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.

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.

The Russian Government appears uneasy with criminalizing historical opinions, though the justification given below seems quite narrowly technical and not what would be a more principled position–that freedom of thought and freedom of speech are incompatible with state authorities determining which historical views are acceptable. From Ekho Moskvy, 14 January 2010, via BBC monitoring and Johnson’s Russia List:

The Russian government has refused to endorse a draft law criminalizing denial of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II, Russian Ekho Moskvy radio station reported on 14 January, quoting a report by the business daily Vedomosti.

Vedomosti has obtained a copy of the relevant resolution, signed by Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Sobyanin, which reads in particular that the ministers have failed to understand the part of the bill dealing with distortions of the verdict of the Nuremberg Trials, because “it is unclear to them how a document that has already come into force can be distorted”, the report said.

The draft law was submitted to the State Duma about two years ago by several leading members of the One Russia party, including Emergencies Minister Sergey Shoygu and Boris Gryzlov, the State Duma speaker and chairman of the party’s supreme political council. In May 2009 the relevant parliamentary committee recommended the bill for passage but things have not progressed since then. The report quoted a source in the State Duma as saying that “from the very start (the bill) was a fairly controversial initiative proposed exclusively in connection with Shoygu’s vociferous statements (demanding that denial of the Soviet role in World War II be made a criminal offence)”.

Yegor Gaidar, architect of Russia’s shock therapy and economic reform as Boris Yeltsin’s Deputy Prime Minister and then Prime Minister, has died at the age of 53. In my Moscow time, I saw Gaidar in person only once, at the memorial service for murdered journalist Dmitrii Kholodov. The service and viewing of the body took place just outside the Frunzenskaia metro station, a place familiar to generations of historians of Russia. This was the fall of 1994 and Gaidar was, of course, highly unpopular and was almost shouted off the stage by a hostile crowd. I gave him points for showing up.

Millions of Russians still hold Gaidar and his compatriots in that first Yeltsin government responsible for the misery of the post-Soviet years. I’m more sympathetic, both because of the size of the task Gaidar faced and the poisonous political circumstances. As Gaidar put it to PBS in 2000,

I had the general feeling of a short political time. The situation was extremely unstable, one of crisis. We lived in conditions of dual power, so that the country was no longer functioning. But we had a mandate of trust then and we had to get results, at the very least eliminate the most urgent of the crises, otherwise we couldn’t resolve the other questions. First of all we had to solve the crisis brought about by the collapse of the old system and to replace it with a new system, and, if at all possible, to do so that the changes would be irreversible. We had to battle with a new wave of reaction against inescapably difficult changes, which again would lead to more radical changes with the possible formation of a totalitarian regime. These were the two tasks we assigned ourselves in 1992-1993. But the tasks selected were very ambitious, and we had the feeling that no one could guarantee that we would have the time to resolve them.

Discussing losing his post in Yeltsin’s confrontation with the Duma in 1992-1993, Gaidar said

In general, the transformation of Russia in the direction of a market had obviously begun, but I never had the feeling that it was secure, that it was guaranteed. I had the feeling that there still remained a great risk that the situation could be reversed.

This is telling. I have heard it attributed to Gaidar (though I haven’t been able to track down a precise quotation) that he went to work each day as Yeltsin’s Deputy Prime Minister with the goal of finding the one thing he could do that day to make a return to the old system most difficult.

As a research historian, I note that Yeltsin died in April 2007. Boris Fyodorov, another key figure in Yeltsin’s early reforms, died in November 2008. Gaidar has now died. Though all those men wrote accounts of their time in politics, we have lost a major part of the human record of the creation of a new Russia. This shows, by the way, how early mortality is not a phenomenon of Russia’s lumpenproletariat–Russia’s elite is likewise prone to dying too soon.