Shelved - did Kremlin make my Stalin book disappear?

[IndianaGreen]

Shelved - did Kremlin make my Stalin book disappear?

Orlando Figes
The Guardian, Wednesday 4 March 2009

Yesterday the Russian publishing house Atticus cancelled the publication of an acclaimed book by the Russian scholar Orlando Figes about life under Stalin. The publisher said it was dropping the book for economic reasons, but the historian believes that the decision was the product of political pressure and reflects a desire by the Kremlin to rehabilitate Stalin.

The history in my book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, is inconvenient to the current regime in Russia.

It draws on several hundred family archives and thousands of interviews with survivors of the Stalinist regime which I conducted with Memorial, a human rights and historical research centre which has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize.

On 4 December a group of masked men from the investigative committee of the Russian general prosecutor's office forced their way into the St Petersburg offices of Memorial. After a search the men confiscated hard drives containing the entire archive of Memorial in St Petersburg: databases with biographical information on victims of repression; details about burial sites in the St Petersburg area; family archives; sound recordings and transcripts of interviews.

All the materials I collected with Memorial in St Petersburg (about one third of the sources used in The Whisperers) were also confiscated. The raid was part of a broader ideological struggle over the control of history publications and teaching in Russia that may have influenced the decision of Atticus to cancel my contract.

The Kremlin has been actively for the rehabilitation of Stalin. Its aim is not to deny Stalin's crimes but to emphasise his achievements as the builder of the country's "glorious Soviet past". It wants Russians to take pride in their Soviet past and not to be burdened with a paralysing sense of guilt about the repressions of the Stalin period.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/04/orlando-figes-stalin-publisher

[rpannier]

1. And the irony of it all is

Stalin was a Georgian

[leftstreet]

2. Putin has actively pushed Russian pride and nationalism

Not judging him either way.

(snip)
At a conference in June 2007, Vladimir Putin called on Russia's schoolteachers to portray the Stalin period in a more positive light. It was Stalin who made Soviet Union great, who won the war against Hitler, and his "mistakes" were no worse than the crimes of western states, he said.

[Igel]

3. The Memorial seizure has been a big topic on SEELangs.

I can only imagine it's been discussed thoroughly on other quasi-academic lists and boards.

I'm surprised anybody tried to get Figes' book published in Russian. It should be--apart from a brief outburst of info in the early '90s the entire matter's been of no great interest to many Russians.

In fact, there's probably been more effort into showing that Stalin was set up by the West (either in 1938-9 or during the war itself), that the US and the West didn't help Russia at all (lend-lease is overlooked), that Stalin was set up by the Jews or undermined by the non-Russian or non-Slavic minorities, than there is in actually trying to understand what happened.

Rather like ignoring the effect Khrushchev's corn fetish had on Soviet agriculture, if you ask me.