THE RUSSIAN FRONT

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)”.

Latest news–Mikhail Suprun, an historian from Archangel, arrested in Russia for research on sensitive topics. (And let me note–the Guardian continues to do an excellent job of monitoring the politics of history in Russia).

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.

Noted political commentator and past Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has weighed in on the origins of the Second World War, both at his own site and at townhall.com.

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?