Aug 29 2009
Update: Medvedev’s Historical Truth Commission
According to Itar-Tass, Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev’s historical truth commission held its first meeting on 28 August.
No surprises. The emphasis is not actually on getting better access to documents or promoting scholarly analysis of the past, but instead on scoring political points. The entire exercise is intellectually incoherent, and so it’s no surprise that what’s come out so far makes no sense, at least in terms of its ostensible purpose.
Naryshkin specifically said that the historical approach he’s fighting “aims to revise the geopolitical results of the war.” But what does that mean? What are the geopolitical results of the war that might conceivably be revised? SOVIET borders moved west from what they had been in August 1939, but those borders are now well west of RUSSIA’s frontier, with the limited exception of the Kaliningrad enclave. If the real concern were revising the results of World War II, then we’d be looking at a tussle between Poland and Belarus. Instead, Belarus-Russia relations have cratered in the last few months. If anyone outside of Europe’s wingnut right is seriously suggesting the revision of the borders established as a result of World War II, I’ve missed it. Let’s not forget that the Helsinki Accords, AND Helmut Kohl’s declarations at the end of the Cold War, drew a line under territorial revision in Europe.
In addition, Naryshkin declared he’s dealing with foreign threats–that “Russia, as historic successor of the Soviet Union, is provocatively blamed for events and tragedies of those years, which prepares a base for making claims against our country: political, financial and territorial.” The remedial actions that he proposed, however, were all internal: how history is taught inside Russia. That suggests what seems to me to be the true goal of this operation–tapping into Russian nationalism, not actually promoting historical truth.