Posted on May 19, 2009 - by Venik

Russia’s New Policy on Historical Revisionism

The Wall Street Journal is commenting on Russia’s new policy to counter attempts at historical revisionism (“Russia Frames New Policy on History“, by Andrew Osborne, WSJ, May 19, 2009). According to WSJ’s hand-picked collection of opinions, Russia is trying to move back to the Soviet practice of tightly managing the official, state-approved version of history for specific periods and events. I though I should make some comments in response.

“President Dmitry Medvedev has created a special commission to counter what he says are increasingly aggressive attempts to rewrite history to Russia’s disadvantage.”

This is not entirely accurate. Medvedev created this commission to counter any attempted historical revisionism, be it to Russia’s disadvantage or otherwise. There is a number of Russian “historians” attempting to twist the facts in a way that frequently leads to ethnic and religious tensions in the country. As far as the Russian government is concerned, these homegrown revisionists do far more damage to Russia’s prestige and stability than their Ukrainian or Latvian colleagues.

“The ruling United Russia party also has proposed a draft law that would mandate jail terms of three to five years for anyone in the former Soviet Union convicted of rehabilitating Nazism. Analysts say they expect it to become law, though it will only be enforceable in Russia.”

Russia is one of very few European nations that still does not have such a law. Legislation punishing attempted rehabilitation of Nazism existed in most EU nations for decades. And not just in EU, but also in China, the US and Israel. Perhaps the toughest laws against rehabilitation of Nazism have been adopted in Germany. Russia’s ability to enforce this new law beyond its borders would depend entirely on the government’s willingness to do so.

“While the Kremlin encourages Russians to celebrate the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazism, politicians in several former Soviet republics denounce the Red Army as occupiers who brought their countries decades of totalitarianism.”

Decades of “totalitarianism” during which these former Soviet republics retained their local governments, their language and their culture, eventually enabling them to leave the Soviet Union and, in most cases, to quickly become prospering (relative to Russia itself, anyway) independent states. Similar attempts at independence in certain democratic states led to fruitless but bloody civil wars claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.

“In Ukraine, attempts to classify a Stalin-era famine as ethnically targeted genocide have angered Russia. It says ethnic Russians too died of hunger in other parts of the U.S.S.R., and that the initiative is a ploy to stir anti-Russian sentiment.”

It is a fact that famine in the USSR in the early 1930s claimed more victims in Russia than it did in the Ukraine. To say that only Ukrainians starved during those times is like to say that only Jews died during the Second World War. The myth of “Holodomor” perpetuated by Ukraine’s nationalistic government has been specifically designed to highlight trivial cultural differences between Russia and Ukraine and to blow these social peculiarities entirely out of proportion. Ukraine’s economy is in ruins and the country’s, how should I put it, maverick president has to take drastic actions to stay in power.

“Orlando Figes, a professor at the University of London, says the commission is part of a clampdown on historical scholarship. “They can make it hard for Russian historians to teach and publish…”

Dr. Figes is the author of several books on Russian culture undemanding readers often mistake for historical works. In the early 1990s many Western and some Russian historians have developed a fool-proof moneymaking scheme: pressure the government into opening access to previously restricted archives, extract the “juiciest” tidbits of historical information, construct novels around these cherry-picked facts, present these works of fiction as historical research, and market their creations to the widest possible audience: people unfamiliar with history. Works every time but, hopefully, not for much longer.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

Related posts:

1. Vladimir Putin’s future: A tale of two Russias | Editorial
2. Cameron and Putin meeting ‘historical mistake’, says exiled Russian tycoon
3. Cameron meeting Putin is a ‘historical mistake’, says exiled Russian tycoon
4. The Makings of a Successful Foreign Policy
5. Several Foreign Policy and Media Takes