Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 5 – Those whose
writings about traumatic events in the past of this or that nation should be
subjected to prosecution under Russia’s criminal code, according to Iosif Diskin,
head of the Social Chamber’s Commission on the Harmonization of Inter-Ethnic
and Inter-Religious Relations.
His suggestion is likely to act as a
restraint on those researching issues that Moscow will view as controversial
and causing trouble. It came after Boris Sinanov, a member of the Russian
Academy of Sciences scientific council, complained that historians in the North
Caucasus are stirring things up (nazaccent.ru/content/31661-o-reanimacii-istoricheskih-mezhnacionalnyh-travm-zayavili.html).
“If there are such facts,” Diskin
said, “the commission will be happy to support reporting them to the Procuracy
Genereal with a demand that criminal cases be opened. There are tings which do
not need discussion” and the law “’in all its power’” should be used to prevent
unnecessary and dangerous talk.
Sinanov, a specialist on the North Caucasus,
pointed to two recent examples. On the one hand, he said, “we had the chance to
observe events in Kabardino-Balkaria where events 300 years old, the Kenzhal
battle, generated a stormy reaction now” between members of the two nationalities,
inspired by writings about that event.
And on the other hand and more
recently, “the third edition in 10,000 copies of Ossetins in the Service of the
Third Reich, a book written by an Ingush displaced from the Prigorodny
District as a result of the 1992 war, appeared. That book was “absolutely speculative
but it has gone into a third edition already.”
It has uncertain how far either the
Social Chamber or Russian prosecutors will go, but even talking in this way
sends a chill through many places where there are lively controversies about the
past and where what some will view as an honest discussion of them others will
see as an incitement to violence.
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