The official replacement of historical facts by patriotic myths continues unabated. On October 14, 2016, on the order of the local governor and against the will of the locals, an equestrian statue of Czar Ivan the Terrible was erected in the city of Orel in Central Russia. The governor noted that Orel was founded on Ivan the Terrible’s order… Read More »
On October 10, 2016, Aleksandr Khinstein, the editor of General Ivan Serov’s memoir Notes from a Suitcase, gave a short speech on the Russian TV (Channel 1) talk-show Evening with Vladimir Soloviev. He stated that Russia will successfully overcome international sanctions and the threat of “color revolutions”: “[Russian] President [Putin] has signed a law about the National Guard… Read More »
On October 12, 2016, the Russian historian Boris Sokolov published an additional response to Aleksandr Khinstein and Vera Serova, General Serov’s granddaughter, entitled “’Honor and dignity’ as a Tool of the Russian Authorities” in the Ukrainian newspaper Day. Since Sokolov’s article sheds significant light on the efficacy of Ivan Serov’s memoir, Notes from a Suitcase, which I have also dealt with… Read More »
On October 11, 2016, which is the 46th anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Literature award received by the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, primarily for his book The Gulag Archipelago, young activists of the group Revolutionary Communist Youth Union (RKSM) hung a dummy with Solzhenitsyn’s mask on the gates of the GULAG History Museum in Moscow. A sign with… Read More »
In April 2016, two Russian historians, Drs. Vyacheslav Kozlyakov and Konstantin Yerusalimsky, specialists on the Russian history of the 15th-17th Centuries, and Dr. Ivan Babitsky, an expert in the Latin Renaissance literature who currently is working at Florence University, Italy, sent the Russian Ministry of Education and Science a 21-page-long review of Vladimir Medinsky’s dissertation, accusing him of… Read More »
On October 4, 2015, the Russian Ministry of Justice declared the NGO “International Society ‘Memorial’” (Memorial), which housed the Wallenberg round table on September 22, to be a “foreign agent.” In fact, the goal of the Memorial is to memorialize the victims of Soviet political repression. The law about “foreign agents” was introduced in 2012. It maintains that Russian… Read More »
On October 3, 2016, Russian news agencies and the Russian BBC Service announced that Ivan Serov’s granddaughter Vera filed a lawsuit for libel against the radio station Ekho Moskvy and the well-known Russian historian Boris Sokolov, whose words about Serov’s memoir Notes from a Suitcase I put as an epigraph to my article on the memoir. Aleksandr Khinstein,… Read More »