Yanukovych proposes World War II Liberator monument

During a visit today to the Donets'k oblast, Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych proposed to erect a monument to the World War II "Liberator" (Визволитель) on the border of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. According to Ukrains'ka pravda, the leader of the Party of Regions said, "We know who brought freedom and peace to our land," adding in Kremlin-friendly language that he was against attempts to "rewrite history."

Jarosław Kaczyński: Putin 'spun a story'

A strong majority of Poles wanted Prime Minister Putin to apologise yesterday for the 17 September 1939 Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. He made no such apology, but offered a conciliatory hand to Polish readers (and the back of his hand to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko) in letter published yesterday in Gazeta Wyborcza. (The letter has been made available in English translation on Putin's website.) Here is the reaction of former Polish PM Jarosław Kaczyński this afternoon, referring to Putin as "prezydent":

Po pierwsze, nie było przeprosin... Putin snuł pewną opowieść, która jest właściwa dla nacjonalizmu. Rosja Stalina była przedstawiana jako zwykłe państwo. Były oczywiście jakieś przyjazne dla Polski akcenty, ale są one nie satysfakcjonujące.

First of all, there was no apology... Putin spun a story that was suitable for [Russian] nationalism. Stalin's Russia was presented as a normal state. There were some nice sentiments for Poland, but they were not enough.

Kaczyński went on to ask why Putin had been invited to Gdańsk in the first place.

Majority of Poles: 'Putin should apologise' for 1939

Together with other European leaders, the Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Prime Ministers are meeting in Gdańsk today to commemorate the 70th anniversary of World War II. Vladimir Putin's visit in particular is making headlines. According to a recent poll conducted by GfK Polonia for the newspaper Rzeczpospolita (The Republic),

Na pytanie, czy podczas uroczystości 1 września Władimir Putin powinien przeprosić za napaść na Polską 17 września 1939 r. "tak" odpowiedziało 76 proc. ankietowanych. Przeciwnego zdania było 18 proc. badanych. Nie miało zdania w tej sprawie - 6 proc.

As to the question, 'Should Vladimir Putin apologise for the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939 during the 1 September commemoration ceremonies,' 76% of respondents said 'Yes.' 18% of the polled were of the opposite view. 6% did not have an opinion on the matter.

Photo from Rzeczpospolita's website. A good article on the memory politics wrought by the 1939 invasion in Poland appeared in yesterday's Financial Times.

Yushchenko Responds

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko responded to Dmitrii Medvedev's charges of "anti-Russian" behavior today in a consciously respectful (albeit at times exasperated) letter that spoke of a "tradition of friendship and good-neighbourly relations" between Ukraine and Russia rather than "fraternal" ties (as Medvedev asserted repeatedly in his letter). Refuting Medvedev's charge that Ukraine has used the tragedy of 1932-33 as part of an "anti-Russian" project, Yushchenko said:

[У]країнський народ віддає також данину пам'яті мільйонам росіян, білорусів, казахів та представників інших національностей, що померли від голоду у Поволжі, на Північному Кавказі, в Казахстані та інших регіонах колишнього СРСР. Відомо, що під час проведення Акції пам'яті «Незгасима свічка», присвяченої 75-м роковинам Голодомору в Україні, у вікнах сотень міст в усьому світі, у тому числі й у Росії, горіли свічки, що є свідченням багатонаціональної солідарності з Україною у визнанні цього факту.

The Ukrainian people also commemorate the millions of Russians, Belorussians, Kazakhs, and members of other nationalities who died from hunger in the Lower Volga region, the North Caucasus, Kazakhstan, and other regions of the former USSR. It should be noted that during the "Inextinguishable Candle" campaign, dedicated to the 75th Anniversary of Holodomor in Ukraine, candles were lit in the windows of hundreds of cities around the world, including in Russia -- bearing witness to a multinational solidarity with Ukraine in recognition of [Holodomor].

The full letter can be found at Ukrains'ka Pravda.

The Rhetoric of Memory and the "Crisis" in Ukrainian-Russian Relations

Dmitrii Medvedev, visibly perturbed despite the tranquility of his surroundings, addressed the public in a new videoblog entry today to decry the Kremlin's relations with Kyiv, explicitly throwing himself into Ukrainian presidential election politics perhaps earlier than expected. In his remarks, based on a letter sent today to Viktor Yushchenko, Medvedev cites Gogol''s 1842 imperial-friendly edition of Taras Bul'ba as an elegy to, in his view, less acrimonious times -- Нет уз святее товарищества, "There is no stronger bond of fellowship" (i.e. than the bond between Ukrainians and Russians), words not original to the 1835 edition of Bul'ba -- and identifies Ukrainian efforts to come to terms with the legacy of Soviet terror as evidence of a larger "anti-Russian" project.

Memory and Mazepa

Today is the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava, in which Peter I defeated Charles XII of Sweden and the Ukrainian Het'man Ivan Mazepa. As it happens, the occasion has given us yet another instructive specimen of the defensive discourse about memory and history generated by some vocal Kremlin sympathizers: an article by Oleg Kil'diushov entitled “The Battle for the Battle of Poltava” and featured, not surprisingly, on the home page of Gleb Pavlovskii’s Russkii zhurnal. Mazepa is a fascinating, contested historical figure -- for crossing Peter, he tends to be anathemized as a "traitor" in Russia and hailed as a "patriot" in Ukraine -- but Kil'diushov appears wholly unable to explore his significance without resorting to hyperbole or caricature. He employs with great excess the signature punctuation of le nouveau chauvin russe – namely, sarcastic inverted commas (e.g."Украина" и "украинцы") – and refers to the journalists of Zerkalo nedeli / Dzerkalo tyzhnia as "Banderites" and to historians like Saint Peterburg State University's Tatiana Tairova-Iakovleva as "Mazepists."

Tairova-Iakovleva is the author of a recent, highly-acclaimed book on Mazepa, and it is in her fine documentary research (and not in Kil'diushov's rhetoric) that we see the possibilities of Russian-Ukrainian concord.

UPDATE 13 July 2007:

Adrian Karatnycky and Alex Motyl take on 'The Battle for the Battle for Poltava' in the 9 July issue of The Wall Street Journal Europe. An excerpt:

For Russians, Poltava without question was a great historical victory and Russians should be free to memorialize it as such. And there is no question that in the 17th century, national identities were ill-formed and many inhabitants of the territory of Ukraine felt a stronger kinship for the common Orthodox faith they shared with Russians than for any aim of independence. But for contemporary Ukrainians, there can be no similar ambivalence. As a young state that gained independence in 1991, Ukraine must develop its own sense of history, its own heroes and founding fathers. In short, it needs a common historical narrative to bind its citizens.

Such efforts are at best benign and should excite from Russia no more than a firmly agnostic ambivalence. But the vehemence of Russian polemics over events and personalities three centuries old speaks to the Russian state's interest in keeping alive the idea of the eventual reunification of the two states. It also helps perpetuate a cultural divide between Ukraine's Ukrainian-speaking west and the Russophone east.

The full article can be read here.

Timothy Snyder: 'Holocaust: The Ignored Reality'

Timothy Snyder's article in the upcoming 16 July New York Review of Books offers nothing less than a corrective to conventional twentieth-century European historiography in under 4,200 words. It will be read for a long time.

Snyder traces, sensitively but authoritatively, signs of 'the difference between history and memory' in twentieth-century Europe. Among other things, he argues that

[t]he emphasis on Auschwitz and the Gulag understates the numbers of Europeans killed, and shifts the geographical focus of the killing to the German Reich and the Russian East. Like Auschwitz, which draws our attention to the Western European victims of the Nazi empire, the Gulag, with its notorious Siberian camps, also distracts us from the geographical center of Soviet killing policies. If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia...

The geographic, moral, and political center of the Europe of mass killing is the Europe of the East, above all Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States, lands that were subject to sustained policies of atrocity by both regimes. The peoples of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most, since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower put it, a dark continent, Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.

As in his fine The Reconstruction of Nations (Yale, 2003), Snyder shows what a skilled, objective practitioner in comparative history can achieve: critical lessons for our common future.

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again.

Another note from this past week: Masha Lipman's column in 19 June's Washington Post confronts what Snyder calls an 'imperialism of martyrdom.'

In the following excerpt she targets the logical cul-de-sac of the stated mandate of the Kremlin's new commission 'to counteract attempts to falsify history that undermine the interests of Russia' (“по противодействию попыткам фальсификации истории в ущерб интересам России"), which we discussed in a post on 13 June:

...[T]he goal of a government commission established last month by President Dmitry Medvedev's decree [is] to oppose attempts to falsify history that damage Russia's interests. This mission shows the potential for interpretation -- and abuse: It implies that genuine historical fact cannot be damaging to Russia's world stature, but also that there's nothing wrong with the distortion of facts if it embellishes the country's image.

The rest of Lipman's column can be read here.

Recent Sorties in the 'Memory War'

A quick update. On May 19, President Medvedev declared the creation of a special commission “to counteract attempts to falsify history that undermine the interests of Russia” (“по противодействию попыткам фальсификации истории в ущерб интересам России"). He did so days after recording this entry on his video-blog marking Victory Day, in which he states (after 3:06) that “attempts to falsify history” about World War II have become increasingly “angry and aggressive.” More about the ukase establishing the commission can be read in these Russian-language articles by RIA Novosti and Vedomosti and in this 11 June opinion piece by Janusz Bugajski from the Wall Street Journal Europe.

Who is responsible for these so-called “angry and aggressive” attempts to “falsify history,” according to the Kremlin? Medvedev has in mind, of course, Ukraine and Poland, who have recently announced a new development in their increasingly collaborative efforts to come to terms with the past.

On 11 June, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU, Служба безпеки України), which has become a significant actor in the investigation of Soviet crimes in Ukraine, announced that Poland's Institute of National Memory (IPN, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej) has given it a large store of archival documents relating to the activity of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, Українська повстанська армія) from 1944-47. More about the transfer can be read in this Ukrainian-language article on Korrespondent.net. The SBU noted that this was not the first time it has collaborated with IPN, and these strides in Ukrainian-Polish cooperation on the memory front clearly have the Kremlin feeling defensive.

Old Provocations, Newly Marketed; or, What is 'Project Russia'?

In April a series of odd billboards popped up in and around Kyiv displaying the words 'Project Russia' in various languages and in varying sizes of typeface. The words themselves were arguably innocuous, but coupled with a pregnant image, they were decidedly less so. The image was an outline of the borders of the Soviet Union, with Ukraine and other non-Russian former Soviet republics clearly ensconced within. According to Dmitrii Gusev, who spoke with Delo, the billboards were advertising a three-volume propagandistic book project connected to the Kremlin.

The billboards -- including one that stood outside the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada -- have been reportedly removed from Kyiv. But 'Project Russia' continues to make the rounds -- by special delivery, as Novyi Region reports.

White envelopes with free copies of the book are reportedly appearing in the mailboxes of prominent intellectuals and civic leaders in Ukraine. They're not asking for them. Nor do they necessarily appreciate the free reading. Andrei Ermolaev, Director of the 'Sofia' Center for Social Research, had this to say about 'Project Russia': 'The text has an openly dull messianic character... It's been done either by cowards -- or jokesters.'

A Victory for Memorial

The End of the “Case of the Raid” and Some Lessons Learned

A Public Statement from 'Memorial'

On 6 May 2009 the City Court of St Petersburg upheld the decision of the Dzerzhinsky Region Court, which had ruled that the raid on the premises of the Research and Information Centre “Memorial” in St Petersburg on 4 December 2008 was illegal.

On the same evening representatives of RIC “Memorial” (lawyer Ivan Pavlov, director Irina Flige and Tatiana Kosinova, a member of the organisation’s governing body), accompanied by two independent observers (Boris Pustyntsev, head of the organisation “Civic Control” [Grazhdanskii kontrol’] and Svetlana Ekimova, representative of the Human Rights Ombudsman for St Petersburg), arrived at the Prosecutor’s Office to collect the items which the officials from the Prosecutor’s Office’s Investigative Committee had illegally confiscated. These items included twelve computer hard drives, which at the time of the raid contained databases with the results of twenty years of research into the history of political terror during the Soviet period.

The representatives of Memorial made a record of the procedure by which the items were returned, and this record was witnessed by the independent observers. All returned items were then packed into boxes, sealed and taken to “Memorial’s” premises.



On 13 May independent technical experts tested the hard drives for their functionality and the integrity of the data held on them, once again in the presence of representatives of the public. All drives turned out to be functional and data samples confirmed the integrity of the data. The test report states that the drives show no sign of having been read, with the exception of a single drive which was unsuccessfully connected to a computer in the night of 4 December. It seems that during all this time the drives were simply kept at the Prosecutor’s Office, without anyone taking an interest in their content.

A total of four court hearings took place in the five months that passed since the raid, during which RIC “Memorial” demanded that the raid be declared illegal and the confiscated items returned. As early as March the Prosecutor’s Office declared its willingness to return the confiscated items “since they were not needed”, but now it has been forced to do so by court order.

Obviously, the return of the confiscated items does not compensate for the damage done to RIC “Memorial’s” work: as a consequence of the raid almost the entire IT system was put out of service and large parts of the information and reference material held on the confiscated hard drives were inaccessible for five months. Moreover, the issue of the moral damage inflicted on our organisation remains open: investigator M.G. Kalganov’s absurd suspicion that “Memorial” could be involved in funding rightwing extremist publications, publicly reiterated by the permanent representative of Russia at a session of the OSCE, was not refuted during the court proceedings. The court refused outright to address this issue. “Memorial” intends to take further steps in order to defend its good name.

Nevertheless - our organisation’s rights have been rehabilitated and our property has been returned to us. We believe this outcome would have been impossible without the wave of protests and acts of solidarity that began immediately after the raid on 4 December, internationally as well as within Russia. As members of “Memorial” we wish to express our sincere gratitude to the scholarly community in Russia and abroad, the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation and the regional Human Rights Ombudsman for St Petersburg, the human rights section of the European Council, the democratic civic and political organisations in Russia, the mass media in Russia and abroad (in particular the information portals Polit.ru and “Human Rights in Russia” [Prava cheloveka v Rossii, hro.org), foreign politicians and many others for the support they offered to us.

Memorial would like to draw attention to the fact that several conclusions can be drawn from the “case of the raid”:

Firstly, despite widespread opinion to the contrary, it is possible in certain cases for non-governmental organisations in Russia to defend their rights in court, if they invest a considerable amount of effort and display insistence. Such a victory does not come cheap: in this case it has cost the staff members at “Memorial” much time and energy – over a period of five months they had to put their main work aside time and again in order to stand up for the rights and the good name of the organisation.

Secondly, public solidarity campaigns are not merely symbolic acts of protest. They can yield practical results.

Thirdly, we have seen that under the present conditions a full triumph of law and justice is unlikely when the case in question concerns official interests. In the “case of the raid” this was evident from the fact that the court refused to address the issue of the illegality of the search warrant itself on the grounds that it was wholly unjustified, limiting itself to pointing out that the decision to carry out a raid is the exclusive prerogative of the investigator. Thus the court in practice confirmed the right of the investigative agencies to take such arbitrary decisions, infringing upon rights of legal persons without having to fear subsequent legal investigation. “Memorial” believes such practice to be anti-constitutional.

Fourthly, during the court process it became clear that the law enforcement agencies (at least the Centre for the Fight Against Extremism at the Main Administration of the Russian Ministry for Internal Affairs for the North-Western Federal District) consider “Memorial” to be an “extremist” organisation, something that warranted the decision to place our office under “operative observation”, in other words “external surveillance”. All our attempts to establish why our Research and Information Centre in St Petersburg has become the object of operational investigations have been unsuccessful so far. The Centre for the Fight Against Extremism refused to reply to our enquiry, pointing out that the law prohibits disclosing the classified information about operational investigations. However, the very fact that the efforts in the “fight against extremism” are directed against organisations such as “Memorial” throws a specific light on the reasons why real extremism in St Petersburg, as well as in the whole of Russia, is on the rise, while the percentage of extremist crimes solved remains catastrophically low. The story of how RIC “Memorial” was placed under external surveillance ought to serve as yet another stimulus for a serious public debate, during which we need to arrive at an evaluation of the present aims and priorities of the law enforcement agencies with regard to the “fight against extremism”. We expect interested government agencies to join in such a public debate.

Thus the “case of the raid on RIC “Memorial”” is over, at least in as far as the rehabilitation of our injured rights are concerned, but there are certain aspects of this case that still need to be evaluated by society.

International “Memorial” Society

“Memorial” St Petersburg