Yevgeny Kiselyov: When Interpreting History Becomes a Crime
[Yevgeny Kiselyov is a political analyst and hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.]
I would be fascinated to know if Westerners can fully appreciate the political significance behind President Dmitry Medvedev's decision to create a special commission "for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests." Most foreigners would probably say, "This is very strange. Doesn't Russia have more pressing problems it needs to tackle, such as the managing the crisis, modernizing the country's political and economic institutions or battling corruption?"
Had the year been 1950, when the Soviet Union was making colossal efforts to recover from the aftermath of World War II, foreigners would have been equally perplexed that Josef Stalin chose that moment to initiate a huge public debate on the Marxist approach to linguistics.
Two decades before that, Stalin rewrote the history of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Red Terror and civil war. In this spirit, "A Short History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)" was published under Stalin's orders to make sure that all Soviets understood the "historical record" correctly -- that Stalin was the one and only successor to Lenin.
In 1934, Stalin's childhood friend and top Kremlin bureaucrat Avel Yenukidze published the book "The Underground Print Shop in the Caucasus." It was interpreted as having diminished Stalin's contributions to the printing press and to Bolshevism in general. As a result, Stalin did not spare his old friend. Yenukidze was arrested and executed as an "enemy of the people." The crime: writing about his revolutionary youth without the necessary respect owed to Stalin.
Similarly, it was anyone's guess why Stalin prohibited the sequel to the film "Ivan Grozny" by the famous director Sergei Eisenstein or why Pravda lambasted a new opera by Dmitry Shostakovich. Soviet intelligentsia were left scratching their heads trying to figure out why Mikhail Zoshchenko's short stories and Anna Akhmatova's poems were subject to such harsh criticism in literary magazine reviews.
The worst "falsifier" of history, of course, has been the Kremlin, and it is difficult not to draw a parallel between Medvedev's decision to combat the falsification of history and similar steps taken during Stalin's rule.
As soon as Medvedev uttered the words "attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests," it was clear what he really meant: The state would crack down on any attempts to objectively examine the more unpleasant -- and incriminating -- aspects of Russian and Soviet history. This includes a candid, historical discussion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of nonaggression between the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany -- and, by extension, Stalin's passive and active role in helping Hitler start World War II. Likewise, questioning the Soviet Union's annexation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia would be highly discouraged, as would raising the issue of how the Kremlin created and supported repressive puppet regimes all across Eastern Europe after rolling back Nazi forces at the end of World War II...
Read entire article at Moscow Times
I would be fascinated to know if Westerners can fully appreciate the political significance behind President Dmitry Medvedev's decision to create a special commission "for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests." Most foreigners would probably say, "This is very strange. Doesn't Russia have more pressing problems it needs to tackle, such as the managing the crisis, modernizing the country's political and economic institutions or battling corruption?"
Had the year been 1950, when the Soviet Union was making colossal efforts to recover from the aftermath of World War II, foreigners would have been equally perplexed that Josef Stalin chose that moment to initiate a huge public debate on the Marxist approach to linguistics.
Two decades before that, Stalin rewrote the history of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Red Terror and civil war. In this spirit, "A Short History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)" was published under Stalin's orders to make sure that all Soviets understood the "historical record" correctly -- that Stalin was the one and only successor to Lenin.
In 1934, Stalin's childhood friend and top Kremlin bureaucrat Avel Yenukidze published the book "The Underground Print Shop in the Caucasus." It was interpreted as having diminished Stalin's contributions to the printing press and to Bolshevism in general. As a result, Stalin did not spare his old friend. Yenukidze was arrested and executed as an "enemy of the people." The crime: writing about his revolutionary youth without the necessary respect owed to Stalin.
Similarly, it was anyone's guess why Stalin prohibited the sequel to the film "Ivan Grozny" by the famous director Sergei Eisenstein or why Pravda lambasted a new opera by Dmitry Shostakovich. Soviet intelligentsia were left scratching their heads trying to figure out why Mikhail Zoshchenko's short stories and Anna Akhmatova's poems were subject to such harsh criticism in literary magazine reviews.
The worst "falsifier" of history, of course, has been the Kremlin, and it is difficult not to draw a parallel between Medvedev's decision to combat the falsification of history and similar steps taken during Stalin's rule.
As soon as Medvedev uttered the words "attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests," it was clear what he really meant: The state would crack down on any attempts to objectively examine the more unpleasant -- and incriminating -- aspects of Russian and Soviet history. This includes a candid, historical discussion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of nonaggression between the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany -- and, by extension, Stalin's passive and active role in helping Hitler start World War II. Likewise, questioning the Soviet Union's annexation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia would be highly discouraged, as would raising the issue of how the Kremlin created and supported repressive puppet regimes all across Eastern Europe after rolling back Nazi forces at the end of World War II...