Writer David Volodzko made quite the splash during his brief stint as a staff columnist at the Seattle Times, getting canned by the paper for a controversial statement after his very first story.
The column itself—based on the ethics of a Vladimir Lenin statue in Seattle—apparently wasn’t the problem. It was a subsequent tweet from Voldozko, in which he said that Hitler wasn’t as evil as Lenin since “Hitler only targeted people he personally believed were harmful to society whereas Lenin targeted even those he himself did not believe were harmful in any way.”
It’s a strange hill to die on, and one that apparently got Voldozko axed after his inaugural Times story. Thursday night, the paper released a statement to social media announcing that, “effective immediately,” Voldozko would no longer be a member of the Times staff.
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“A Seattle Times editorial writer engaged in Twitter recently in a way that is inconsistent with our company values and those of our family ownership,” the statement said.
Voldozko’s column itself was not cited as a reason for his firing and is still available to read on The Seattle Times website. It did appear to poke at a similar notion, however, in a much more innocuous fashion.
At one point, Voldozko references his grandfather, who he said came to the U.S. “as a refugee after escaping a Nazi concentration camp.”
“The only thing worse, he said with bitterness in his voice, was the Russia Lenin had built,” Voldozko wrote.
Ironically, he even uses the presence of neo-Nazis in Russia as proof of this hypothesis.
“In Russia, racist attacks are so common one cannot keep track,” Voldozko wrote. “Neo-Nazism thrives, the government fans the flames, Ukraine is on fire.”
The objectionable tweet from the now-former columnist has since been deleted.
Voldozko has had his work published in numerous other publications over the years, including New York magazine, The Nation and The Daily Beast.
Read it at The Stranger
