THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Lennart Samuelson was kind enough to pass this Newsweek illustration along and let me post it. You’ll need to click the image to get the bad history in all its glory.

Clearly I’ve somehow missed the Western Allies’ triumphant liberation of Berlin in my previous studies of World War II.

So the US is certainly not immune to messing up the history of World War II. This particular instance, though, seems to me to represent the American problem of general ignorance about the war, and not the contemporary Russian problem of attempting to politicize knowledge of the war.

The FSB, lineal descendant of the Soviet KGB, has once again leapt to the defense of historical truth. A round table held in the FSB’s Cultural Center has come to the shocking conclusion that radical nationalists in Ukraine and the Baltics committed war crimes in collaboration with the Nazis.

All in a day’s work in the struggle against falsification, of course, though I’m still wondering which serious historians out there hold the view that nationalists in Ukraine and the Baltics DIDN’T do nasty things. The fact that Goebbel’s pistol was on display (an item of dubious relevance to the question of East European nationalism) suggests a certain lack of scholarly rigor.

In keeping with Russian government’s historical truth commission, with only two and a half actual historians, press accounts of this round table don’t actually mention any real historians who participated. Neither Rosarkhiv nor the FSB, the ostensible sponsors of this event, have any account of what happened as of March 4. I’m going here by the English-language Itar-Tass story and checking a number of Russian accounts here, here, and here.

I’ve found only three people specifically mentioned as being present: head of Rosarkhiv A. N. Artizov, FSB deputy director Yurii Gorbunov, and head of the FSB’s archive service Vasilii Khristoforov. Were there any actual practicing historians at this round table? I’d appreciate knowing.

This story is not technically a matter of Russian military history, but Raul Castro was Cuban defense minister for almost fifty years, and so there indeed are Soviet ties. My chief purpose for posting this link to note that it’s Castro who serves as the voice of moderation and calm in the Colombian-Venezuelan spat.

Obscene shouting match at the Unity Summit? I’m reminded of the great line from Dr. Strangelove: “You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”

In the interests of fairness . . .

It’s not only the current Russian government that’s preoccupied with issues of historical falsification. In connection with another project, I serendipitously stumbled across a 1923 crusade by the state of Wisconsin to fight invidious falsifiers of the War of 1812. Today, of course, we’d be pleased to find someone who cares enough about the War of 1812 to bother to falsify it, but we’re dealing here with a simpler time.

Anyway, let me quote the statute, which I get courtesy of the American HIstorical Review 28.4 (July 1923), p. 699–JSTOR has it if your institution has access:

No history or other text-book shall be adopted for use or be used in any district school, city school, vocational school, or high school which falsifies the facts regarding the war of independence, or the war of 1812, or which defames our nation’s founders or misrepresents the ideals and causes for which they struggled and sacrificed, or which contains propaganda favorable to any foreign government.

No penalties for textbook authors, but districts which continue to use textbooks found to be guilty of falsifying are subject to revocation of state aid.

Now as best as I can find through on canvassing of Wisconsin’s online statute book, this law has long since become a dead letter. Perhaps some bright MA student in the UW system can do a thesis on the circumstances that produced the law–I’d speculate that it’s post-World War I isolationism and resentment of a war perceived to have been fought in the interests of the British–hence the focus on the revolutionary war and 1812, and not on anything else.

But the absurdity of this law, I think, highlights the absurdity of efforts to fight historical falsification more generally. For one, it is an effort by the state of Wisconsin to dictate the coverage of events which took place when Wisconsin was not a state and to which Wisconsin was not party–are you listening, Russian Federation President Dmitrii Medvedev? For two, this is clearly action not in service of an abstract quest for the truth, but in service of some particular political ax-to-grind now lost to us in the sands of time. After all, was there REALLY a problem of high school textbooks in Wisconsin carrying foreign propaganda, or are we dealing with interpretations at odds with the views of some crusading state legislator?

Russia’s Commission to combat historical falsification has met. Sergei Naryshkin, head of the Presidential Administration, makes it reasonably clear what the goal has been all along.

“Let’s be realistic: there is a number of countries, in which political passions regarding certain issues of our history are still running high . . . At a strictly scientific level we have managed to sway our opponents or make them think about the futility of attempts to impose on us their view of history through falsification. . . . But success at a popular level is still far away.” (RIA-Novosti)

The “number of countries” are easily identifiable: Poland and the Baltics are fairly clearly the places that Naryshkin has in mind, and in particular the idea that the Soviet return in 1944-45 was not liberation but instead a new subjugation. But, as should go without saying, that idea is not a question of fact but a question of interpretation.

My modest proposal: let’s open up the Presidential Archive for the period from 1939-1945 and see if that sheds any light on these questions. Naryshkin’s in a position to make that happen.