Kosachev offers another sign of shift in official Russian position on the Soviet past

On 29 June 2010, an article by Konstantin Kosachev, Chair of the State Duma Committee for International Affairs, argued that the damage to Russia’s reputation was beginning to outweigh the advantages brought by defending the Soviet past on the international arena.


In the article, Kosachev called for a new strategy to be devised to handle issues relating to Soviet history. He suggested the formulation of a kind of ‘historical doctrine’, comprising a set of principles outlining very clearly where Russia stands with regard to the Soviet past, and couched in terms that would be easily comprehensible to Russia’s foreign partners.

Kosachev proposed that such a doctrine would, for example, draw a sharp distinction between historical evaluations of Soviet actions at the domestic level, and at the foreign policy level. The former should be the business of each individual post-Soviet state; the latter should be ‘the subject of historical analysis, but not of political initiatives’, with no unilateral revisions to be permitted.

He argued that such a strategy could help Russia to deflect East European attempts at provoking Russia into aggressive responses on the historical front, as well as protecting Russia against possible future demands for compensation for the victims of Soviet crimes.

The article is available here.

Karaganov comments on Katyn and Stalinist past

On 22 July the prominent Russian politics and foreign affairs analyst Sergei Karaganov published an article in the official Russian newspaper Rossiiskaia gazeta titled ‘The Russian Katyn’, in which he called upon Russia to ‘find within herself the strength to admit that the whole of Russia is one big Katyn, strewn with the mostly nameless graves of millions of the regime’s victims’.

Should Russia apologise for Holodomor?

'No,' says a (slim) majority of Russian respondents to a poll released yesterday by the Levada Centre. In response to the question 'In your view, should Russian leaders apologise to the Ukrainian people (Ukrainskomu narodu) for the "Holodomor" of the early 1930s, as they did recently to the Polish people for the tragedy of Katyn?', Russians replied:

7% Definitely yes

16% Probably yes

28% Probably no

24% Definitely no

25% Difficult to say

The poll can read another way: 48% of respondents were not opposed to the idea of an official apology to Ukrainians, with 23% either completely or somewhat supportive of one. As for Russian views of the reasons for the 'mass famine in Ukraine' in 1932-33, the responses were also remarkable:

27% hold that it was caused by 'unfavourable weather conditions';

35% hold that it was caused by 'mistakes made during the process of collectivization';

14% hold that it was caused by 'premeditated (prednamerennye) actions by Soviet authorities that sought to break the resistance of Ukrainian peasants who did not want to go to collective farms'; and

25% could not say.

The details of the Levada poll can be read here.

'Не умер Сталин'

Но как тут быть, когда внутри нас
Не умер Сталин?

But how are we to live here, when inside us
Stalin is not dead?

Boris Chichibabin, 1959

The image above comes from Wednesday's match between Metallurh FC Zaporizhzhia and Chornomorets' FC Odesa. The sign, which reads 'Zaporizhzhia against Stalin,' is a response to the recent erection of a monument to Stalin by the Communist Party of Ukraine in Zaporizhzhia.

Metallurh won the match, 1:0.

Stalin Monument Unveiled in Zaporizhzhia

Well, they succeeded. Today the Communist Party of Ukraine unveiled a three-metre monument to a uniformed and decorated Iosif Stalin in Zaporizhzhia, the first erected since Ukraine's independence. Video of the ceremony -- and the attendant protest -- follows below.



The weather was unusually hot in Zaporizhzhia today, and UNIAN is reporting that an elderly woman died during the unveiling ceremony. Three veterans of World War II were also hospitalized.

Putin in Katyn

7 April 2010 marked a premiere – on the invitation of the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the Prime Ministers of Russia and Poland met in the Katyn forest to commemorate the more than 20,000 Polish officers shot there by Soviet forces in 1940. In his address, Putin stated “этим преступлениям не может быть никаких оправданий”. Putin’s words could be a milestone on the path towards a reappraisal of the massacre in Russia. To the present day those shot here are not officially recognised as victims of Stalin’s terror, and many Russians continue to believe in the Soviet propaganda version, according to which the Katyn massacre was committed by German occupation forces and not the NKVD.


See Putin's speech here

For a comment by Arsenii Roginsky, chairman of "Memorial" see here

Tragically, the Polish President and a number of government officials were killed this morning in a plane crash on their way to an official ceremony in Katyn.

Clash in Kyiv over 'Volyn Massacre' Exhibition

Yesterday in Kyiv a group of Ukrainians protested an exhibition at Ukrainian House organised by a 'human rights group' called 'Russophone Ukraine' (Русскоязычная Украина, a project of Party of Regions MP Vadim Kolesnichenko) and the Polish 'Society for Honouring the Memory of the Victims of the Crimes of Ukrainian Nationalists.' Video of the confrontation is embedded above. The exhibition is entitled 'The Volyn Massacre: Polish and Jewish Victims of OUN-UPA [Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army]'. An essay on the memory of the Volyn Massacre among the Ukrainian diaspora by John-Paul Himka can be read here. As with other events of this period, the historical scholarship on the massacre -- not to mention public discourse about it -- is often fraught and lacking in contextualization.

This volatile collision of Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian memories of wartime violence is the focus of our project, 'Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.'

Communists Plan a Monument to Stalin in Zaporizhzhia

The Communist Party of Ukraine is reportedly planning to erect a monument to Stalin in Zaporizhzhia in time to mark Victory Day on 9 May. Although local authorities officially refused to allot land for this purpose, the CPU is going ahead regardless -- with a private plot of land. According to the historian Viktor Gudz, it is estimated that over 30,000 died in the Zaporizhzhia oblast' alone during Holodomor, the 1932-33 famine for which Stalin was responsible.

Photo: AFP

Battle over Bandera (Continued)

Alexander Motyl has published an even-handed assessment of the Bandera controversy in today's Moscow Times. An excerpt:

Bandera became especially popular as the noble ideals of the 2004 Orange Revolution were progressively tarnished by the heroes of that revolution, Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. The more unpopular Yushchenko became, the more he promoted Bandera and the nationalists in the hope that some of their idealistic glow would rub off on him. Unfortunately, Yushchenko’s ill-considered conferral of Hero of Ukraine status on Bandera threw a wrench into a more or less even-tempered discussion of the nationalists and their legacy. Yushchenko’s critics — among them Putin and other top Russian officials who have indirectly rehabilitated Stalin — added fuel to the fire with their irresponsible accusations of fascism. At this point, a sensible discussion is almost impossible in the highly politicized atmosphere surrounding Bandera.

The objective, even-handed accounts of Ukrainian historians, who see Bandera in all his complexity, will eventually seep into the public realm, but only after Ukrainian identity is consolidated and Ukrainian fears of a neo-imperial Russia subside. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych could promote this shift by unifying the country around a common identity and history, vigorously protecting Ukrainian interests vis-a-vis Moscow and eschewing Yushchenko’s proclivity for provocation. Europe could help by opening its doors to Ukraine, and Russia can assist by rejecting Stalinism. And we should not forget about Western historians in this equation, who can do their part by refraining from simple-minded analyses.

The full article can be read here.

The First Island of the Gulag Archipelago

The prison of the Trubetskoi Bastion in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg was infamous during tsarist times. And today eager guides will lead tourists through some of the former cells and tell them about Dostoevsky, Gorky, Trotsky and Lenin's older brother, Alexander, who were all held here at some point.

Less well publicised is the fact that the Bastion was also the first political prison of the Bolshevik regime, used by the Petrograd Cheka - the organiser of the Red Terror - during the Civil War. Memoirs and eyewitness reports name the Fortress as a site of mass executions; it has always been suspected that the territory contains mass graves.

In 2009, human remains were found, for the third time since 1989, at a site earmarked for a car park. Now a group of archaeologists and staff from the Museum for the History of St Petersburg are working there; the remains are awaiting forensic analysis. However, no government funding is forthcoming for the archaeological work, nor indeed for further excavations on the territory of the Fortress.

And the issue of the car park has not been resolved either.

Click here for a detailed article

For the history of the Bolshevik prison in the Fortress click here