Declassified archives and persecution. How in Russia they defend the "historical truth"

The Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation will allocate money to combat falsifications and distortions of the history of World War II. We tell how the authorities plan to defend the “historical truth”, and how they fought for it before.

“The Russian Federation honors the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland, provides protection of historical truth. Determining the meaning of the feat of the people when protecting the Fatherland is not allowed, ” the third amendment says to Art. 67 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. According to surveys, almost 90% of Russians consider this amendment the most important. The president himself also spoke about the protection of historical truth - in June, Vladimir Putin wrote an article about the Second World War. “We will firmly defend the truth based on documented historical facts. We will continue to honestly and impartly talk about the events of the Second World War, ”he wrote.

How will officials defend the “historical truth” and fight falsifications?

The money of the Ministry of Finance will be sent to the Fatherland History Foundation. According to representatives of the fund, some of the funds will be published by archival documents and their promotion among the Russian and foreign audience.

The publication of documents will become a “weapon against falsifications”. “The amateurish attempts at public persons to present a story in false light will meet the publication of specific historical documents refuting insolvent versions,” Konstantin Mogilevsky Executive Director of the History of the Fatherland Foundation explained to the Izvestia newspaper.

Now many of the war years are still secret - despite the fact that, according to the law on state secret, the term of classification of information constituting a state secret should not exceed 30 years. Some documents of the last century are not declassified at the request of the researchers: in 2016, the Interdepartmental Commission for the Protection of State Secrets refused to discover access to the archives of the VCHK-NKVD-KGB. Such a decision in the department was justified by the fact that the information contained in the archives remain relevant and at present and may damage the country's security.

How they fought for the “historical truth” before

The number of criminal cases is also increasing under articles related to the “falsification” of history. In 2018, the International Human Rights Group “Agora” issued a report “Russia against history. Punishment for revision. " Researchers found that since 2012, the number of cases of public demonstration of prohibited symbols (20.3 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation) has increased in Russia 9 times, and they began to arrest under this article 6 times more often. Human rights activists recorded 100 facts of persecution for statements on the topic of history - criminal cases and cases of bringing to administrative responsibility, concealing archival documents, restrictive regulation and ban on information materials.

“False history” not only books and articles that the court recognized as extremist materials. They can also blame for comments on social networks-in 2018, a criminal case on the rehabilitation of Nazism was brought to a 62-year-old resident of Magadan for statements in Odnoklassniki. The man called Marshal Zhukov a “maraudian”, and the military leader Tukhachevsky - “executioner”. Sometimes pursuit begins even because of oral statements. A schoolboy from the new Urengoy performed at a meeting of Russian and German children in the Bundestag. He said that not all German soldiers wanted to fight and called for abandoning wars. In Russia, he was accused of justifying Nazism-the deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Elena Kukushkina, sent requests to the Department of Education of the region, the prosecutor's office and a gymnasium with a request to check the student’s speech for the presence of signs of justification of Nazism.

The initiative of the Ministry of Finance is not the first attempt to combat falsification of history. In 2009, a commission was created to counteract attempts to falsify history to the detriment of the interests of Russia under the President of the Russian Federation. It lasted until 2012. According to members of the commission, it was difficult to call its activity active. “I have been at meetings, in my opinion, two times lately. Moreover, the last one is two years ago. Since then, maybe she met once or two, because, I remember, once I could not be present. But in general, it was very rare and very sluggish, ” said the historian and television journalist Nikolai Svanidze. Another member of the commission, director of the Institute of CIS countries Konstantin Zatulin, explained that mainly the organization was engaged in publications of archival documents. “At the initiative of the commission, a number of publications have published many important documents regarding, for example, the problems of the First and Second World Wars, many problems in history coverage were also updated,” he said.