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Nationalism of Putin’s Era Veils Sins of Stalin’s

21.01.2009

TOMSK, Russia - For years, the earth in this Siberian city had been giving up clues: a scrap of clothing, a fragment of bone, a skull with a bullet hole.

And so a historian named Boris P. Trenin made a plea to officials. Would they let him examine secret archives to confirm that there was a mass grave here from Stalin's purges? Would they help him tell the story of the thousands of innocent people who were said to have been carted from a prison to a ravine, shot in the head and tossed over?

The answer was no, and Mr. Trenin understood what many historians in Russia have come to realize: Under Vladimir V. Putin, the attitude toward the past has changed. The archives that Mr. Trenin was seeking, stored on the fourth floor of a building in Tomsk, in boxes stamped "K.G.B. of the U.S.S.R.," would remain sealed.

The Kremlin in the Putin era has often sought to maintain as much sway over the portrayal of history as over the governing of the country. In seeking to restore Russia's standing, Mr. Putin and other officials have stoked a nationalism that glorifies Soviet triumphs while playing down or even whitewashing the system's horrors.

As a result, across Russia, many archives detailing killings, persecution and other such acts committed by the Soviet authorities have become increasingly off limits. The role of the security services seems especially delicate, perhaps because Mr. Putin is a former K.G.B. officer who ran the agency's successor, the F.S.B., in the late 1990s.

To historians like Mr. Trenin, the closing of these archives reflects a larger truth. Russia, they say, has never fully grappled with and exposed the sins of Communism, never embarked on the kind of truth and reconciliation process pursued by other countries, like South Africa, after regimes were overthrown.

There are undoubtedly many reasons for this. For one, after the Soviet Union fell, Russia underwent an economic upheaval, and people were focused on just surviving. Still, now that the country is more stable, the Kremlin, if anything, is moving toward more secrecy. It tends to be hostile toward those who want to study the grimmest aspects of Soviet rule, as if attempts to diminish the Soviet image will discredit the current leadership.

"They say Russia has gotten up off its knees, and this is why we should be proud of our past," Mr. Trenin said. "The theme of Stalin's repressions is harsh and gloomy and far from heroic. So they say that this is why it should be gradually pushed aside. They say the less we know about it, the better we will live."

His comments were echoed in interviews with more than a dozen historians across Russia, all of whom said they had had far greater access in the 1990s to archives of the K.G.B. and other security services. They spoke of the years immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union as a time when scholarship flowered, saying that they had a chance to delve into historical episodes that had long been concealed.

"There was a period when we could go to the archives as if we were going to our workplace," Mr. Trenin said.

Under Mr. Putin, the historians said, these records have usually been out of reach. Mr. Putin, who served two terms as president, is now prime minister, after installing his protégé Dmitri A. Medvedev as his successor in May.

Officials at the security archives, which are now mostly controlled by the F.S.B. and the Interior Ministry, typically reject requests for access by citing a need to protect state secrets and personal privacy. (Though a vast majority of people mentioned in records from Stalin's time are obviously dead.)

The director of the F.S.B. archives in Moscow, Vasily Khristoforov, has said all records related to "ways and methods of operational investigative activity" will never be declassified.

The chill over the Soviet security archives has not only thwarted inquiries into events of the 1930s under Stalin, when millions of people were executed or died in prison camps. It has also prevented historians from gaining a better understanding of other aspects of Soviet persecution, like the hounding and the deportation of dissidents through the 1980s.

And it has aggravated tensions between Russia and its neighbors. The Kremlin, for example, has recently rebuffed requests from Poland to release documents related to the World War II massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and others in the Katyn Forest and elsewhere in Russia. For decades, the Soviets blamed the Nazis for the killings; Mikhail S. Gorbachev was the first leader to admit that Soviet security services carried them out.

What is more, the restrictions have frustrated Russians who are seeking the truth about their families and want future generations to be aware of what once happened here.

Read more and source: NY Times

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