Stalin's daughter Lana Peters dies in US of cancer

Stalin's daughter Lana Peters dies in US of cancer

The only daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has died of colon cancer in a US care home, aged 85.

Svetlana Alliluyeva, also known as Lana Peters, passed away in the state of Wisconsin on 22 November, US officials have confirmed .

Her defection from the Soviet Union in 1967 was a propaganda coup for the US. She wrote four books, including two best-selling memoirs.

But she said she could not escape the shadow of her father.

When Peters arrived in the US, she said she had come for the "self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia".

Her defection was partly motivated by the Soviet authorities' poor treatment of her late husband, Brijesh Singh, she said.

Peters went to India in 1966 to spread Singh's ashes, but instead of returning to the Soviet Union she walked into a US embassy to seek political asylum.

She burned her passport, denouncing communism and her father, whom she called "a moral and spiritual monster".

She graduated from Moscow University in 1949, initially working as a teacher and translator.

Peters was married four times - three of them in Russia - and left two children behind in her homeland.

Her first memoir, Twenty Letters to a Friend, was published in 1967 and made more than $2.5m.

She took the name Lana Peters upon marrying architect William Wesley Peters in the US.

The couple settled in central Wisconsin and had a daughter, Olga, before divorcing in 1973.

She returned to the Soviet Union briefly in the 1980s, renouncing the US, but left again after feuding with relatives.

In an interview in 1990 with the Independent newspaper, Peters said she had no money and was living with Olga in a rented house.

Stalin, who died in 1953, is deemed responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen.

Peters - who was six years old when her mother took her own life - was once close to her father, who called her his "little sparrow". But they grew distant in his final years.

He sent her first love, a Jewish filmmaker, to Siberia.

Peters's brother, Jacob, died in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War when her father refused to exchange him for a German general, while her other brother, Vasili, died an alcoholic, aged 40.

Peters bemoaned the constant association with her father.

"People say, 'Stalin's daughter, Stalin's daughter,' meaning I'm supposed to walk around with a rifle and shoot the Americans," she once said.

"Or they say, 'No, she came here. She is an American citizen.' That means I'm with a bomb against the others.

"No, I'm neither one. I'm somewhere in between. That 'somewhere in between' they can't understand."

While Peters denounced her father's regime, she also blamed other communist party leaders for the Soviet Union's policy of sending millions to labour camps.

War, Stalin and memory

Questions of history prompt heated debate and stir powerful emotions in Russia, as in all post-Communist countries. Many attempts have been made to settle the problems of the past, but none was seen through to the end. It invariably turned out that the time was not right because of political instability, an economic crisis, or social problems.

On February 1, the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, a consultative body comprising representatives of human rights organizations and NGOs, submitted a draft program on memorializing the victims of the totalitarian regime and on national reconciliation to President Dmitry Medvedev.

As expected, it sparked an intense public reaction. The document, whose authors believe that the past century was a time of tragedies and crimes committed by Russians against Russians, has provoked a wave of Soviet nostalgia. It is clear that some people find it impossible to view Russian history objectively as an inalienable part of European and global history. However, the debate this document has stirred could prove useful in that it concerns the key question of the heritage a nation should draw on when formulating its future trajectory.

The ideological confusion of the past two decades has produced a strange aberration in society. Although Russian history boasts a myriad of glorious episodes, many people associate its might and successes solely with Josef Stalin. This could be due to certain forces’ conscious, deliberate efforts to nurture a sense of contemporary Russia’s inadequacy and a yearning for the “great power” we have lost. But there are also objective reasons for this.

For example, part of society still cannot reconcile itself to the humiliating economic and geopolitical position into which Russia was plunged after the end of the Soviet Union. This only drives them into a trap. By upholding their country’s honour and dignity they also defend a leader whose crimes before his own people and other nations are both undeniable and unforgivable.

Ascribing victory in World War II to Stalin, rather than to the multiethnic, multinational Soviet peoples, leads to a complete dead end. It inseparably links victory to the actions of one of the most merciless regimes in Russian history.

Deliberations about Russia’s tragic dialectic could be interesting from the philosophical viewpoint, but politically they are a no-win option. Russia’s unwillingness to confront the whole truth about its 20th century history (which is much more complicated than simply “for” or “against”) hints at an inferiority complex.

This is unacceptable for a country that did not lose that war and which has solid reasons to consider itself one of the few fully sovereign world powers capable of dealing with internal problems without foreign assistance.

Russia could propose establishing an International Memory Institute, as the presidential council has suggested, to pool the efforts of all post-Soviet and post-Communist countries in assessing the past and also act as a counterweight to similar, but clearly anti-Russian, institutes established in other countries.

If Moscow takes the lead on this, the project could become the consolidating factor in the post-Soviet space.

Above all, Russia needs to rely on its historical tradition as a whole, and stop focusing on a very short period of its past as it searches for a new political identity

Lenin and stalin impersonators in Moscow

Photo Archive of Russia under Stalin

Photo Archive of Russia under Stalin

Photo Archive of Russia under Stalin

Photo Archive of Russia under Stalin

Springtime For Stalin

Three and a half months after a Ukrainian court convicted Stalin of genocide against the Ukrainian nation during the famine of 1932-1933, a new monument in honor of the Soviet dictator has been erected in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia.
Separating the two events was this year’s Ukrainian presidential election, in which Viktor Yushchenko, who had pursued a radically anti-Stalinist memory policy, was defeated and replaced by Viktor Yanukovych, who promised to avoid extremes and unite the nation.

Though Yanukovych would prefer to steer clear of such ostentatious nostalgia for Stalin, he is responsible for a remarkable change in mood.

In his final months in office, Yuschchenko favored an ill-considered “trial” against Stalin and other long-dead defendants as a way to define the history of Ukraine’s past within the Soviet Union; Yanukovych, by contrast, has overseen the formation of a new coalition government that includes the Communist Party of Ukraine.

Rather than simply letting his predecessor’s strident anti-communism fade into the past, the new president has pronounced on Ukrainian history in a contrary spirit.

Thus, Yanokovych told the Council of Europe in late April that the deliberate starvation of the three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine by the Stalinist regime was not genocide, but rather a “common tragedy for all people who lived in the former Soviet Union.”

His bland formulation blurs important truths.

While it is true that Stalin’s policy of collectivization—the state seizure of farmland and the coercive employment of peasants—brought enormous suffering throughout the USSR in the early 1930s, it is also true that Stalin made deliberate decisions about grain requisitions and livestock seizures that brought death to three million people in Ukraine who did not have to die.

Some of the very worst of the killing took place in southeastern Ukraine, where Stalin is now being celebrated and where Yanukovych has his political base.

The famine destroyed that region’s rural society by killing many, cowing more, and permitting the immigration of people from beyond Ukraine—chiefly Russians, some of whom inherited the homes of the starved.

The cult of Stalin is thus no empty symbol in Ukraine; it is a mark of active identification with a person who owed his mastery of Ukraine to a campaign of death.

New Stalin Statue Fuels Tension In Ukraine

ZAPORIZHYA, Ukraine -- Ukrainian Communists on Wednesday unveiled the first monument in Ukraine's modern history to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, fuelling tension between the country's pro-Russian east and nationalist west.
World War Two veterans wearing medals and waving red flags sang patriotic songs as the 2.5 metre monument, showing Stalin from the waist up on a granite block, was unveiled near the regional Communist Party office in the mainly Russian-speaking city of Zaporizhya in eastern Ukraine.

Stalin is a symbol of Russian oppression, particularly in the Ukrainian-speaking west and centre of the country, because of his role in the mass famine in 1933 which killed millions of Ukrainians -- including in Zaporizhya.

But he is feted by some older people in the mainly Russian-speaking east and south as the heroic leader of Soviet forces in World War Two. The 65th anniversary of that victory is to be celebrated on Sunday.

The statue, the first public monument to Stalin to be unveiled in decades, was cast at the initiative of local Communists, financed by donations from war veterans and set up on private land.

Its creation has gained added resonance since the election in February of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, who last month gave in to a key Russian demand by extending the lease on a Russian naval base until 2042.

The unveiling of the statue is likely to deepen the east-west divide in Ukrainian politics, said Volodymyr Fesenko, an analyst with the Penta think-tank.

"We have immortalised a figure linked with many tragic pages of Ukrainian history," he said. "It's a reason for further political confrontation."

Ukraine's new leaders have tried to distance themselves from the erection of the statue of Stalin, who remains a highly divisive figure even among Ukraine's Russian speakers.

"We should not establish monuments for tyrants," said Justice Minister Oleksander Lavrynovich. "We must know about them and know about them very well. We have to learn from the lessons of history to avoid its repetition."

The unveiling could spark a sharp reaction from people in western Ukraine, whose view of Soviet history differs sharply from that of many living in the east.

Pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko sparked the ire of east Ukrainians earlier this year by posthumously declaring wartime nationalist leader Stepan Bandera a Hero of Ukraine.

The decree has been declared illegal by a court in the east, but Yanukovich has not yet taken steps to undo it.

Fesenko said the Stalin statue could spark a new 'war of monuments'. "As an answer to the Stalin monument, new monuments to Bandera could appear in western Ukraine," he said.

Russia publishes Katyn massacre archives

Russia has published online once-secret files on the 1940 Katyn massacre, in which some 22,000 members of the Polish elite were killed by Soviet forces.

The state archive said the "Packet No. 1" original files had until now only been available to researchers.

The Soviet Union denied its role in the massacre for decades.

But relations between Russia and Poland have warmed since the Polish president and others were killed in a plane crash on their way to a Katyn commemoration.

The six documents that were published on the state archive website were declassified in 1992 on the order of the then-Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.

Current President Dmitry Medvedev had now ordered their publication online, the state archive said.

One of the documents is a 5 March, 1940 letter from the then-head of the Soviet secret police or NKVD, Lavrenty Beria, to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, recommending the execution of Polish prisoners of war.

Beria refers to them as "steadfast, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power".

"Each of them is just waiting for liberation so as to actively join the struggle against Soviet power," it says.

The letter bears Stalin's signature in blue pencil, with the comment "In favour".

Given that historians have already had access to the files for some time, correspondents say the decision to put them on the state archive website is likely to be seen as a symbolic gesture, rather than shedding new light on what happened at Katyn.

"We on the Russian side are showing absolute openness in telling what happened in Katyn and other places with Polish prisoners of war," Russian state archive chief Andrei Artyzov was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

"All the basic documents about these events have been published."

Among the files that remain secret are documents relating to a Russian investigation into the massacre that began in the 1990s.

Russian human rights campaigners have appealed for those documents to be declassified.

Poland has repeatedly demanded that Russia open all its files on Katyn, and the issue has soured relations between the two countries in the past.

Recently though, tension over Katyn has eased.

Earlier this month leaders from both states marked the massacre together for the first time, in a joint ceremony attended by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk.

It was the first Russian ceremony to commemorate Katyn.

Days later, Polish President Lech Kaczynski and more than 90 others were killed when their plane crashed as it was trying to land in western Russia ahead of a separate event to mark the killings.

Moscow's handling of the aftermath of the crash was well received by Poles.

The April 1940 killings were carried out by the NKVD on Stalin's orders.

Members of the Polish elite, including officers, politicians and artists, were shot in the back of the head and their bodies dumped in mass graves.

The killings took place at various sites, but the western Russian forest of Katyn has become their chief symbol.

The Soviet Union blamed the massacre on Nazi Germany before acknowledging responsibility in 1990.

One of the documents now posted online was a March 1959 letter marked "Top Secret" from the former head of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin, to then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, proposing that all dossiers concerning the Katyn killings be destroyed.

He said the authorities should just keep a few documents - the minutes of meetings of the NKVD troika that condemned the prisoners and some papers on the fulfilment of the troika's instructions.

Shelepin wrote that the official Soviet version - that Nazi Germany had carried out the killings - had been "firmly implanted in international opinion".

Stalin Billboards for Victory Day

City Hall plans to set up billboards in central Moscow to explain dictator Josef Stalin's role in the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, an idea that has drawn criticism from a senior state official and rights activists alike.

The billboards will be erected on the request of "numerous veterans organizations" in time for Victory Day on May 9 as part of the celebrations of the 65th anniversary of the defeat of Germany in World War II.

The Stalin billboards will be placed at traditional meeting places of veterans on Poklonnaya Gora, Manezh Square, Gogolevsky Bulvar, Sokolniki Park, Vorobyovy Gory and several other places, Makarov said.

The content of the billboards will be sent for approval either to the Defense Ministry's Institute of Military History or to the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow, Makarov said.

Diary That Helped Expose Stalin's Famine Displayed

The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Stalin's murderous famine in Ukraine are to go on display on Friday.
Welsh journalist Gareth Jones snuck into Ukraine in March of 1933, at the height of an artificial famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as part of his campaign to force peasants into collective farms. Millions starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as the Soviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock.Jones' reporting was one of first attempts to bring the disaster to the world's attention."Famine Grips Russia — Millions Dying" read the front page of the New York Evening Post on March 29, 1933. "Famine on a colossal scale, impending death of millions from hunger, murderous terror ... this is the summary of Mr. Jones's firsthand observations," the paper said.As starvation and cannibalism spread across Ukraine, Soviet authorities exported more than a million tons of grain to the West, using the money to build factories and arm its military.Historians say that between 4 million and 5 million Ukrainians perished in what is sometimes referred to as the Great Famine.Walking from village to village, Jones recorded desperate Ukrainians scrambling for food, scribbling brief interviews in pencil on lined notebooks."They all had the same story: 'There is no bread — we haven't had bread for two months — a lot are dying,'" Jones wrote in one entry."We are the living dead," he quoted one peasant as saying.Jones' eyewitness account had little effect on world opinion at the time. Stalin's totalitarian regime tightly controlled the flow of information out of the U.S.S.R., and many Moscow-based foreign correspondents — some of whom had pro-Soviet sympathies — refused to believe Jones' reporting.The New York Times' Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, dismissed his article as a scare story."Conditions are bad, but there is no famine," Duranty wrote a few days after Jones' story was published. Other correspondents chimed in with public denials.With his colleagues against him, Jones was discredited.Eugene Lyons, an American wire agency reporter who gradually went from communist sympathizer to fierce critic of the Soviet regime, later acknowledged the role that fellow journalists had played in trying to destroy Jones' career."Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials," Lyons wrote in his 1937 autobiography, "Assignment in Utopia."Lyons' admission came too late for Jones, who was killed under murky circumstances while covering Japan's expansion into China in the run-up to World War II.British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whom Jones had once served as an aide, said shortly after his death in 1935 that the intrepid journalist might have been killed because he "knew too much of what was going on.""I had always been afraid that he would take one risk too many."Jones' handwritten diaries are on display at the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge, where he was a student, until mid-December.

Medvedev blasts Stalin defenders

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has made an outspoken attack on those seeking to rehabilitate former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
Millions of Soviet citizens died under Stalin's rule and Mr Medvedev said it was not possible to justify those who exterminated their own people.
He also warned against efforts to falsify history and defend repression.
Some Russian politicians have recently tried to portray Stalin in a more positive light.
Under President Medvedev's predecessor, current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Stalin was often promoted as an efficient leader who turned the Soviet Union into a superpower.
Mr Medvedev made the unusually critical comments in a videoblog posted on the Kremlin's website. It appeared on the day the country is supposed to honour millions of people killed under Stalin's brutal regime which lasted from the late 1920s until his death in 1953.
Mr Medvedev said it was impossible to imagine the scale of repression under Stalin when whole groups of people were eliminated and even stripped of their right to be buried.
The president said there were now attempts to justify the repression of the past, and he warned against the falsification of history.
All this flies in the face of the current trend to promote Stalin as an effective manager and a leader who transformed the Soviet Union.
Under Mr Putin, the order was given for school history books to be re-written, highlighting Stalin's achievements.
In Moscow there is now even a Stalin-themed cafe and a metro station with one of Stalin's famous slogans on its walls. In northern Russia a historian investigating crimes committed by the former Soviet dictator was recently arrested.
It would appear there is a split within the Russian leadership on this highly sensitive issue.

Activists Denounce Stalin in Station

The freshly renovated Kurskaya metro station reopened this week as the newest front in a bitter controversy over the legacy of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, whose name was returned to the facade after more than 50 years.
The entrance hall of the Circle Line station once again bears a verse from the 1944 version of the Soviet anthem: “Stalin raised us to be loyal to the nation; He inspired us to work and be heroic.”
Human rights activists condemned the reference to Stalin as distasteful and said it was part of broader effort to soften history’s depiction of him, while the Moscow metro maintains that it was just trying to be faithful in its restoration of a historical monument.
“Recreating the original station with Stalin’s name is the same as restoring a Nazi memorial with Hitler’s name on a swastika,” Oleg Orlov, head of human rights organization Memorial and an outspoken critic of the Stalinist terror, told The Moscow Times.
Stalin ordered mass executions during the Great Terror in the 1930s and beyond. The disputed inscription — penned by Soviet poet Sergei Mikhailkov, who died Thursday at the age of 96 — was removed after Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, launched a campaign against his personality cult in the mid-1950s.
The verse was replaced by another from the anthem: “The sun of freedom shone through thunder, and great Lenin lit up our path.”
Alexander Cherkasov, also from Memorial, said Stalin’s return to the station might have been encouraged by the current political establishment. Last year, the Education and Science Ministry approved a new history textbook for Russian schools, which argues that Stalin’s terror was justified as an “instrument of development.”
Metro spokesman Pavel Sukharnikov said such accusations were flimsy. Metroinzhrekonstruktsiya, the company that managed the renovation, merely sought to restore the station’s original appearance, he said.
“We went by the project that was used in 1949,” he said. “We wanted to stay true to history.”
Although controversial, Stalin is a part of Russia’s past, said Sergei Obukhov, a Communist State Duma deputy, who does not see Stalin’s role as outright negative.
“It would be wrong to compare him with the Nazis, as we did not have an equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials, where Nazi crimes were recognized by the international community,” he said.
The Kurskaya metro station, Obukhov said, should be protected like any other historical monument.
Sergei Nikitin, head of the Moscow branch of Amnesty International, argued that restoring the citation was a curiosity more than a scandal.
“I understand that some people are outraged, but I also think that it was important to preserve the original architecture with all the decorations,” he said. “After all, references to Stalin and also Lenin can be found at many other stations of the metro, not just Kurskaya.”
While Stalin’s name returned, a statue of the Soviet leader did not. Sukharnikov said the original was lost in the 1950s. The station had been closed since July 3, 2008, for a thorough renovation and reconstruction.

Stalin's bid for a new world order

Soviet government documents released since the USSR's collapse give us a clear idea of what drove Stalin's thinking in concluding the non-aggression treaty - the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - with Nazi Germany.
On 19 August 1939, just days before the agreement was signed in Moscow, in a speech to a hastily-convened session of the Politburo, Stalin said the "question of war and peace is entering a decisive phase".
He predicted that the outcome would depend entirely on whichever strategic position the USSR decided to adopt.
Should the Soviet Union form an alliance with France and Britain, he opined, Germany would be forced to abandon its territorial demands on Poland.
This, Stalin suggested, would avoid the threat of imminent war, but it would make "the subsequent development of events dangerous for the Soviet Union".
Should the USSR sign a treaty with Germany, Stalin suggested, Berlin would "undoubtedly attack Poland, leading to a war with the inevitable involvement of France and England".
Looking ahead, Stalin suggested that "under these circumstances, we, finding ourselves in a beneficial situation, can simply await our turn [to extract maximum advantage]".
What is clear is that Stalin not only appeared unconcerned about the prospect of an attack from Nazi Germany, he actually considered such an attack impossible.
"Our aim is to ensure Germany can continue to fight for as long as possible, in order to exhaust and ruin England and France," he said. "They must not be in a condition to rout Germany.
"Our position is thus clear… remaining neutral, we aid Germany economically, with raw materials and foodstuffs. It is important for us that the war continues as long as possible, in order that both sides exhaust their forces."
Many western historians believe that the Anglo-French security guarantees given to Poland effectively turned Stalin into the arbiter of Europe.
On 3 May 1939, Stalin replaced the pro-Western, Jewish Foreign Minister Litvinov, with Vyacheslav Molotov. It was a strong signal that he wanted to improve relations with the Nazis.
Official Russian history asserts that Stalin believed that Germany, even if it were to emerge from war as a victor, would be so exhausted that it would be unable to wage war with the USSR for at least a decade.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact drew unequivocal criticism from Communists outside the USSR.
Stalin invited the head of the Comintern, the international Communist organisation founded in Moscow, to explain his thinking.
"Hitler does not understand or want this, but he is undermining the capitalist system," he said. "What we can do is manoeuvre around the two sides, push one of the sides to attack the other."
In a written note to foreign Communist parties, Stalin asserted: "The salvation of English-French imperialism would be a violation of Communist principles. These principles in no way exclude a temporary agreement with our common enemy, Fascism."
So was there an alternative?
In the spring and summer of 1939, Stalin could have forged an alliance with Western democracies. Such a move may have prevented a world war, with Europe's borders remaining unchanged.
The problem with this, for Stalin, was that it would have delayed what he viewed as the "final global victory of Communism" for an indeterminable period.
Stalin's actions and deeds made it clear that he could not conceive a protracted period of "peaceful co-existence", the notion that came to determine the Soviet Union's policy towards the capitalist world after Stalin's death.
Stalin and Hitler were united by their desire to destroy the old world order, and to rebuild it as they wanted.
Arguably, this made Soviet-Nazi friendship as inevitable as was its rapid, explosive end.

Kremlin's Crimes - Is Russia Determined To Repeat Its History?

As European democracies celebrate the 20th anniversary of their liberation from communism and the Soviets, Moscow seeks to restore its dominance over former satellites. Rewriting Russian history is part of this plan. The Putinist notion of a progressive Soviet system in the past is designed to provide justification for Russia's current assertiveness in the region.
Take Moscow's annual May 9 parade, which celebrates the "victory over fascism" on the anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender to the Allies. The entire exercise is based on a monumental national delusion fostered by the Kremlin.Although Russia was one of the victorious powers at the end of World War II, Moscow continues to disguise the historic record that the Soviet Union itself helped launch the war in close alliance with Nazi Germany. Through the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, Stalin schemed with Hitler to carve up Eastern Europe.Russia has recently intensified its revisionist campaign, claiming that it voluntarily gave up communism and the Soviet Bloc and that the Cold War ended in a draw with the West. Russia's state propagandists maintain that the USSR never occupied its neighboring states after World War II, but rather liberated them from tyranny.And they minimize the Kremlin's imposition of a totalitarian system over the region that stifled its political and economic progress for almost half a century. Unlike post-war Germany, Moscow has never paid reparations for Soviet crimes and expropriations in Central and Eastern Europe.Moscow also disguises the fact that Stalin murdered more Russians and other Soviet citizens than Nazi Germany. Its official figure of 27 million war dead includes several millions of Stalin's victims during Soviet civilian deportations and military purges.Instead of admitting that it was a perpetrator and an opportunist in the destruction of Europe, Russia, as the successor state to the Soviet Union, depicts itself as a victim and a victor.Moscow took another step to revise its history last month when it formed a presidential inter-departmental commission to promote the Soviet version of history and to tackle alleged "anti-Russian" propaganda that damages the country's international image. The commission's mandate is to formulate policy options to "neutralize the negative consequences" of what they consider to be historical falsifications aimed against Russia.This is in particular a response to steps by neighboring governments in Estonia, Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere to talk openly about Soviet repression and to remove monuments that glorify the Soviet occupation.The committee has no independent historians, and is comprised of bureaucrats from government ministries, representatives from military and intelligence agencies, several pro-Kremlin spin-doctors, and nationalistic lawmakers.The chairman of this "historic truth" commission, Sergei Naryshkin, is chief of staff in President Dmitry Medvedev's administration and a loyal supporter of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. As Russian liberals have pointed out, this commission bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet institutions that established a monopoly over scientific and scholarly truths.Additionally, legislators from the ruling United Russia Party have proposed amendments to the penal code that will make the "falsification of history" a criminal offence. If passed by the Duma, this could result in mandatory jail terms for anyone in the former Soviet Union convicted of "rehabilitating Nazism."This draft bill is not designed to fight neo-Nazis or fascist ideology. Instead, it would allow the criminal prosecution of individuals who question whether the Soviets really "liberated" Eastern Europe toward the end of the war or whether countries such as Georgia welcomed their annexation by the Czarist Empire.This would open the door to possible legal campaigns against political leaders in neighboring countries, including Ukraine, Georgia, and the three Baltic states, who challenge Russia's distorted version of history.Last month's parade, where soldiers in Czarist-style uniforms carried the red flag with the yellow hammer and sickle across the Red Square, was an almost exact reenactment of Soviet-era self-glorification. The spectacle sent an unmistakable message to all formerly occupied territories that Russia remains the strongest military continental power and continues its Czarist and Soviet traditions.During the May display President Medvedev warned unnamed adversaries who were supposedly contemplating "military adventures" against Russia -- a thinly veiled threat to keep Ukraine and Georgia out of NATO. The Kremlin's new historiography of Russia as a proud, virtuous neighbor to those in its sphere helps provide an intellectual underpinning for such posturing.Western countries, including the former Soviet satellites, can take steps to expose Russia's historical revisionism by sponsoring international conferences and symposia, by opening up all pertinent state archives to scholars, by educating the younger generation about communist crimes, and simply by talking openly about the Soviet era.As Russia glosses over its dark past and flexes its muscles, the fear is that those who rewrite history may also be determined to repeat it.

Downplaying Stalin,Russia avoids it's Soviet past

Russia’s attitude towards the past has changed dramatically since Vladimir Putin first took office as president in 2000. The official position, once leaning towards openness about the brutal repression of the Communists, quickly turned to secrecy. Criticizing the Soviet leadership, including Joseph Stalin, became synonymous with disrespecting Russia’s history and disregarding the positive accomplishments of the Soviet regime.
The latest word on the topic,coming from the New York Times, chronicles the growing difficulties historians face in documenting the county’s past. Historian Archives, particularly those with damning information concerning the KGB and the country’s other secret services, have now become closed or redacted to the point of uselessness.
Russia has still largely not dealt with the violence inflicted by Soviet authorities, instead voicing an official stance that apologies should not be made for the past.
“Russia positions itself as a completely different democratic country with democratic values, but at the same time, it does not reject, it does not disassociate itself and does not condemn the regime that preceded it,” said Vasily Khanevich, a historian interviewed by the Times. “On the contrary, it defends it.”
Attitudes at Russian schools have also changed. Authors of controversial new history textbooks, which have been accused of justifying Stalin’s repressions, openly admit that the texts seek to teach a "modern ideology". The intent, they say, is to “foster a civic and patriotic viewpoint in the young person.”
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov has written his own book,titled “Stalin and the Modern Age,” which jumps on this resurgent image of Stalin and the Soviet Union, especially among younger Russians.
“It is no secret,” a press-release about the book writes, “that now, during a growing rift in society, people tired of hoping for positive changes in the country are more than ever remembering Stalin with kind words.”
“Time,” the release continues, “is sweeping away the trash thrown by detractors on Stalin’s grave.”