July 1, 2016
37-year-old
Vladimir Luzgin has been convicted and fined 200 thousand
roubles for reposting on his social network page a text which correctly states
that the Soviet Union, in collaboration with the Nazis, invaded Poland in 1939.
A Russian prosecutor claimed and a court in Perm accepted that Luzgin was
guilty of posting “knowingly false information”.
Kommersant reports that Luzgin is the
first person in the Perm region (and probably in Russia) to face criminal
prosecution under a highly controversial law envisaging anything from fines to
five years’ imprisonment for so-called ‘rehabilitation of Nazism’. The
law, signed by President Vladimir Putin in May 2014, was an earlier opus from
Yelena Yarovaya, co-author of a recently adopted and terrifying repressive
‘anti-terrorist bill’.
The law claims to
be aimed at opposing the glorification of Nazism and distortion of historical
memory. The renowned Sova Centre disagrees and believes its aim
is to prohibit historical discussion.
In fact, the Perm
ruling effectively criminalizes mention of inconvenient historical fact.
The article “15 facts about
Banderites, or what the Kremlin is silent about” contains some contentious
assertions about the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UPA], and is certainly not expressed in the language
historians would use. Luzgin, however, was mainly prosecuted over the
following:
“The
communists and Germany jointly invaded Poland, sparking off the Second World
War. That is, communism and Nazism closely collaborated, yet for some
reason they blame Bandera who was in a German concentration camp for declaring
Ukrainian independence”.
The prosecution
claimed that this contradicted “facts established by the Nuremberg
Tribunal”. The reference to the Nuremberg Trials was doubtless intended
to give the law some respectability, but only accentuates the absurdity of the
situation. Any reputable historian will confirm that the Soviet Union
invaded what was then Poland on September 17, 1939.
They could hardly
deny it when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocols
carving up Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany have long been public
knowledge.
Yet the dean of the
Perm University’s History Faculty Alexander Vertinsky still appeared as a
witness for the prosecution and claimed that the material contained “statements
that do not correspond with the position accepted at international level”.
Even if the
statements which Luzgin only reposted on his personal VKontakte page had been
incorrect, the criminal prosecution would be extremely disturbing.
Given that Luzgin
has effectively been convicted of reposting facts that Putin’s Russia prefers
to whitewash, but which it cannot change, the court trial is chilling.
The ruling was
unfortunately not surprising given the direction Putin’s Russia has been
moving, towards whitewashing the crimes committed by bloody dictator Joseph
Stalin and further restricting access to archival documents.
In parallel with
its military aggression against Ukraine, the Kremlin has been trying to
reinstate the Soviet narrative about the Second World War in which details of
the first almost 2 years during which the Soviet Union was Hitler’s ally are
blurred, and the collaboration justified.
At a press conference with German Chancellor
Angela Merkel on May 10, 2015, Putin defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,
claiming that the Soviet Union was being left to face Hitler’s Germany by
itself. Russia’s culture minister Vladimir Medinsky called the pact
a "colossal achievement of Stalin’s diplomacy."
Things got even
worse soon afterwards. On September 20, 2015, Russia’s ambassador to
Venezuela Vladimir Zayemsky claimed that the Soviet Union
did not invade Poland on September 17, 1939 and that it was in fact Poland, not the
USSR, that collaborated with Nazi Germany. He wrote that “the alleged
invasion by Soviet forces of Poland in 1939 is a lie” and went on to claim that
although Poland was the first victim of WWII, it tried to be “Hitler’s faithful
ally” in the period before the War. “It was Warsaw’s pro-fascist stand
which made a treaty of cooperation between the USSR, Czechoslovakia and France
impossible”, he alleged. The same offensive attempts to rewrite history were presented by Russia’s ambassador
to Poland Sergey Andreyev a few days later, speaking on Polish
television.
Andreyev claimed
that the Soviet invasion on September 17 had not been an act of aggression, but
a defensive act to ensure the security of the USSR.
An argument
eerily close to Putin’s attempts to justify Russia’s invasion and annexation of
Crimea in 2014.
Halya Coynash
