British academics protest after Russia closes down history website
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/13/russia-shuts-history-website>
Move reflects official efforts to rewrite Stalin's role and to cover up
Nazi-Soviet pact
* Luke Harding in Moscow
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 July 2009 17.58 BST
A group of British academics including the historian Orlando Figes and the
poet and translator Robert Chandler have spoken out after authorities in
Russia closed down a website dealing with the country's controversial Soviet
past.
On 19 June the home affairs ministry in St Petersburg shut down the site
www.hrono.info. The website had been Russia's largest online history
resource, widely used by scholars in Russia and elsewhere as a unique source
of biographical and historical material.
Officials said they closed the site because it published extracts from
Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf. Today, however, its founder, Vyacheslav
Rumyantsev, said the closure had nothing to do with Hitler, adding that the
text was widely available elsewhere and was only summarised on the site.
Rumyantsev said the authorities may have pulled the plug after an article
was posted on 16 June criticising St Petersburg's pro-Kremlin governor,
Valentina Matviyenko. The article attacked Matviyenko's decision to cut an
allowance given to survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
The closure comes amid official attempts in Russia to rewrite some of the
darkest aspects of its 20th-century history. School textbooks now portray
Stalin not as a mass murderer but as a great, if flawed, national leader and
an "efficient manager" who defeated the Nazis and industrialised a backward
Soviet Union.
In December, police in St Petersburg raided the human rights organisation
Memorial, removing much of the material used by Figes in The Whisperers, his
acclaimed book on family life under Stalin. It included interviews with
gulag victims, photos and personal testimonies. Figes's Russian publisher
later scrapped plans to publish the book in Russian.
--snip--
Much of Soviet history is now taboo. Particularly sensitive for the Kremlin
is the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, under which Hitler and Stalin agreed to
carve up Europe, with Moscow annexing the Baltics and two-thirds of Poland.
The Kremlin also refuses to acknowledge Ukrainian claims that the
Stalin-engineered famine of 1932-33 amounted to a genocide.
--snip--
In May Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, announced he was setting up a
new body to counter the "falsification of history". The commission,
dominated by members of Russia's FSB intelligence service rather than
professional historians, would ensure that history teaching stressed
Russia's heroic sacrifice during the war, Medvedev said, and combat foreign
"revisionists".
This month Russia's defence ministry posted a lengthy article on its website
claiming that Poland provoked the second world war. The article said Poland
refused to yield to Germany's "modest" ultimatum demands in 1939 for a land
corridor to East Prussia and Gdansk. The ministry withdrew it after Poland
protested to Russia's ambassador in Warsaw.
--snip--
----
Mark Perkins MLIS, MCLIP
www.markperkins.info
0 comments:
Post a Comment