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.

Obscene shouting match at the Unity Summit? I’m reminded of the great line from Dr. Strangelove: “You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”

It’s not only the current Russian government that’s preoccupied with issues of historical falsification. In connection with another project, I serendipitously stumbled across a 1923 crusade by the state of Wisconsin to fight invidious falsifiers of the War of 1812. Today, of course, we’d be pleased to find someone who cares enough about the War of 1812 to bother to falsify it, but we’re dealing here with a simpler time.

Anyway, let me quote the statute, which I get courtesy of the American HIstorical Review 28.4 (July 1923), p. 699–JSTOR has it if your institution has access:

No history or other text-book shall be adopted for use or be used in any district school, city school, vocational school, or high school which falsifies the facts regarding the war of independence, or the war of 1812, or which defames our nation’s founders or misrepresents the ideals and causes for which they struggled and sacrificed, or which contains propaganda favorable to any foreign government.

No penalties for textbook authors, but districts which continue to use textbooks found to be guilty of falsifying are subject to revocation of state aid.

Now as best as I can find through on canvassing of Wisconsin’s online statute book, this law has long since become a dead letter. Perhaps some bright MA student in the UW system can do a thesis on the circumstances that produced the law–I’d speculate that it’s post-World War I isolationism and resentment of a war perceived to have been fought in the interests of the British–hence the focus on the revolutionary war and 1812, and not on anything else.

But the absurdity of this law, I think, highlights the absurdity of efforts to fight historical falsification more generally. For one, it is an effort by the state of Wisconsin to dictate the coverage of events which took place when Wisconsin was not a state and to which Wisconsin was not party–are you listening, Russian Federation President Dmitrii Medvedev? For two, this is clearly action not in service of an abstract quest for the truth, but in service of some particular political ax-to-grind now lost to us in the sands of time. After all, was there REALLY a problem of high school textbooks in Wisconsin carrying foreign propaganda, or are we dealing with interpretations at odds with the views of some crusading state legislator?

“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)”.

Millions of Russians still hold Gaidar and his compatriots in that first Yeltsin government responsible for the misery of the post-Soviet years. I’m more sympathetic, both because of the size of the task Gaidar faced and the poisonous political circumstances. As Gaidar put it to PBS in 2000,

I had the general feeling of a short political time. The situation was extremely unstable, one of crisis. We lived in conditions of dual power, so that the country was no longer functioning. But we had a mandate of trust then and we had to get results, at the very least eliminate the most urgent of the crises, otherwise we couldn’t resolve the other questions. First of all we had to solve the crisis brought about by the collapse of the old system and to replace it with a new system, and, if at all possible, to do so that the changes would be irreversible. We had to battle with a new wave of reaction against inescapably difficult changes, which again would lead to more radical changes with the possible formation of a totalitarian regime. These were the two tasks we assigned ourselves in 1992-1993. But the tasks selected were very ambitious, and we had the feeling that no one could guarantee that we would have the time to resolve them.

Discussing losing his post in Yeltsin’s confrontation with the Duma in 1992-1993, Gaidar said

In general, the transformation of Russia in the direction of a market had obviously begun, but I never had the feeling that it was secure, that it was guaranteed. I had the feeling that there still remained a great risk that the situation could be reversed.

This is telling. I have heard it attributed to Gaidar (though I haven’t been able to track down a precise quotation) that he went to work each day as Yeltsin’s Deputy Prime Minister with the goal of finding the one thing he could do that day to make a return to the old system most difficult.

As a research historian, I note that Yeltsin died in April 2007. Boris Fyodorov, another key figure in Yeltsin’s early reforms, died in November 2008. Gaidar has now died. Though all those men wrote accounts of their time in politics, we have lost a major part of the human record of the creation of a new Russia. This shows, by the way, how early mortality is not a phenomenon of Russia’s lumpenproletariat–Russia’s elite is likewise prone to dying too soon.

For those who don’t know much about Soviet history, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, party boss of Leningrad, was shot in his office on 1 December 1934. Stalin used this as his pretext for beginning the Great Purges–dismantling what protections existed against arbitrary arrest and execution.

The question then and since is whether Leonid Nikolaev, the man who ostensibly did the deed, actually did it, and if he was the one who did it, whether he did it at Stalin’s behest. As usual for these questions, the rumors in Russia run the gamut. My personal favorite is the one I was told over tea in one Moscow archive: Kirov, allegedly a notorious babnik (womanizer), had worked his charms on Nikolaev’s wife, and the assassination was payback.

In any event, the documents suggest that Nikolaev was the classic disgruntled loner, not part of any conspiracy, who shot Kirov out of a sense of personal affront. This certainly sounds plausible to me, though I’m under no illusions that it will settle the debate.

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.

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.