Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 1 – Vladimir Putin
said today that those who engage in the rewriting of World War II are “the
collaborationists of today,” that “such people have always existed everywhere
and always will and have various motives,” but “it is important to understand
that this issue is very important today” (kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63983).
In calling attention to this remark,
US-based Russian historian Irina Pavlova says that this is but the latest step
in the repression of historical science by the Putin regime, a repression that
has not yet sparked significant resistance by Russian historians or significant
opposition by historians abroad (ivpavlova.blogspot.com/2020/09/blog-post.html#more).
That would be tragic enough because
it means that Russians and others as well are once again being denied the
opportunity to gain a more accurate picture of their past. But Putin’s words
are tragically far more dangerous than that because of how Russians have always
been encouraged to view “collaborationists.”
Again, as in Soviet times, those who
collaborated with the Germans in any way, including cooperating because they
had no choice or coming down on the horrific German side because of the horrific
Soviet one, have remained the ones Moscow is not prepared to forgive or forget
but insists on continuing to punish.
Soviet and now Russian officials view
collaborationists in World War II as something far worse than the Germans and demand
that they be denounced, excluded and punished. By extending the application of this
term to historians who are today studying that conflict the Kremlin is opening
the way to imposing at a minimum an intellectual straightjacket on them.
Tragically, the Soviet past suggests
that Russia today will do more than that; and that anyone who seeks to make an
honest accounting of what happened during the war and more generally can expect
to suffer the loss of work or even worse as long as Putin and his team remain
in place.
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