THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Colonel S. N. Kovalyov’s essay on the origins of World War II (mentioned here and with Russian text available through here )is an excellent example of the pitfalls in attempting to draw history into contemporary politics by going after vague and undefined falsifiers.

One pitfall is that trying to score political points makes you screw up your facts, and thereby look dumb. The claim in Kovalyov’s article that stirred up public controversy is that Poland produced the war by failing to accept Hitler’s perfectly reasonable demands in the fall of 1938.

What Kovalyov misses are two salient facts. First, Hitler’s allegedly reasonable demands for Danzig and an extraterritorial connection across the Polish corridor to East Prussia came in the immediate aftermath of some other allegedly reasonable demands for Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. Hitler’s request to the Poles is hardly as innocent and pure as Kovalyov makes it seem, and the Poles were quite correct to see the threat behind the superficially limited demand.

Second, Kovalyov points out that it is only after the Poles’ final refusal of German demands on 26 March 1939 that Hitler denounced the 1934 German-Polish non-aggression pact. What Kovalyov fails to note is that this Polish refusal came ELEVEN DAYS after the German invasion and annexation of rump Czechoslovakia. This provided such a clear and unequivocal demonstration of the true nature of Hitler’s supposedly reasonable and limited demands that even Neville Chamberlain picked up on it. Kovalyov fails to mention this obvious piece of context.

Kovalyov also suggests that the Soviets had no choice but to occupy the Baltics, or else face the prospect of the Nazis doing it instead. That’s a reasonable argument, and people could certainly discuss its merits. But when Kovalyov says that the Baltics joined the Soviet Union “by request of the governments and parliaments of these states absolutely voluntarily,” my response is “pull the other one.”

(For non-native English speakers who might be reading this, that idiom means “that argument is obviously ridiculous, and would only be convincing if I were stupid.”)

The second pitfall of going after falsifiers of history as Kovalyov does is that it is pushing on an open door. His bigger claim is not really about Poland, but instead that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the only reasonable choice for Stalin in summer 1939. The Western allies had made it abundantly clear, especially at Munich, that they would rather do anything than fight the Germans, and the Poles refused to even consider allowing Soviet troops passage to get the Germans.

Anyone who has even the smallest familiarity with Western literature on the origins of World War II would reply to Kovalyov, “Yes, of course, almost everyone who’s looked at 1938 and 1939 would agree with you that the Western allies gave Stalin no reason to trust them to fight Hitler. You make Hitler look like a good guy to prove THAT?”

The third pitfall of torturing the historical record is that you get caught. Given that Kovalyov’s article has been pulled from the Ministry of Defense’s website, and that his attacks on Poland and the Baltic States and partial rehabilitation of Hitler will win no friends in Europe, he has to be a little worried about a posting to scenic Kamchatka.

I have never met Kovalyov nor read anything else he’s written. That said, I get the sense that he set out to score some points on Poland and the Baltics. To do that, though, he had to make Hitler seem reasonable and statesmanlike, which doesn’t fly with a lot of Russians who might otherwise be quite happy with his stance.

I think we may have a candidate for the Truth Commission’s first target: a Russian military officer who argues that Poland’s responsible for World War II.

I’m headed to the MoD website to see if I can find it for myself. My thanks to the person who brought this to my attention.

UPDATE: here’s the Russian-language text of the Defense Ministry’s statement disavowing the official status of the argument.

UPDATE: the article in question by S. N. Kovalyov seems to have been taken down from its original page (subtly titled “History: Against Lies and Falsification), but I was able to grab a copy of the text and will post it soon.

I’m happy to report that a number of Russian commentators have pointed out the problems inherent in a presidential commission appointed to chase down falsifiers of history. Indeed, even some members have distanced themselves from the idea of policing history and historians. On the program Red Corner on 22 May, journalist Nikolai Svanidze, a member of the commission, had some positive things to say about what he wants the commission to do and not do:

If the state excessively increases its role regarding the regulation and study of history, that is a direct route to the falsification of history. This makes me somewhat concerned about the work of our commission. . . .To say what is good and bad in history, to advise professionals about how to study it – in my view, that is falsification of history. . . .I’ll tell you what I dream of regarding the work of our commission. I dream that the archives will be opened, and that the work of the commission will proceed on the basis of new, so-far unstudied facts, unknown to both the public and professional historians. If that happens, then I, as both a member of the commission and a citizen, will applaud the commission and be glad that I joined it.

To be sure, talk is cheap (or, po russki, bumaga vse terpit), but this talk is a lot better than Medvedev’s talk about falsification.

I’m trying to track down the actual episode. I got these accounts from BBC monitoring, as cited in Johnson’s Russia List # 97, 26 May 2009. The reason I’d like to see the original is that Aleksandr Tsipko also appeared on the program and said some things that in English translation are fairly incoherent. So I’d like to find out if the incoherence is Tsipko’s, or inserted by the translator. At least as reported, Tsipko wants the commission to:

register some absolute assessments of historical facts on which the legitimacy of the state and the legal legitimacy of the authorities rest, define the ideological base of the authorities. . . . If you do not formulate the ideological base of your own authority as anti-Communist, then someone will come to (President) Medvedev and (Prime Minister) Putin, asking, so where is your authority from?

Seems to me that the authority and legitimacy of Russia’s elected officials comes from whether or not they were the electorate’s choice in a free and fair election conducted within an accepted constitutional system. That has precisely zero to do with the relative contribution of the Soviet Union to victory in World War II, whether Stalin can compared to Hitler, and to what extent the Baltic states experienced Soviet re-entry as liberation.

Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev’s video blog includes for May 7 his comments on Victory Day, the Great Fatherland War, and the falsifiers of history. He calls on Russians to defend the memory of the war, and to defend it against the malicious falsifiers who attempt to impugn its meaning.

Generally speaking, it’s a bad thing when historians wrestle with politicians. As the saying goes, “Never get in a mud fight with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.” But professional pride requires me to point out a couple of things.

First, Medvedev most notably says not a word about what exact falsifications of history he’s objecting to. I can come up with some candidates, as could anyone who’s been following post-Soviet politics. Let’s say, for example, he’s troubled by Victor Suvorov’s allegations that Stalin was preparing an invasion of Western Europe, only to find himself beaten to the punch by Hitler in 1941.

I’m not a particular adherent of Suvorov’s school, but what I think is most relevant here is that the key to resolving the truth or falsehood of Suvorov’s accusations lies almost literally in Medvedev’s hands. The holy-of-holies of Russian archives is the “Presidential Archive.” If Medvedev doesn’t like what historians say, he could throw open the archives tomorrow. If he doesn’t want to open those archives because of what might come to light, then we’re no longer talking about falsifiers.

Second, Medvedev’s language is sadly reminiscent of Soviet-era history journals and their regular attacks on “bourgeois falsifiers.” Medvedev has stripped the “bourgeois” off the label, but the tone is rather similar. In 1931, Stalin dismissed historians as “archive rats,” and we’ve generally taken pride in that label. Though Medvedev is no Stalinist, he’s pandering to similar sentiments.

[This is the final part of a four-part series of posts concerning "The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America." For background information on this series, click here. Previous installments: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three]

What is to be Done?

For scholars who have themselves been forced to curtail (or forego altogether) archival work owing to a lack of institutional support, the relative decline in research money available to Russian historians may seem inconsequential. It may even occasion a not altogether unjustifiable case of schadenfreude. After all, having long benefited disproportionately from federal largess, scholars of Russia, it stands to reason, have little business whining about declining federal support as governmental attention shifts elsewhere.

Still, while it is certainly true that Russian historians have for many years enjoyed access to funds not available to their colleagues studying, say, Britain, France, or Germany, it is likewise true that Russian historians do not have now (nor are they likely anytime in the near future to have) access to the kind of research support typically sponsored by Western European governments. Given how little the Russian state has done to support the work of its own native scholars, it is hard to imagine that it would ever consent to subsidizing research conducted by foreign graduate students and academics. What would happen to American Ph.D. programs in European history if, over the course of the next five years, the governments in Paris and Berlin reduced by one-half the number of Chateaubriand and DAAD fellowships available to U.S. scholars and graduate students needing to work in French and German archives? This may well be the fate awaiting Russian historians.
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