THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Some more information has become available about the case of Mikhail Suprun, the historian arrested along with a police official for allegedly obtaining access to unauthorized historical documents. (I’m relying here on the Interfax story in Johnson’s Russia List # 205; I can’t track down a public version of the original Interfax report)

What struck me originally about this case appears to be borne out: this is about local issues more than President Dmitrii Medvedev’s general effort to steer Soviet history in a particular direction. The Investigations Committee of the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office has gone out of its way to stress that this is not about a crackdown on history per se, but claims instead that the question is whether Suprun obtained access to restricted personal information about private individuals–Germans deported to the Archangel region.

Here’s why I think this cannot help having a serious chilling effect on research, despite the prosecutors’ claims to the contrary. First, Russian archives are working under a 75-year rule for personal information, which seems quite extreme. What is personal information? Name, age, and nationality of those deported to Archangel? That’s the sort of information that Suprun might quite legitimately have been interested in, but that a prosecutor could regard as personal and private. What about discussions in archival records of private activities and family life? That would put, I imagine, forced confessions obtained in the Great Purges under seal. They’re rife with references to family and personal life. I myself read confessions from wrecking investigations in the late 1920s and early 1930s which discussed private parties. We’re now past seventy-five years, but we weren’t when I read them. Did I break Russian Federation law by taking notes and publishing my conclusions? At least I didn’t suborn any officials: I filled out a request slip, and the archivists brought me the file.

Second, the Investigations Committee goes out of its way to stress that Suprun was doing this for the benefit of some unnamed foreign organization (presumably the German Red Cross) for some nefarious purpose. This nefarious purpose is not specified, probably because it’s impossible to come up with one. I can again testify from personal experience to an inclination of some Russian officials to believe that there is big money in mundane archival documents, and that researcher interest in those documents is driven by mercenary goals. I’d like to invite them to be laughed out of Western publishers’ offices when they raise the prospect of huge profits from primary source documents. But raising the spectre of foreign entanglements plays a populist and xenophobic chord that I expect the prosecutors believe will resound nicely.

As I suggested before, foreign historians have thus far been protected by their foreign passports. My guess is we’re not far from a test case stirred up by a zealous local official.

Turns out the Russian government’s fight against historical falsification has some good sides as well. The site runivers.ru (all material in Russian) has a truly amazing collection of scanned historical works. Interlibrary loan offices throughout the country will give thanks for everything that’s now available digitally. It starts with the standard great works of Russian-language historiography (Karamzin, Soloviev, Kliuchevskii), extends to three major pre-revolutionary military encyclopedias, and includes a host of 19th century military histories.

My only quibble is that the works are overwhelmingly pre-1917, which reduces the site’s usefulness to me personally. Nonetheless, there are a few post-revolutionary publications. I was delighted to see, for example, the Red Army’s seven-volume Strategicheskii ocherk of World War I. I weep for the trees I killed a couple of years ago making copies of what’s now available online. Likewise, there’s A. A. Svechin’s Evoliutsiia voennogo iskusstva, which will immediately handy.

For a site that seems inspired by the anti-falsification campaign, there’s remarkably little on the things that have preoccupied the Putin-Medvedev regime. Those fall under the site’s category “historical themes.” The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact page, say, has some standard documents (text of the Pact and the secret protocol) but nothing at first glance that seeks to whitewash Stalin. The Katyn section likewise recognizes Soviet responsibility for the massacre and the clear evidentiary trail.

A couple of drawbacks from a technical point of view–the site loads slowly. Full functionality seems to require the use of a DejaVu plugin, which I could not make function on my Mac system. Nonetheless, I was still able to get to everything I wanted to see.

My imperial Russian comrades should bookmark this site and visit often.

TRF readers looking for more Trotsky content may want to check out the most recent webcast of the Hoover Institution’s interview series “Uncommon Knowledge” where you’ll find the program’s host (and Hoover Fellow) Peter Robinson focusing in on the life and legacy of the Russian revolutionary. Robinson’s guests are the journalist, author, and self-proclaimed Trotskyist Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service — Professor of Russian History at St. Anthony’s College Oxford and author of the forthcoming study, Trotsky: A Biography.

Although specialists may find some of Robinson’s questions insufficiently “nuanced” for academic tastes (”Was Leon Trotsky a good guy, or a bad guy?”) and a good portion of the program is premised on a hypothetical (”What if Lenin had been succeeded not by Stalin, but by Trotsky?”) the responses from the guests are sufficiently informative (Service) and entertaining (Hitchens) to make the thirty-minute program well worth watching. For both video and a transcript of the interview, click HERE.

Next up: What if Superman grew up in Germany, instead of America?

Sometime back, we introduced readers of The Russian Front to a new scholarly initiative aimed at re-examining Russia’s central role in shaping modern history. “Russia’s Great War & Revolution, 1917-1922: The Centennial Re-Appraisal” is an international project comprised of forty leading historians from Russia, North America, Europe, and Japan. They are working to develop a more complete understanding of how Eurasia’s “continuum of crisis” marked by war, revolution, and civil war transformed history and laid the foundations of the twentieth century.

The project’s ultimate contribution will be a series of peer-reviewed volumes expected to be published (both in analog and digital formats) during 2014-2017 — in time to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Russia’s world-altering events. Additional outcomes, including an interactive website containing images, maps, digitized texts, and audio-visual resources designed for the general public and public school teachers, are also in the works.

Professional historians and advanced graduate students whose research focuses on any aspect of the Russian past from 1914 to the early 1920s are urged to contact series editors.

Followed the highlighted link to make you way to the official Call for Papers.

And tell ‘em The Russian Front sent you.