http://russian-front.com Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:20:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Lennart Samuelson was kind enough to pass this Newsweek illustration along and let me post it. You'll need to click the image to get the bad history in all its glory. Clearly I've somehow missed the Western Allies' triumphant liberation of Berlin in my previous studies of World War II. So ... http://russian-front.com/2010/03/09/gi-joes-triumphant-capture-of-berlin/ 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 ... http://russian-front.com/2010/03/04/fsb-defender-of-historical-truth/ This story is not technically a matter of Russian military history, but Raul Castro was Cuban defense minister for almost fifty years, and so there indeed are Soviet ties. My chief purpose for posting this link to note that it's Castro who serves as the voice of moderation and calm ... http://russian-front.com/2010/02/23/raul-castro-voice-of-reason/ In the interests of fairness . . . 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, ... http://russian-front.com/2010/02/21/in-the-interests-of-fairness/ 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 ... http://russian-front.com/2010/01/20/update-presidential-commission-on-falsification-meets/ 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 ... http://russian-front.com/2010/01/19/update-criminalizing-historical-distortion/ Yegor Gaidar, architect of Russia's shock therapy and economic reform as Boris Yeltsin's Deputy Prime Minister and then Prime Minister, has died at the age of 53. In my Moscow time, I saw Gaidar in person only once, at the memorial service for murdered journalist Dmitrii Kholodov. The service and ... http://russian-front.com/2009/12/16/rip-yegor-gaidar/ Reuters has a story (picked up by Johnson's Russia List and the New York Times) that Russian archivists have finally settled the question of who killed Kirov. 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 ... http://russian-front.com/2009/12/03/the-kirov-murder-solved/ 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 ... http://russian-front.com/2009/11/10/suprun-update/ 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 ... http://russian-front.com/2009/10/28/silver-lining/