I’m happy to report that a number of Russian commentators have pointed out the problems inherent in a presidential commission appointed to chase down falsifiers of history. Indeed, even some members have distanced themselves from the idea of policing history and historians. On the program Red Corner on 22 May, journalist Nikolai Svanidze, a member of the commission, had some positive things to say about what he wants the commission to do and not do:
If the state excessively increases its role regarding the regulation and study of history, that is a direct route to the falsification of history. This makes me somewhat concerned about the work of our commission. . . .To say what is good and bad in history, to advise professionals about how to study it – in my view, that is falsification of history. . . .I’ll tell you what I dream of regarding the work of our commission. I dream that the archives will be opened, and that the work of the commission will proceed on the basis of new, so-far unstudied facts, unknown to both the public and professional historians. If that happens, then I, as both a member of the commission and a citizen, will applaud the commission and be glad that I joined it.
To be sure, talk is cheap (or, po russki, bumaga vse terpit), but this talk is a lot better than Medvedev’s talk about falsification.
I’m trying to track down the actual episode. I got these accounts from BBC monitoring, as cited in Johnson’s Russia List # 97, 26 May 2009. The reason I’d like to see the original is that Aleksandr Tsipko also appeared on the program and said some things that in English translation are fairly incoherent. So I’d like to find out if the incoherence is Tsipko’s, or inserted by the translator. At least as reported, Tsipko wants the commission to:
register some absolute assessments of historical facts on which the legitimacy of the state and the legal legitimacy of the authorities rest, define the ideological base of the authorities. . . . If you do not formulate the ideological base of your own authority as anti-Communist, then someone will come to (President) Medvedev and (Prime Minister) Putin, asking, so where is your authority from?
Seems to me that the authority and legitimacy of Russia’s elected officials comes from whether or not they were the electorate’s choice in a free and fair election conducted within an accepted constitutional system. That has precisely zero to do with the relative contribution of the Soviet Union to victory in World War II, whether Stalin can compared to Hitler, and to what extent the Baltic states experienced Soviet re-entry as liberation.