RUSSIAN HISTORY 2.0: KREMLIN WANTS TO 'CORRECT' THE RECORD
Fred Weir
The Christian Science Monitor
Boston, Massachusetts
May 21, 2009
A proposed law could make comparing Soviet rule with that of the Nazis a crime. Intellectuals fear a manipulation of Russia’s past.
MOSCOW - A bitter joke from the Soviet-era has it that Russia is the world's only country with an unpredictable past.
That jibe has come winging back in recent days, after the Kremlin announced the creation of a special 28-member panel tasked with examining and combating examples of "historical revisionism" that harm Russia's image.
The committee, which has no legal power, is chaired by the head of President Dmitry Medvedev's administration, Sergei Naryshkin, and includes a sprinkling of historians but also lawmakers, Kremlin officials, the armed forces' chief of staff, and members of the FSB security service.
But a companion law, drafted by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party and soon due to be introduced into the State Duma, will stipulate fines and prison sentences of up to five years for anyone found guilty of "denying the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal."
This is a reaction to a growing body of historiography in former Soviet and Eastern European countries that depicts the long years of Soviet domination as similar in nature to the Nazi occupation, and suggests that for these nations, liberation arrived only when the USSR collapsed.
Even more irritating for the Russians are perceived attempts in some places, like Ukraine and Latvia, to "rehabilitate" citizens who wore German uniforms during World War II to fight against the oncoming Red Army.
<Article Truncated>
Read the entire article at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0521/p06s10-woeu.html
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 8
10!
The C.S.Monitor has been considered the only newspaper in the United States that is truely objective for the past 25 years in a row.
The CS Monitor is an excellent news organ! I am more concerned with this penchant of the Russians to manipulate history....in their favor....!
Sadly, the occupation by Germany and the occupation by the U.S.S.R. are comparable. I suspect that the German administration of those areas was worse than the Communists but not so long and not so insidious.
"A bitter joke from the Soviet-era has it that Russia is the world's only country with an unpredictable past."
Hahhaha...that's very clever, but it hurts to laugh!
"liberation arrived only when the USSR collapsed."
They did seem happy to be free of Soviet rule...
Ah-h-h... the sweet seduction of totalitarian rule. Apparently for some, once you've been subjected to it, you never get over it.
Most of eastern Europe just traded one ruthless dictator for another at wars end, Stalin for Hitler. Perhaps the biggest irony of WWII in Europe is that it started mainly with the occupation/invasion of Poland by the Germans, only to be given to the Soviets to end the war... a real shame. That's real history...
Thanks for posting this Donald