A Russian history lesson
A Russian history lesson
Is there such a thing as historical truth? Not in Russia, apparently.
Can a person be convicted for reposting an indisputable truth from an old school history textbook? If this question seems silly to you, you haven’t been following the latest goings-on in Russia, which has once again proved that the impossible is anything but.
When, in summer this year, Vladimir Luzgin, a 38-year-old mechanic from Perm, went on trial on charges of “rehabilitating Nazism” (another legislative brainchild of State Duma Deputy Irina Yarovaya, her of the “Yarovaya Law,” with its expansion of authority for law enforcement agencies, new requirements for data collection and cryptographic backdoors in the telecommunications industry, not to mention increased regulation of evangelism), not everyone believed there would be a conviction. For a start, Luzgin himself had not written a single word, merely reposted an historical comment. Second, he was accused of denying the facts established at the Nuremberg Tribunal, and of disseminating falsehoods about Soviet activities during the Second World War. But the sticking point was a phrase that any post-Soviet educated person familiar with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would find pretty much par for the course: “The Communists and Germany jointly attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, thereby starting the Second World War. In other words, Communism and Nazism worked hand in glove.”
Evidence of Luzgin’s innocence is easily found on any library shelf. For example, according to Winston Churchill: “On September 17 [1939] the Russian armies swarmed across the almost undefended Polish eastern frontier and rolled westward on a broad front. On the 18th they met their German collaborators at Brest-Litovsk” (from The Second World War). And this is what Russian authors say in the work Russian History: 20th Century (edited by Professor Andrei Zubov): “It often happened that German and Soviet troops would jointly suppress Polish pockets of resistance. The Bolshevik papers sang the praises of the ‘Soviet-German brotherhood in arms.’”
Ignorant of history, or simply unwilling to let an inconvenient historical truth get in the way of political exigency, the Perm regional court accepted the dubious historical findings of the investigators, and found Luzgin guilty, slapping him with a fine of 200,000 roubles ($3,120).
The RuNet online community has been in mocking mode: “Give it two more years and Russian historians will uncover evidence that on 22 June 1941 Ukraine, supported by the US, Japan and a united Europe, launched a treacherous attack on Russia;” “The judge should be prosecuted for denying the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in contravention of the school curriculum.”
The absurd verdict, however, caught the eye of one of Russia’s most brilliant legal minds, the human rights activist Henry Reznik, who took up the appeal.
On 1 September in Moscow, the doyen of Russian law explained to a Supreme Court panel of judges that an accessory (the USSR) to a crime (by Nazi Germany) could never be exonerated, for complicity under criminal law is an aggravation. In addition, Reznik quoted a 20-year-old history textbook (which Luzgin, we think, should keep on his bedside table) citing none other than the Soviet half of the aforementioned pact, People’s Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, who, it turns out, didn’t try too hard to distance himself and his country from the Nazis: “The short attack on Poland by the Wehrmacht, followed up by the Red Army, proved sufficient to wipe out this ugly offspring of the Treaty of Versailles.”
What about the Supreme Court judges, the aristocracy of the Russian legal system? According to Novaya Gazeta’s courtroom reporter, the judges’ reaction to the appeal alternated between boredom and embarrassment: “The three Supreme Court judges sat with indifference, desperate to get it over with. They barely glanced at the speakers.”
After 30 minutes of deliberation, the panel decided to reject the appeal without changing a single letter of the original decision. And although Russian law is not based on precedent, all legal practitioners have rapidly adopted the new boundaries of what is permitted.
The Russian journalist Yevgeny Kiselyov, who lives and works in Ukraine, sees an alarming parallel: “Recall that after the war there was a fresh wave of Stalinist purges for things seemingly far removed from politics: the excoriation of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko in Leningrad literary journals, ‘wrong’ films and operas, ‘anti-patriotic’ theatre critics. Need I remind you what it led to? Is history repeating itself? I fear so. The worst is yet to come.”
