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Russian commission to guard against false history
The president of Russia created a commission Tuesday to fight what he says are efforts to falsify Russian history - part of a campaign to promote the Kremlin's account and to curtail, and possibly punish, those who question it.Russia's relations with some of its former Eastern bloc allies have suffered due to ongoing disputes over the facts of the past century. 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 the region as a hostile occupation. President Dmitry 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 Soviets were killed. The costly victory 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. Observers say Russia is 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. For years, Russia has fought efforts by former Soviet republics and allies, many of which now in NATO and the European Union, to remove or relocate WWII monuments and Soviet grave sites. Medvedev and Putin have accused the former Soviet republics Latvia and Estonia of treating citizens who fought alongside the Nazis as heroes by allowing them to hold commemorations. Russia denies Ukrainian claims that a devastating Stalin-era famine was genocide. It also denies the 1940 killing by Soviet agents of some 20,000 Polish officials, intellectuals and priests near the western Russian town of Katyn constituted genocide. The new 28-member history commission is charged with analyzing information and working out strategies for countering alleged efforts to falsify history, Medvedev's press service said. It will be headed by Sergei Naryshkin, the president's chief of staff, and filled with government officials. Posted by: 2009-05-19 |
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