Censorship continues to pose problems for historians and academics in Russia. Orlando Figes, a history professor at the University of London, just finished writing a book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, that does not sit well with the Russian government's desire to instill a stronger sense of patriotism and pride in its citizens. In writing the book, Figes utilized hundreds of family archives and thousands of interviews with survivors of Stalinism made possible by the human rights group, Memorial.
On December 4th of last year, a SWAT team from the the Investigative Committee of the Russian General Prosecutor¹s Office entered the Memorial office by force. The team searched the office and confiscated the hard-drives containing the entire archive of the Memorial office. These hard-drives contained databases with biographical information on victims of repression, information about burial sites, family archives, and sound recordings and transcripts of interviews. Also confiscated was the entire collection of materials in the Virtual Gulag Museum, which attempts to rescue artifacts, documents, and photos from small exhibits currently under threat throughout Russia.
How did Russian police manage to invade a human rights group and confiscate historical data about one of the most repressive regimes in modern history? As many Westerners know, many violent actions on the part of police are justifiable in propecting the populace from "hate crimes". Figes writes:
A spokesman for the investigative committee of the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office said the search was part of an investigation of a criminal case involving the publication of an article inciting racial hatred in a local newspaper (Novy Peterburg) in June 2007. There is no evidence of any connection between Memorial and Novy Peterburg, or with the author of the article.
Further information, including a copy of the search warrant, which the man commanding the action seems to have issued to himself, and a link to the newspaper article in question can be found here..
The police also confiscated all the materials Giges collected with Memorial, including a large portion of the sources for his book. He kept copies of the documents on his website, but photo and audio files remain in the custody of the police. Giges believes that the Russian government's raid on Memorial heralds a return to the self-congratulatory history-writing of totalitarianism:
The raid on Memorial is part of a broader ideological struggle over the control of history publications and teaching in Russia that may have influenced the decision of Atticus to cancel my contract.
The Kremlin has been actively campaigning for the rehabilitation of Stalin. Its aim is not to deny Stalin’s crimes but to emphasise his achievements as the builder of the country’s ‘glorious Soviet past.’ It wants Russians to take pride in Soviet history and not to be burdened with a paralysing sense of guilt about the repressions of the Stalin period.
At a conference in June 2007, Putin called on Russia’s schoolteachers to portray the Stalin period in a more positive light. It was Stalin who made Soviet Union great, who won the war against Hitler, and his ‘mistakes’ were no worse than the crimes of Western states, he said. Textbooks dwelling on the Great Terror and the Gulag have been censored; historians attacked as ‘anti-patriotic’ for highlighting Stalin’s crimes.
Once again, "lack of patriotism" (i.e. anti-Americanism, anti-Russianism) is mobilized to silence stories about the crimes of government, whether under Stalin or Bush. As a political weapon, patriotism proves effective for muffling dissent. Giges goes on to describe the impact of the Russian government's history campaign on education:
The presidential administration has promoted its own textbook, The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006: A Teacher’s Handbook. According to one of its authors, the Kremlin propagandist Pavel Danilin, its aim is to present Russian history ‘not as a depressing sequence of misfortunes and mistakes but as something to instill pride in one’s country. This is precisely how teachers much teach history and not smear the Motherland with mud.’
Danilin is a close associate of Gleb Pavlovsky, a presidential adviser and the editor of the Russian Journal, which aims to create an intellectual base for Putin’s pseudo-democracy.
A special December issue on the ‘Politics of Memory’ was published to coincide with the raid on Memorial. It contained two articles viciously attacking the work of Memorial for playing into the hands foreign historians accused of setting out to blacken Soviet history by focusing on Stalin’s crimes.
Pavlovsky is an interesting fellow-- a man with a poisonous past. According to the wikipedia, Pavlovsky was possibly involved in the highly controversial Ukranian presidential election of 2004, supporting the defeated Viktor Yanukovych. In 2005, a tapped phone conversation that mentioned his named aired on a Kievan news channel. This tape connected him to the dioxin poisoning of Ukrianian president Viktor Yushchenko-- a connection which Pavlovsky denies.
To get a sense of Pavlovsky's politics, one must look at his fellow pro-Kremlin "political technologists" (a term used by Pavlovsky to describe his technocracy-loving outlook). For example, Russian State Duma member Sergei Markov, who is also the deputy chairman of the Public Chamber's Committee For International Cooperation and Public Diplomacy, worked with Pavlovsky on Yanokovych's election campaign. He and Pavlovsky regularly provide lectures and presentations for the pro-Kremlin youth group, Nashi, in which they complain that Russia is encircled by enemie regimes controlled by the US. Both believe Russia should have intervened to impose its will in the Ukraine's "Orange Revolution". Markov's position as a diplomat makes it difficult to understand the the difference between diplomacy and overt hostility:
Markov blamed the armed conflict in Georgia on the United States and accused America of planning a civil war in Ukraine. "First, [U.S. Vice President Dick] Cheney threw the Georgian people under Russian tanks, knowing exactly how it would end," said Markov. "And now they are ready to throw the Ukrainian people in this furnace. They are ready now to provoke the maximum destabilization in Ukraine."
It seems clear that a new history is being established in Russia- a history which openly encourages political and economic nationalism, as well as white-washing of communism's crimes. The Kremlin intellectuals are hard at work writing this new history, as the Russian police move quickly to eliminate any contesting narratives. Meanwhile, the Russian government does little to hide its frustration with "human rights" and other ideas which prevents it from engaging in the sort of violent internal and external policy it prefers. Unfortunately, the United States is not in a position to criticize the Kremlin's censorship or military aggression. One might even go so far as to suggest that the American government has been a source of great inspiration and justification for rights violations and military aggression over the past eight years.
