Jun 26 2009
The AHA weighs in . . .
The American Historical Association has written an open letter to Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev protesting state intervention in the determination of historical truth.
I cannot resist pointing that we are dealing with the AHA, so the letter doesn’t use the phrase “historical truth” as part of the AHA’s position. The closest the letter gets is the “reality of the past.” It instead uses the word “truth” in scare quotes and has “historical truth” only as part of a quotation from the organization “Liberte pour L’Histoire.” They’re French, so that must make it OK.
I do have a serious point here, as opposed to simply taking pot shots at the AHA. If there is no historical truth because everything is tainted beyond redemption by politics and bias, then it’s tough to get mad at Medvedev. After all, what would make his bias and politicization worse than anybody else’s?
Of course, in actual practice, regardless of their theoretical stance, most historians do all they can to control and reduce bias and get as close as they can to objectivity. That means, among other things, careful use of evidence. It’s one of the reasons I’d like to know who Medvedev thinks the falsifiers are. If they’re cooking their evidence, I have a professional obligation to call them on it.
[...] No question that this release is connected to the 70th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (early in the morning of August 24, 1939), and not surprisingly Russia’s SVR is releasing this document collection in an effort to shape interpretations of the events of 1939-1941. This fits quite well, at least in the SVR’s public spin on the documents, with Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev’s efforts to fight what he sees as falsification of the Soviet Union’s role in World War II, efforts that I’ve discussed extensively at the Russian Front, most recently here and here. [...]