RUSSIAN COMMISSION TO GUARD AGAINST FALSE HISTORY

RUSSIAN COMMISSION TO GUARD AGAINST FALSE HISTORY

Steve Gutteman
Associated Press (AP)
Moscow, Russia
May 19, 2009
Efforts underway to hurt Russia by falsifying history says President Medvedev

MOSCOW - Russia announced Tuesday it has created a commission to fight what President Dmitry Medvedev says are efforts to hurt his country by falsifying history — part of a campaign to promote the Kremlin's views and silence those who question them.

Bitter disputes over events of the past century — including a World War II-era massacre of Polish officers, a Stalin-era famine in Ukraine and the relocation of the graves of Soviet soldiers in the Baltics — have damaged Russia's relations with former Soviet and Eastern bloc neighbors.

Russian leaders tend to cast the Soviet Union as a force for good that defeated Nazi Germany and liberated Eastern Europe. Critics say such arguments gloss over the decades of postwar Soviet dominance seen by many in the region as a hostile occupation, and some say Russia must do more to acknowledge Soviet-era crimes.

Medvedev earlier this month warned against questioning the primacy of the Soviet Union's role in the World War II, in which at least 27 million Soviet citizens were killed. The costly victory over fascism is a source of immense pride for Russians, and is central to Moscow's vision of 20th Century European history.

"We will never forget that our country, the Soviet Union, made the decisive contribution to the outcome of the second world war, that it was precisely our people who destroyed Nazism, determined the fate of the whole world," Medvedev said May 8, on the eve of celebrations commemorating the Allied victory in Europe.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's party is drafting legislation to make it a crime to belittle the Soviet contribution to what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. The bill, yet to be submitted to parliament, equates criticizing the Soviets' role with rehabilitating Nazism, and makes it punishable by up to three years in prison.

The new 28-member commission, created by a presidential decree, will investigate "the falsification of historical facts and events aimed to disparage the international prestige of the Russian Federation," according to an addendum to the decree signed Friday and announced Tuesday.
The decree said it would also recommend measures to counter alleged falsifications, but Medvedev's press service declined to comment what those measures might entail.

The commission will be headed by Medvedev's chief of staff, Sergei Naryshkin, and include foreign and domestic intelligence officials as well lawmakers, historians and officials from government ministries.

Some analysts said Russia was trying to prevent any effort to equate the actions of the Soviet regime with the crimes of the Nazis. "Something had to be done about it, because the arbitrariness and falsifications have become intolerable, contradicting not only science but common sense," said Makhmut Gareyev, president of Russia's Academy of Military Sciences and former deputy chief of the Soviet general staff.

Liberal Kremlin critics said, however, that Medvedev's commission amounted to an effort to airbrush Soviet history. Author Yulia Latynina said it plays into the hands of "mastodons in epaulets" — ultraconservatives among Russia's historians and politicians.

"The whole idea was copied from Orwell's '1984' and from the famous phrase about Russia as a country with unpredictable past," she told The Associated Press. "This commission will finally turn Medvedev into a laughing stock."

For years, Russia has fought efforts by former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact allies, many now in NATO and the European Union, to remove or relocate WWII monuments and Soviet grave sites.

Russia's leaders have accused the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia of honoring those who fought alongside the Nazis by allowing them to hold commemorations.

Moscow has mounted a campaign against Ukrainian claims that a 1930s famine that killed millions was an act of genocide engineered by the Soviets.
It also denies that the 1940 killing by Soviet agents of some 20,000 Polish officials, intellectuals and priests near the western Russian town of Katyn constituted genocide.

Historian Heorhiy Kasyanov from Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences accused the Kremlin of trying to whitewash Soviet history in order to justify the rollback of democratic rights in Russia.

"It's part of the Russian Federation's policy to create an ideological foundation for what is happening in Russia right now," he said in Kiev.

NOTE:
Associated Press writers Mansur Mirovalev in Moscow and Maria Danilova in Kiev, Ukraine, contributed to this report.