THE RUSSIAN FRONT

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?

Here’s a surprise–in the ongoing Russian preoccupation with falsification of history, it’s the supposedly liberal Dmitrii Medvedev who’s been complaining about falsifiers, and the supposedly authoritarian Vladimir Putin who’s said quite sensible things.  Writing in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza during his visit to Poland, Putin made a number of points which seem to me wholly correct: no country can claim clean hands in the 1930s.  We must all learn from history, but “exploiting memory, anatomizing history and seeking pretexts for mutual complaints and resentment causes a lot of harm and proves lack of responsibility. . . . The canvas of history is not a third-rate copy which can be roughly retouched or, following customer’s orders, modified by the addition of bright of dark tints.”

He specifically complains about those who attempt to whitewash Nazi accomplices (certainly a fair point), and argues that the road to World War II was a complicated one, beginning with the Treaty of Versailles and continuing through a host of events, including both Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  He’s correct to mention, though his Polish audience may not have appreciated it, Polish cooperation with Nazi Germany in the partition of Czechoslovakia.

In sum, a remarkably sober and even-handed appraisal of the need for an honest look at history.  Let us hope Putin’s audience back in Russia pays attention.

UPDATE: Zbigniew Brzezinski likes the article, too.  THAT is striking.

Russian Front Commenter mab asked about a recent document release from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) on the Baltics in World War II.

I’ve finally had time to do a first read of the documents to see what I think they’re intended to show and what they actually do show.  The collection is entitled “The Baltics and Geopolitics” (Pribaltika i geopolitika), available in three parts on the SVR website, at present only in Russian.

No question that this release is connected to the 70th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (early in the morning of August 24, 1939), and not surprisingly Russia’s SVR is releasing this document collection in an effort to shape interpretations of the events of 1939-1941.  This fits quite well, at least in the SVR’s public spin on the documents, with Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev’s efforts to fight what he sees as falsification of the Soviet Union’s role in World War II, efforts that I’ve discussed extensively at the Russian Front, most recently here and here.

According to the SVR, the documents reveal that the Soviet Union had no choice but to enter Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that Britain and France had abandoned any possible alliance with the USSR, and the alliance with Hitler was necessary to prevent German takeover of the Baltic states.

The document collection is quite interesting, but what it tells us is not what we’re told it tells us.  The conclusion that the Soviet Union was forced into an alliance with Nazi Germany simply does not follow from the evidence presented.  It reminds me of Emile Faguet’s parody of Plato (hilariously funny if you’re read the Republic–trust me):

“The whole is greater than the part?”
“Surely.”
“And the part is less than the whole?”
“Yes.”
“Therefore clearly philosophers should rule the state.”
“What?”
“It is evident; let us go over it again.” (Hat tip: Will Durant)

While the documents don’t quite hold up to the weight put upon them, what we do learn is nonetheless quite significant.

Most of the pre-war documentation is either Soviet intelligence reports on the policies of the Baltic states, or actual government documents from the Baltic states.  It’s not surprising that the Soviets would have Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian documents, since they occupied those states and could comb their archives at leisure.  What’s striking, though, is that the Soviets seem to have had a VERY good agent in the Finnish foreign ministry, who got them lots of Finnish diplomatic documents in something like real time.  The actual Finnish documents include Soviet cover letters from the time; the Estonian documents, by contrast, have no accompanying covers that would indicate that the Soviets had access to them in 1938-1939 (doc. 26, for example), and so the Estonian documents were likely obtained after occupation.

The actual content of those early documents hits on a number of themes, many but not all of which fit comfortably with current Russian political priorities.  These include German commercial penetration of the Baltic, pro-German attitudes among large segments of the population, and anti-Soviet views, at least in Estonia and Latvia.  The implicit message here that the SVR would like us to take away is that Soviet occupation of the Baltics prevented them from becoming German satellites.  Maybe–one could just as easily argue that the Soviet threat pushed the Baltics toward Germany.

The oddity here is Lithuania–Russia today would probably prefer to paint all the Baltics with a single Nazi-sympathizer brush, but Lithuania followed a somewhat different line.  It shared no border with the Soviet Union, and was quite nervous about Poland, both of which made it more friendly to the USSR.  That didn’t make any difference–it got swallowed up like the others.

There’s an awful lot of documentation of the sovietization of the Baltics.  Two things strike me here.  First, we have a mental picture of the Soviet takeover as a sharp break: the Soviets move in, and everything changes instantaneously.  The process was, in fact, longer and more complex, as the documents show.  Second, the fact that the process of sovietization was not instantaneous makes it much like the later sovietization of Eastern Europe.   A comparative analysis of the process of Soviet takeover in the Baltics 1939-1941 and the Soviet takeover in Eastern Europe 1945-1948 would be quite interesting–twisting and complex paths to a foreordained outcome.

One of the things that’s most striking to me about the documents is what’s not included.  Nearly two-thirds of the documentation comes AFTER 22 June 1941, when the really significant part of the story is over.  There’s much less than I would have liked to see on the key 1939-1941 period.

Most strikingly, and I find this utterly staggering, is that there are NO documents on the period from July 1940 to November 1941.  One or two important things happen in there, but this publication tells us nothing.  If I were Viktor Suvorov (though I’m not), I would be jumping up and down and pointing to this omission as evidence of something to hide: namely Soviet intent to launch aggressive war in 1941.

Words cannot do this justice; you have to watch it.  The meaning of World War II to the peoples of the former Soviet Union, animated live, with sand. I note that this is from Ukraine’s equivalent of “America’s Got Talent,” and it’s done in Russian. Hat tip to Warming Glow.