Posted on 10/15/2009 1:43:11 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
A Russian historian investigating the fate of Germans imprisoned in the Soviet Union during the second world war has been arrested, in the latest apparent clampdown on historical research into the Stalin era by the Russian authorities.
Mikhail Suprun was detained last month by officers from Russia's security services. They searched his apartment and carried off his entire personal archive. He has now been charged with violating privacy laws and, if convicted, faces up to four years in jail.
Suprun had been researching Germans sent to Russia's Arctic gulags. A professor of history at Arkhangelsk's Pomorskiy university, his study included German prisoners of war captured by the Red Army as well as Russian-speaking ethnic Germans, many from southern Russia, deported by Stalin. Both groups ended up in Arkhangelsk camps.
"I had been planning to write two books. I need another two or three years before I can finish them," Suprun told the Guardian today. The historian – who described his arrest as "absurd" – said he had signed an agreement with local officials not to talk further about his case.
But the arrest has provoked outrage in Germany and among leading historians. It comes amid Kremlin attempts to rehabilitate Stalin and to clamp down on independent historical research – with political repression during the Soviet era and victims of the gulag system now taboo topics.
Today the historian and writer Orlando Figes described Suprun's arrest as unprecedented, and part of a "Putinite campaign against freedom of historical research and expression". Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck college, London University, added: "[It's] potentially quite alarming, if it means that the regime intends to clamp down on the collection of personal data about the Stalin terror."
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Anybody who studied the Eastern front knows why Putin would arrest this guy. I am still surprised since it is pretty common knowledge the Soviets treated German and Axis POWs horribly. Some 90,000 Germans surrendered at Stalingrad and less than 10,000 made it back to Germany after the war. To be fair, Stalin was brutal to his own people and the Nazis treated Russian POWs worse than dogs.
Maybe a thousand years from now Russia will join Western civilization.
As they say in Russia, “Those who do want to relive history, rewrite it.”
The judge said five to ten but I say double that again
I’m not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown
Kick over the wall ‘cause government’s to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
D’you know that you can use it?
Maybe a thousand years from now Communism will finally be snuffed out as Nazism was.
So that's how Russia protects Russian criminals!
As long as there is someone who has a crumb more than someone else there will always be some idiot with too much time on his hands to theorize about the injustice of it and then a whole bunch of morons to follow him. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
They treated Allied POWs pretty shabby, too.
The Iron curtain of Communism is returning to mother Russia.How long before we get iteration two of the Soviet Union?
“What we are seeing is the rebirth of control over history,” said Rauf Gabidullin, of Arkhangelsk’s movement for human rights. “The majority of Russians don’t have any idea of the scale of Stalin’s repression. Those in power are from the KGB. They don’t want people to know what their KGB predecessors were doing, or its huge scope.”
Back in the USSR, you don’t know how lucky you are boy...back in the USS...back in the USSR.
50 years from now anyone investigating Obama’s real birth certificate will get the same punishment -—or worse.
mark
“A people separated from their history are easily persuaded”, supposedly Marx.
Hmmm, state authorities using a privacy law against someone who exposed something they didn’t like. Seems awfully familiar, and I’m not talking Hitler or Stalin. Something more recent, something right here in the US.
Oh yeah, here it is; http://michellemalkin.com/2009/09/11/acorn-watch-the-baltimore-city-state%E2%80%99s-attorneys-office-warped-priorities/ (ACORN busting bloggers facing possible wiretapping charges).
Gee, the similarities are shocking, just SHOCKING, I say! /SARC
Who says communism is dead in the New Soviet Union?
Jackboots.
The USSR did not fall. It’s currently just catching its breath, getting ready for a comeback.
We have Acorn thugs with their patron in the WH. We have Al Gore, Sharpton and Jesse, the MSM, and now the bigots in the NFL. Times have changed for the better for Russians, with 90% approval for Putin. Times have changed for the worse for us.
psychopathic thugs.. ? Little strong don't you think? Lets fix our own problems and others fix theirs.
It’s not as if the Russians were angels before the Bolsheviks took over.
>To be fair, Stalin was brutal to his own people and the Nazis treated Russian POWs worse than dogs.<
They treated their own POWs horribly too.
I’m reading The Gulag Archipelago right now. The author describes how Russian POWs were shot upon being released and returned to the motherland. (They didn’t want word getting out about how much nicer Europe was compared to life under the Soviet regime.)
To be really, really, really fair, the peoples neighboring russia were very well aquainted with, and lived in fear of its barbarity.
And guess what the Nazi’s could certainly be brutal to their own people.
At least until PC and HD legislation makes the knowlege of atrocities other than Nazi unspeakable here in the USA, we can read that the russians still silence citizens who investigate their crimes.
>russians still silence citizens who investigate their crimes.<
As far as I know, Germany at least came to terms with their brutality and preserved for posterity historical items relating to it.
Meanwhile, back in Russia, these “dissidents”(people only trying to tell the current or historical truth)are still arrested or killed under mysterious circumstances.
Russia may not be as backward as they used to be, but they are not to be trusted under any circumstances as far as I’m concerned.
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