To the outside observer, this would sound like two opposed organizations. This being Russia, of course, appearances can be deceiving. Only a few of the speeches and statements have been released, but what’s available so far suggests that there was much more about openness and access than there was about secrecy. Being generally bitter and cynical by nature, I was expecting only boilerplate (and there was, to be sure, plenty of that), but there was a remarkable amount of substantive information on offer. In particular, historians of Russia owe it to themselves to read the speech of Rosarkhiv head A. N. Artizov in full.

Chair of the meeting was S. E. Naryshkin, head of Medvedev’s Presidential Administration. His remarks were quite brief, and opened with a very vague set of goals for the meeting: “perspectives on the development of archival affairs, working out and realization of a series of measures directed at supporting a just and objective representation of Russian history.” This is, of course, not especially enlightening.

It did get better though. Naryshkin conceded that the falsification and anti-Russian history that Russian political leaders have been getting so worked up about are largely the result of bad access to documents. In Naryshkin’s words, “lack or inaccessibility of information becomes the condition and reason for falsification.” This makes the most important step “further declassification of archival documents.”

Naryshkin also set priorities for the Russian archival system. His first was electronic access–both the preservation of newly-generated electronic documents (not a big deal for most historians, at least not now) and improving electronic access to existing collections.

Next came access to documents, in which Naryshkin actually referred to the “society’s right of free access to information.” This was immediately followed by a qualification to “strictly provide for the security of the state and respect the rights of citizens,” but the very idea of treating access to archival information as a right, even if phrased in social rather than individual terms, is a major step.

A. N. Artizov’s speech was much heavier on concrete information. He noted the particular problems Russian archives face: finding qualified staff, and coping with the mass of records created by the totalizing nature of the Soviet state. Nonetheless, he touted the achievements of Russian archives in the last few years, including declassification and scholarly publication. Scans of key documents on the Katyn massacre achieved two million hits per day when made available to the public.

Veterans of reading rooms know that many of the people there are seeking to document the work or military service records of themselves or their relatives. Rosarkhiv has a new website where such inquiries can be submitted electronically. Historians of limited time and unlimited funding should note the ability to submit thematic requests for information as a paid service.

Thanks to Artizov, fans of the political use of history can look forward to a document collection that Artizov has promised will be coming soon: “the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis”

Artizov had quite a bit to say about declassification. He cited 10 million files declassified since 1991, but noted how slow and labor-intensive the process is. He claimed that 1.7 million files remain classified, 1.1 million of those Communist Party or USSR government files. I should note that those numbers sound low to me. They could be true, I suppose, if they exclude some very important archives that are outside the Rosarkhiv system: the military, the foreign ministry, and the security services.

New files come in to the Rosarkhiv system at the rate of 1.5 million per year. Most notably, Artizov says the Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev fonds have all been transferred from the Kremlin’s Presidential Archive to Rosarkhiv. The bulk of the remaining Politburo archive will make the same transfer in 2010-12. Transfer doesn’t mean declassification, of course, but certainly the move from presidential to archivist hands is a good thing for researchers.

Artizov also gave some updated information on the major World War II archive that he discussed back in March. I was skeptical of this on practical and scholarly grounds, and remain so. Artizov is remarkably specific, though, which suggests that efforts proceed apace to make this archive happen. The plan for the new archive is to build it on the grounds of the existing Ministry of Defense Archive in Podol’sk. While this will certainly make the physical transfer of MoD records much simpler, it makes life much tougher for foreign researchers, who will be faced with the unenviable choices of either taking a daily elektrichka trek out from Moscow, or living all the way out in Podol’sk.

Fortunately, this situation is about to change. Late next month, Routledge publishers will make its 2009 release The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-1945: A Documentary Reader by Alexander Hill (Associate Professor of Military History, University of Calgary) available in a handy paperback edition.

Hill’s edited volume contains documents covering wide-ranging aspects of the Soviet military experience: from pre-War diplomacy and preparations, through the debacle of 1941, to the Fall of Berlin and invasion of Manchuria. Separate chapters covering the Siege of Leningrad, Lend-Lease and the Economy, and the Partisan movement round out the volume. The collection is accompanied by Hill’s expert commentary and suggestions for further readings.

The book is an ideal supplement for individuals interested in the documentary history the Soviet war effort. And it makes a terrific companion text for courses devoted to the Second World War.

To pre-order your copy directly from Routledge, just click on the link above.

Our GlavKom Scott Palmer will be delighted to know that the Rodina-mat’ monument in Volgograd is an easy winner for the most significant symbol of victory.

VTsIOM also surveyed turning points in the war. Russians were asked what they considered to be a decisive moment in the Great Fatherland War, and the moment in the Great Fatherland War. Stalingrad wins both: 68% of Russians saw it as a decisive moment, and 31% as the turning point of the war. Kursk and Moscow essentially tied for second place in both circumstances, as Kursk scored 49% as a decisive moment and 17% as the turning point; Moscow got 46% and 15%.

That surprises me to some degree. I’m not surprised at all to see Stalingrad winning, though my own inclination would be to see Moscow as the most significant moment, an issue that we can perhaps argue about in the comments. Finding Kursk in 2nd is odd, though I’ve been aware that it looms far larger in the Russian consciousness than in the Western. I’m not sure what to make of that. Back during perestroika, Duma member and former Deputy Minister of Defense Andrei Kokoshin argued for the importance of the battle of Kursk as showing the viability of a fundamentally defensive strategy, though it’s hard to imagine that view affecting the general public. I also note that Operation Bagration–the destruction of Army Group Center in Belorussia in summer 1944–only rates 4% as a significant moment, well below the breaking of the Leningrad blockade (34%), the taking of Berlin (13%), and tied with the Rzhev operation [?!?!?!?].

There’s also a pattern in the data: young people are significantly less likely than older people to see any of the big events of the war as decisive–74% of those over 60 see Stalingrad as a decisive moment; only 58% of those 18-24. The sole exception is Moscow, where there is no drop-off by age. I think can be attributed to ignorance–Moscow is important now, one might think, and so it must have been important then. The youngest cohort is by far the most likely (14%) to fail to name a single decisive moment in the war.

What about the question of ignorance? One of the ways VTsIOM measures this is by asking people to name hero-cities.

This is a task I would fail miserably. I’d have no trouble with the obvious ones–Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad–but then I’d start thinking too much. Kursk? Big battle, but it wasn’t actually fought that close to the city itself . . . . Brest-Litovsk? More a fortress than a city, but I’m pretty sure I remember it from the Aleksandrovskii Garden outside the Kremlin . . . No way I’d get Kerch or Novorossiisk. The oddity here is that despite Stalingrad’s centrality to Russian memories of the war, it’s only mentioned by 45% of the respondents as a hero-city; Moscow (59%) and Leningrad (57%) both beat it.

In terms of more substantive knowledge of the basic facts of the war, I was not able to find detailed breakdowns on VTsIOM’s website, so I’m going by the summaries available here.

First, it’s reassuring to know that Russians are clear (88%) that Germany started the war, and only 1% blame the US.

The good folks at VTsIOM are bothered that only 22% percent of Russians can name the correct start date of World War II (1939), and the bulk of the rest, 58%, name 1941. That one doesn’t bother me so much, and I would imagine you’d get very similar answers from an American audience. For Americans and Soviets, World War II really did start in 1941, though as a good broad-minded historian I certainly know the war begin in 1939. While seeing 1941 as the start of the war betrays a certain Russocentrism or Americacentrism, insisting that the start date is 1939 suggests a similar Eurocentrism. If we look at the Far East, one could make a decent case for 1937, or even 1931.

Similarly, in response to the question of who commanded the Red Army, only 49% say Stalin, with the bulk of the rest (31%) naming Zhukov. As above, that large number of errors is understandable, and the supposed wrong answer isn’t entirely wrong. Stalin certainly wasn’t commanding armies in the field.

What about unambiguous questions? The record on dates isn’t impressive. Only 34% can name 1942 as the start of the battle of Stalingrad, and 35% can name 1944 as the lifting of the siege of Leningrad. Things look somewhat better when we get to who fought on what side. 62% can identify the US as an ally, and 53% Britain. 82% got Germany as an enemy, but only 30% Japan. Since Japan was only at war with the USSR for about two weeks, that’s hardly surprising.

Those figures are not entirely out of line with American ones. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a right-of-center American organization, did a survey in which 69% of Americans could identify Germany and Japan as America’s enemies in a multiple choice test. Of course, it’s appalling that 31% couldn’t manage even that, but I’m not sure it’s any more or less appalling than 18% of Russians not managing to hear that Germany was the enemy in World War II.

The only English-language coverage I found was from Voice of Russia, and the translation isn’t entirely correct. 13 million files in the Russian original becomes 13 billion documents in English, for example.

Artizov gives no concrete reason for the policy beyond the general Good Thing of bringing together all materials relating to the Great Fatherland War. It’s not difficult to imagine, though, what’s driving this plan. The Putin-Medvedev administration has made World War II a central part of the regime’s project of self-justification, and something grandiose to commemorate the war is a logical step. As seems typical for the current government in Russia, this big idea appears to have come out of nowhere with little public discussion or preparation. Though Artizov says that the necessary legislation is in the works, I searched in vain on Rosarkhiv’s website for any indication of the potential for such a major step. Clearly some preparatory work has been done–Rosarkhiv does feature a compilation of all photographic records of the war under the heading “Pobeda [Victory], 1941-1945.”

The problems in Artizov’s scheme are many, though–practical, scholarly, and political. Many of the practical issues are laid out quite clearly in an article in Vedomosti. Artizov uses the phrase 13 million files, and suggests the intent is to unite ALL materials on the war. But the Ministry of Defense Archives in Podol’sk have ten million files by themselves, to say nothing of the host of archives around Russia with relevant documents. A new complex capable of holding that amount of material, plus its selection and transportation, all within five years, AND at the same time that the regime has a number of other big projects on its plate, seems a trifle ambitious.

From the scholarly point-of-view, the organizing principle of the proposed new archive strikes me as dubious. Archivists (and historians) like the functional principle of organization–keep papers as their creators kept them. There’s a point to preserving materials as far as possible in the organizational scheme used by those who originally created the documents. That’s the best way to get into the flow of paper, which reflects the flow of work and power of the original institution. The proposed new archive violates that by organizing itself around an event (making it the only event-centered archive in the Russian archival system) and eviscerating the institutional and thematic archives which are already well-established. The plan seems to be to take World War II military materials from the Ministry of Defense, partisan staff and State Defense Committee documents from the Party Archive (RGASPI), and so on. This might extend, if we take this to its logical conclusion, to pulling all 1941-1945 documents from Volgograd, say, which would do terrible violence to the integrity of archival collections all over Russia. It just isn’t clear exactly what sort of selection principle Artizov has in mind.

Putting the problem that way–the archives which will be forced to give up their documents–makes the political problem plain. I can’t imagine that the heads of archives within the Rosarkhiv system are happy about having big chunks of their collections taken from them. A number were present at the press conference at which Artizov made his announcement–Sergei Mironenko (State Archive of the Russian Federation), Oleg Naumov (Social-Political History, i.e. the Party Archive), and Elena Tiurina (Economics Archive). They had NOTHING to say about Artizov’s big plan, though they were quite happy to talk about what their archives were doing to commemorate victory. The elephant in the room, of course, is the Ministry of Defense. Artizov says that the Ministry of Defense is perfectly happy to hand over its World War II materials to civilian archivists, but the notorious difficulty of getting materials from the Ministry of Defense’s archive at Podol’sk makes me skeptical of this.

I welcome comments from anyone who has a better sense of the politics behind this.

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.

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.

“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 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)”.

There doesn’t appear to be much whiff of falsification or President Medvedev’s Truth Commission about this. This involves state interference in history, but this seems more local than central, and the issue that set it off doesn’t appear to be among those things that have Medvedev upset. Three things jump out at me on the supposed grounds for this arrest.

One is that an official of the Interior Ministry was arrested as well, presumably for handing over documents that weren’t supposed to be handed over. This gives a real “there but for the grace of God go I” feeling. The rules and procedures for what’s classified and what’s not are byzantine and opaque. Any researcher has to trust that archivists and officials are handing over documents that are permissible to use. I’ve never been on the archivist side of that relationship, but I have to imagine navigating the rules for Russian officialdom is quite difficult.

Two is that the ostensible grounds for this arrest seem to be Suprun’s alleged violation of the personal privacy of either Germans sent to labor camps in the Soviet far north or of Soviet officials running those labor camps. In each case, talking about privacy seems a little ludicrous. I’ve run into this particular standard for closing documents before–back in the late 1990s folders at the Party Archive in Moscow had pages that I wasn’t supposed to look at because they contained personal information. Security wasn’t exactly tight–the bound volume had a paper loop slipped around the pages I wasn’t supposed to read. Again, the line here seems rather arbitrary. What materials in an archive don’t contain some kind of personal information?

Three is that the real reason for the arrest, not the ostensible one, seems to be embarrassment over the treatment of Soviet citizens of German ancestry and German prisoners-of-war at the hands of the Soviet government.

This illustrates the big problem with suppressing history–getting your story straight. In the kerfluffle this summer over Colonel Kovalyov and his attempt to blame World War II on the Poles, it seemed clear to me that the bigger goal was being nice to Germany (Russia’s best friend in Europe) and jabbing at Poland. A similar but short-sighted motivation may be at work here: i.e., “don’t let anybody know about bad things that happened to the Germans.” This has backfired spectacularly; anyone who’s interested already knew very well that bad things happened to Germans in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, and Suprun’s arrest has ticked off the Germans, including the German Red Cross.

The line that has not been crossed yet (to the best of my knowledge) is the arrest of a foreign historian or confiscation of the research materials of a foreign historian. Anyone knows differently, I’d like to hear.

What’s striking to me is that Buchanan’s argument–that war could have been avoided had only Poland been more reasonable in dealing with Nazi Germany’s legitimate demands–is in its essentials identical to the case made by Russian Colonel S. N. Kovalyov a couple of months ago.

In Buchanan’s formulation,

The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.
Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland’s rescue.
But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?
Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn’t want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany.

In short, the Poles should have surrendered Danzig, an ethnically German city, to the Germans rather than fight.

I’ve outlined the argument (as formulated by Kovalyov) and my objections to it before.  What Buchanan (and Kovalyov earlier) are omitting is the context of the guarantee to Poland against German aggression at the end of March 1939.  On 13 March 1939, Hitler had invaded and annexed the rump Czechoslovakia, rendering meaningless his claims to be reuniting German territories to the Reich.  Why trust him after that?