I’d missed this till today:
A Russian historian investigating the fate of Germans imprisoned in the Soviet Union during the second world war has been arrested, in the latest apparent clampdown on historical research into the Stalin era by the Russian authorities.
Mikhail Suprun was detained last month by officers from Russia’s security services. They searched his apartment and carried off his entire personal archive. He has now been charged with violating privacy laws and, if convicted, faces up to four years in jail.
Suprun had been researching Germans sent to Russia’s Arctic gulags. A professor of history at Arkhangelsk’s Pomorskiy university, his study included German prisoners of war captured by the Red Army as well as Russian-speaking ethnic Germans, many from southern Russia, deported by Stalin. Both groups ended up in Arkhangelsk camps.
“I had been planning to write two books. I need another two or three years before I can finish them,” Suprun told the Guardian today. The historian – who described his arrest as “absurd” – said he had signed an agreement with local officials not to talk further about his case.
But the arrest has provoked outrage in Germany and among leading historians. It comes amid Kremlin attempts to rehabilitate Stalin and to clamp down on independent historical research – with political repression during the Soviet era and victims of the gulag system now taboo topics.
Today the historian and writer Orlando Figes described Suprun’s arrest as unprecedented, and part of a “Putinite campaign against freedom of historical research and expression”. Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck college, London University, added: “[It's] potentially quite alarming, if it means that the regime intends to clamp down on the collection of personal data about the Stalin terror.”
11 comments
October 24, 2009 at 11:04 am
nick
“It comes amid Kremlin attempts to rehabilitate Stalin and to clamp down on independent historical research – with political repression during the Soviet era and victims of the gulag system now taboo topics.”
More like Kremlin attempts to imitate Stalin.
October 24, 2009 at 11:28 am
Vance
Evidently it’s not a matter of individuals trying to shield their own past — not many officials of the Stalin period can even be alive still. Any recommendations on what to read, to learn more about the modern rehabilitation of Stalin?
October 24, 2009 at 12:25 pm
dave
Googling “rehabilitation of Stalin” gets you quite a start.
October 24, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Vance
I thought this was supposed to be an academic blog. ;-)
October 24, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Vance
Admittedly, it gets one to this by Jonathan Brent, which points in the right direction but is kind of an op-ed. Maybe when the proceedings of the conference he mentions become available.
October 24, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Matt
In the city I lived in in Russia there were many older buildings, built in the late 40′s and early 50′s, referred to as “German buildings” because they were built by German prisoners of war. (The joke was that you could easily tell one because they were the only ones with straight walls and 90 degree angle corners.) There was also a large mass grave just outside of the town where a memorial had later been built that was, it seems, mostly with German prisoners who never made it back to Germany.
Much of the rehabilitation of Stalin type stuff is tied in to attempts to squash any criticism of Soviet behavior in WWII. That’s been building recently, but has been growing for quite a while. (It played a part in a nasty little dispute with Estonia a couple of years ago.) I don’t think that the real issue is love of Stalin per se, but rather that it seems to many of the leaders that they cannot value some of the things they want to value without trying to rehabilitate Stalin as part of the package.
October 24, 2009 at 4:43 pm
wayne fontes
Reason .com reviewed “In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage” by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr which dealt with American historians attempts at revisionist history regarding the Soviet Union and the Cold War. I’d be interested in what actual historians thought of the review.
Matt, my father served in the merchant marine during WWII. One of his lasting memories was that when they were docked in France German POW’s were used to unload the cargo. They were simply more efficient than the French dock workers.
October 24, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Vance
There’s something a little distasteful in this lingering over the thought of how well certain folks take to forced labor. (And with respect, Wayne, I don’t imagine your father observed the relative efficiency of the two groups of workers first-hand.)
Searching for Jonathan Brent leads to this review of his Inside the Stalin Archives, by Anne Applebaum. She argues,
but that only helps explain why the regime likes the revision, not why it’s popular.
October 25, 2009 at 12:12 am
J. Otto Pohl
I have quite a bit about the Suprun affair on my blog.
October 25, 2009 at 6:26 am
Matt
My point, at least, was not about how well Germans “took to forced labor” but rather that such forced labor was used all over Russia and that those doing it rarely returned to Germany, that is, that the problem wasn’t limited to the most famous gulag camps.
I’m of the mind that you shouldn’t trust anything Anne Applebaum says about Russia. (You shouldn’t trust much of what she says about anything, but especially about Russia.) She’s a dishonest informant. Here, for example, she’s suggesting that the nostalgia is for Soviet-era “symbols”. There may be such, but more of the nostalgia is for the place that the Soviet union held in the world (perhaps especially in relation to its neighbors and former territories), and, to some degree, to the stability of the system. (Some, mostly the very old now, have nostalgia for the better relative standards of living they had in the ’70s, though some of the younger ones have a mistaken nostalgia for that, too- mistaken because for most of the young standards of living are much higher now, though many other things are worse- the quality of education, for example.) You can trust Applebaum to give a simple-minded and somewhat offensive (they want “symbols”, not real lost advantages) about most things, but especially Russia.
October 26, 2009 at 2:15 pm
pireader
I have the same contempt as everyody else on this thread for Putin using the secret police to shut down honest inquiry. But I don’t understand why people read dark complex KGB-friendly motives into it.
I suspect the obvious–Putin’s a politician. He’s doing it because it’s popular.
Only 70 years ago, the Russian people made a heroic and successful effort to save themselves from slavery and/or extermination. Every family participated and, with 20 million dead and many more wounded, almost every family lost somebody close. For most Russians, it is the defining moment in their national history. They like their national epic shiny bright and untarnished.
Here are some analogies:
*** The British pretty uniformly regard the UK’s lonely stand against Germany in 1940-41 as “their finest hour”. They aren’t keen to hear that their participation in World War II was an unimportant sideshow, from its beginning at least until 1944.
*** After 150 years, many American Southerners still entertain pride and nostalgia for their ancestors’ role in the Civil War. They don’t like hearing that it described as a fanatical failed effort, incited by paranoid fantasies, to destroy their country and preserve slavery.
Of course, the British and Southrons don’t have secret police to enforce their preferred version of history. But the preferences are the same.