to be of bad quality, with things partially decrypted. There are debates between experts in history about all this. The debates are not revealed in the template.

An interesting discussion is at Alger_Hiss#Haynes.2C_Klehr.2C_and_Vassiliev

Then there is Elizabeth Bentley. She named a whole lot of people; the FBI checked a lot of them out, and then stopped investigating alot of them. That doesn't mean they were 'soviet spies', it means Bentley gave some evidence related to them. She wasn't always correct. A lot of people in the FBI Silvermaster Files were never arrested, there were no charges, no trial, and no convictions.

Furthermore, there are well documented actual spies, some of them even convicted in US courts, which have been left off of this template. Why not include them too?

For these reasons, and others, i am disputing the neutrality of this template. Thank you

Decora (talk) 18:54, 19 April 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I agree. A simple template like this is too blunt an instrument to properly convey the nuance both of probability and degree of allegations of espionage. By the same metric that includes Liddell we would include Roger Hollis,Rudolf Peierls, and Jack Jones. Liddell and Hollis were named as suspects by Wright in Spycatcher, a claim dismissed as fantasy by Christopher Alexander. Either we confine the template to persons convicted, acknowledged, or otherwise officially identified, or it's open season for every enteric cold-war suspicion. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 14:16, 22 April 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Agree too per Finlay McWalter. Socrates2008 (Talk) 12:40, 23 January 2012 (UTC)Reply[reply]